To Specialize or Not to Specialize - That is the Question… Can you afford to pick a side?

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook over at WSI Digital, and today is Wednesday, February 12th, 2020. I'm really excited to be back. I took a couple weeks off, had some travel, had some conferences. Luckily, at one of those conferences, I got to actually be face-to-face with our guest speaker today. So, we're going to introduce Ben here in just a second, but before we get officially rolling, thanks to those of you that are joining the show live. If you would like to ask a question, comment, thought, or share an observation, I have a feeling we're going to have a lot of things to talk about. Even in the pre-show, Ben and I were just rattling off a handful of things that would likely spawn maybe another show down the road very easily. As we start talking about stuff, if you've got some thoughts that you'd like to share, by all means, please feel free to use the chat. Some of you have already done that and said hello, and hello back at you. Great to hear everybody. One of the great parts about doing a live show is the interaction. But for those of you that— well, I guess if you're not here live, you're not going to be able to hear this message. But if you would like to share today's show with friends, colleagues, coworkers, or anybody else that you think needs to hear this, all shows are recorded and made available Out at free webinar Wednesdays dot com, so you can just hop out there, find the link, and share it, and be able to catch the show after the fact, and maybe relive some of the nuggets of wisdom that Ben is going to drop on us today. So with with that out of the way, oh, I also would be remiss as a dutiful and loving husband not to give my beautiful bride a shout out because today is her birthday, and I'm not going to tell you how old she is. I will say she's. a little older than me, but I tease her about that publicly and she's cool with it. And I don't think she really listens to my webinars anyway. But to my lovely wife Alicia, I would like to wish you a happy birthday and here's to many more together. So with that little bit of sappiness out of the way— and I can tell, Ben, you're probably just rolling your eyes going, oh my god, did he really just do that? I, I know you're a sappy guy when it comes to your wife as well, so you would probably appreciate that.

That's right.

Wasn't it awesome? So there's the man, there's the voice. So Mr. Ben Pankinen from Social Assurance. Ben and I have known each other, I'll say, a long time. I don't remember exactly when we met. We were even asked that question when we were in Nebraska together. Um, but I'll just say we know each other from a long time back. You are the proud, uh, owner of a WSI Cycling jersey, and I am the proud owner of a number of Social Assurance t-shirts, one of which I had on the other day, which was a really cool coffee mug. And I was at a coffee shop and people didn't even know that it was a logo until I explained it to them, and then they thought that was even cooler. So I think of you often when I wear your cool apparel. But Ben is joining us today from Lincoln, Nebraska, and we're gonna talk about a topic that basically got in front of me thanks to LinkedIn and the whole concept of specializing and focusing on something that you know really well versus trying to be the jack of all trades. And like I said, there's probably going to be a ton of different directions to go. But with that long-winded and somewhat disjointed introduction, Ben, thank you so much for joining Free Webinar Wednesdays today. And I'm really looking forward to chatting with you for the next hour.

Well, hey, thanks, Eric. I, you know, I think this is going to be a really fun one. You know, we kind of think about some of our conversations that we have. I think a lot of this really just flows well in together, together in this kind of topic of thinking how we stay on top of things and, you know, different interests and, you know, things that we have going on. So when we think about kind of where, where—

Hey, wait a minute. You, you, you got to go back to that title slide. So I did mention social assurance, and there's a picture of you, but you got to introduce the little puppy dog. You gotta tell everybody. Yeah, you gotta do the intro there, man.

Yeah, yeah. So, um, yes, uh, completely. Uh, this is Rigo the Rocket. He does have an older brother, but his older brother doesn't usually get to come to the office. Uh, Jacques, uh, usually stays at home because he's, uh, he's not so keen on traveling. Um, but Rigo loves to come to our office. Um, he, uh, so he sits on our couch at the office some of the time and, um, kind of warms up the office. Our productivity might go down, but You know, morale goes way up when Rigo comes to visit.

Absolutely.

He is Rigo the Rocket on Instagram if you do want to follow him. So nice. He mostly, you know, he doesn't really care much about likes, but he, he just likes to share what he's up to.

Yeah, well, if likes equated to treats, then he probably would care about likes. So we've got the Cook Dogs on Facebook, and, you know, we've got lots of people that follow, and sometimes we get to meet up with some folks, and usually treats come. So it does translate Translate, but not as easily. But anyway, I just had to make sure we got Rigo announced there.

So no proper introduction. And shout out to my wife. It's not her birthday, but it is Valentine's Day coming up. So I can't forget that. So don't forget that one either, Eric. You're not off the hook even though you mentioned your birthday.

Yeah, I kind of got double whammied. But it is what it is. Before we jump into your slides, I just want to give you a quick— I mentioned Social Assurance. I know we've got bankers that join the show and they may probably already be familiar, but for folks that might not know what Social Assurance is, you want to just kind of give people some perspective on what you guys do and the cool stuff that you guys provide?

Yeah, super quick background. I used to run basically an IT security company and I was working with a lot of community bankers, specifically like the CIO types, you know, the people that drink Mountain Dew and stuff in the back room and work on firewall rules and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, that was sort of a lot of my network, a lot of good friends in that space. One of them, I was sitting down with him and I said, what's going to happen when social media starts to overtake community banking? He says, it's never going to happen. I said, well, just level with me. You probably said the same thing about a fax machine or about email, you know, all of these sorts of things.

Oh yeah.

And so, you know, we'd put in solutions, of course, to email, right, to do filtering and spam filtering and antivirus, all those sorts of things. And I was like, look, you know, I like software, I love building software, I love doing, you know, marketing area. Like, I think there's a really good fit here for all of these community institutions because, you know, back at that time I was saying, you know, I think visits to the branch are going to go down. Like, I think people aren't going to go physically to some of the same places, right? You know, retail, we kind of thought might start declining at that time, but, you know, banking felt even more that way where I said, well, how are you going to stay connected, stay in front of them? And so that was really kind of the impetus for Social Assurance. So we do a software product that over 1,000 banks in the country use I'll talk about a little bit of a side hustle that I have as well related to that in the education space. But yeah, that's really the thing that we've been focused on for the last 8+ years.

Awesome. Well, you guys do a great job and I'm always pleased to be able to refer folks over to you. And even though some folks that are joining Free Webinar Wednesdays might not be in the community banking space, I think the statement of social media taking over community banking You could replace community banking with any industry, and social media certainly is an area that people are spending more time in. It's creating more distractions, and it's requiring you to be— and kind of into the conversation for today— figuring out how you get out of your comfort zone and be comfortable in other areas, or do you stay in your lane and find other people, and where that hybrid is. So that was a great background, and now I will let you click to the next slide, and you can review the LinkedIn post that brought this conversation to fruition.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, Eric, Eric trolled me on LinkedIn, right? Really, this was kind of the key phrase I started with, was, you know, I've been told for a long time in my career, like, hey, you know, you should, you should like go deep on this one thing. And I guess my interests were sort of more diverse, and I felt like always when I was told that, I was like, I don't know. You know, like I started out business and computer science in college, started programming a little bit and thought, hey, you know, this is kind of fun. Like I get to, you know, sort of make things happen out of nothing. And that was really fun. But, you know, I remember hearing people say, well, yeah, you just gotta like jump into that and do like, you gotta really get this number of hours in programming, to just be a great programmer. Well, as it turned out, I kind of found out later that I wasn't really that good at programming. Like, I was— I could make it happen. I could make things, you know, happen with code, but I was a whole lot better at sort of helping a team and communicating with software developers. You know, these are the people that, you know, some of which work for me now, that are a whole lot better at math than I ever was. And, you know, it really helps to broaden that understanding.

Well, and they've reinvented math too. So I've got nieces and nephews that are in school now and they show me their math problems and I'm like, that's not how I did 2 2, but okay, sure. So yeah, the evolution is shifting everywhere.

No, you're completely right. Through the public school system here. And he— I said, hey, you know, I know we're doing some of this stuff. I work a little bit with the school district. And I said, hey, let's go, you know, sort of do this event. And, you know, about halfway through, he turns to me and he goes, yeah, these robots are cool, but do you want to race in code? And I was like, oh man, buddy, you are 12 years old, but I'm gonna bring it. And it was a humbling experience because he's actually really good at it. And I'm like, oh, this is taking me back. And I am, I'm slow. Like, you know, you're kind of like, I felt like the big lineman that's trying to chase this, you know, this young guy who's quick. And I was like, wow, this is, this is a really humbling experience. Oh, too funny.

Too funny.

Yeah. So, so a little bit of what I thought would be kind of fun to talk about, you know, like, you know, even for our company, right? And so regardless of what you're marketing or whatever, you know, like our focus is very narrow. in many ways of what we do, but it also kind of has this broadness to it that what makes, you know, good social content or what makes things work aren't necessarily all that super narrow a lot of times. So it takes— when we start thinking of ourselves as like innovators, it's a different pitch. Like, I was doing one of those get-to-know-you things, you know, we're in a room a while ago, and I don't know what made me say it, but They were going around the room and they said, you know, those get-to-know-you, hey, would you say your name, what company you work for, and then like what kitchen utensil you are? And so, you know, the first person goes, and I happen to be the second person. So the first person goes, and as they're going, I didn't know what to say. But the first person says, well, I'm a— it's like a steak knife because, you know, I'd like to cut to the point or something like that. And it comes to me and I go, well, I'm a butter knife because I'm not really that sharp, but I'm pretty smooth. And I just like came out and immediately I thought, you know, like, that's part of what we have happen when we're thinking a little bit more about the innovative nature of what we are. And that's a little bit more of who I am, right? So a lot of times we're told, hey, go be the scalpel because Like, you have to go do this very specific task. But what we find is sometimes early in our career, I think we have to do that. Like, we have to hone a craft well enough that then we get asked to be more general. And I think that's one of the things that we, you know, we start learning is like, you know what, like, if I'm working with an agency like yours, or, you know, I'm working with experts in certain areas, like, I can't be, I can't be the scalpel in every area. I can only be that in, you know, a couple areas. And so it sort of teaches us that we have to start as our career changes and shifts. You may end up being somebody who really does focus on the scalpel for your entire career, but more often than not, we end up kind of having to wear a lot of hats. I don't know if you've experienced that much, Eric.

Well, and it's— I'm still getting over the brilliance of that butter knife comment, so I'm just recalibrating my perspective here, but that was, that was pretty good.

Yeah.

And, you know, I guess one of the things that I just jotted down that I'm sure we'll talk about is when we start talking about specialization and But then also being able to do a lot of different things and kind of embracing the whole cleaver mentality versus the precision of a scalpel. Um, you know, you guys are specialized at Social Assurance in the banking and community banking vertical. So in one sense, there is that specialization. Now you've got a little side hustle in education, but you don't get into law firms, you don't go into doctors' offices. So there's that specialization from a banking perspective, but then once you get below that, there's maybe a more general list of doing a lot of things and being able to explore. And I think that's where I know for me, it sometimes is difficult to determine when you've specialized too much or if you're not specializing enough, because if you decided to branch off and start going into law firms because a local law firm within Lincoln approached you, do you go out of your lane to help them? Or is banking where your, you know, your top-level specialization is? And then if a bank approached you and said, hey, would you be interested in X, Y, or Z, even if it's not something that you've done before, maybe that's where your flexibility and— exploratory nature can really flourish. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, no, and I think you're embracing that tension really well, and I think I have that tension a lot of days where I get sort of asked. And so one of the things that I've sort of learned to do over my journey as an entrepreneur, as a technologist, as a marketer, is that I've sort of learned that I have to let myself be curious. And in those moments, it might not mean that it's something that I need to do, but sometimes I need to be really curious. Like, you know, I got asked to be on the board of our hospital system here in Lincoln, and I thought, you know what, like, I really don't understand healthcare well. But for me, Having a few hours every quarter, plus some emails and thinking through things, it does something for my mentality to understand a very different model than I do every day. And what it sort of helps me to do is when I sit down with some doctors and I say, hey, what— so what is it that you're focused on? And they start telling me, well, you know, we were educated in the area of pain, and here's, here's why we ended up with the crisis we do. All of a sudden, it starts to open up my mind to a very different mentality, and it started— helps me to think differently. And so I just really have treasured those moments. And another way I thought maybe we could say it is sort of like there's an old Greek saying that says, The fox thinks about many things, where the hedgehog thinks of one big thing. And it's this old philosophy that kind of says, hey, you know what? It's not that we can't be a fox and be sort of cunning, but a fox oftentimes will overthink things and they're not as decisive, where a hedgehog just sort of says, I got one idea. Here's where I go, where sometimes it slows you down when you have too many things to think about and you try to be good at all of the things. So I fall into both of those categories at times, right? Sometimes I feel like, well, you know, I can think about a bunch of different things, but I also kind of have this overarching thought. And so I think it embraces that tension that you're describing, which I experience a lot, which is that caught in between, ooh, I feel like I need to learn all of these things, to, hey, you know what, I might not be good at all of those things. Maybe I just need to sort of direct other people to help do these things.

Exactly.

So yeah, I think there's a few different ways to think of it. One of them in marketing, I start to think about the role of a marketer today, regardless of the industry you're in. So again, I work primarily with financial marketers, people who are in community and regional financial institutions that are They're having a lot thrown at them. But every marketer in every size company is starting to experience this sort of tension that says, I'm in a much more elastic role. Like, I'm having to communicate things like analytics and math, and I'm having to also understand new platforms, new ways of marketing. The channels have changed dramatically. And what we're seeing is in the last 10, 15 years, we used to think about it like, hey, you know what? Maybe we should start using this thing called email, right? Because I think that's a new area. But as Eric and I were talking before the call, Eric's like, hey, have you spent any time on TikTok? And I'm like, yes, admittedly, I am a middle-aged dude who does have a TikTok account and have spent some time on there. But really, it's like every other new channel and we need to spend some time on it. And then we talked about a couple more platforms. The amount that we have to learn quickly is really escalating. So when I think about just social media, understanding TikTok, I think, is something that marketers should have at least a casual understanding of. It's not necessarily that you have to be great at being viral on it personally. It's not that you have to know every video or every meme on there, but knowing how that platform works is pretty valuable. And understanding the style at which videos are shot for TikTok, I think, is really important for understanding how you might have better videos on Instagram or Facebook or other platforms that you might be more focused on as a business, because that's what you're seeing. That's what you're seeing as far as videos. So, Eric, you and I talked a little bit about a couple other platforms when we were having that conversation. And part of what's helped me to expose— I referenced that I've got a sort of, you could call it a side hustle, but it's actually a little bit bigger than that. A friend of mine asked me just over 2 years ago to come speak at his conference, which was for education. And the funny thing about it was it was kind of like a regional conference. with about 100 high school students. And those 100 high school students, you know, wanted to talk about social media. And so we started doing some exercises with them where I said, okay, well, we're going to have you making some social media content for your school. We're going to have you sort of collaborating a little bit. And, you know, I kind of thought it was going to be one of these conversations that was about an hour long, and then I would just sort of go on, go on my way. But About halfway through, what happened was there were 4 sophomore girls in the front row with their matching MacBook Airs that had been issued by the school, right? So they were supposed to make social media content that day for their high school. So these 4 sophomore girls, you could tell they were the right ones picked, right? They were sitting in the front. They were definitely like the A students, were definitely like listening on every word and were taking notes, and they were ready to go. And I said, well, how are you making social media content? media content for your school? And they, one of them turned their laptop over and she said, oh, I don't know if you know our instructor, you know, our teacher, but he, he just gave us the username and password for the school's social media accounts. And immediately I kind of took a breath and thought, right, like, what could go wrong here?

Oh, nothing at all.

Yeah. Yeah. So I follow up with my buddy and I said, okay, you know, education, this is like, this is your jam. This is what you work in. Like, what do they do? And then he said, well, that's That's kind of what they do. They either trade the password or they tell kids, stay away from it. I said, well, but don't— I mean, are school newspapers still a thing? How does that work? And he goes, well, no. I mean, they kind of are, but basically it's either adults making the social media content or they're just trading passwords. And I was like, all right, here, dude. I've got some software. Just ask them if they'll use this. And so, pretty soon, now fast forward. Almost 2 years. We work with close to 10,000 students across the country that are creating social media content for their school, and they're using some of our technology that we licensed over to a separate company to do that. But it helps me because I get to, you know, go into classrooms every once in a while. So sometimes I'll be taking like a bank marketing trip. I was down in Oklahoma City visiting a few of the banks we work with in that area. And I just reached out to one of our— Class Intercom is the other company. I just reached out to them and said, hey, you know, can I stop in and talk to your classroom? And all of a sudden I'm, you know, taking a tour of a school. I have to kind of switch gear a little bit. So I have to kind of like, you know, leave the suit jacket in the car and throw a hoodie on and go into a classroom. But it's a really fun experience to start to work with students to understand, hey, the way that they engage on social media is different. And it's also just like my nephew, it's super fast. Like the way that they learn things and the way that they kind of accelerate their process just really quick because they don't have these barriers of what would happen to me if I started a new account on a social media. Like they don't have that sort of fear associated with it, which is really fun to watch.

So let's talk a little bit about that. And I'm going to say a couple of old guys in And when I say that, I mean, I'm like way older than you are, but we've got a couple of old guys, um, that have this mentality and this perception of specialization versus not specializing and kind of what we started talking about on LinkedIn, thanks to your post. Does that generation, when you're talking to the next, uh, the next generation of the workforce because of the speed and flexibility and maybe decreased barriers or resistance, Do they even think about stuff like specialization or are they just going wherever and just letting it flow? And, you know, obviously there's pros and cons to that as well, but how are you seeing their perspective of what we're talking about? Would they look at this conversation like crossed eyeballs and like, what are you guys talking about? What is, you know, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. So, you know, when I go into a high school and talk about social media content, right? Like, do I talk about LinkedIn regularly? No. Like, as a high schooler, I don't necessarily see value in that. But the method for how I post on LinkedIn is exactly what I talk about when I go. If you look at my posts on LinkedIn, what you'll see is, including the one you commented on, They're highly personal posts. So those affected me personally. Now you'll also see that I sprinkle in some things about what we do. So, you know, like, you know, I'll make a highly personalized post and then that, you know, sort of every once in a while I'll sprinkle in the ones that I'll be like, hey, by the way, you know, we're doing a webinar on CRA and community regulations and compliance, right? Now, no secret, I don't get a ton of engagement on those posts, but I get a lot of engagement when I talk about something personal. I think the one you referenced here, I think when I screenshotted it, it looked like it had, you know, 12,000, 13,000 views on it. So that's—

Yeah, you crushed it.

Yeah, those are pretty good. But most of my personal posts would exceed 10,000 views. And it's because they're highly personal. So part of what we'll talk about with like a high school student is actually the same thing I talk about with bankers who are looking to get involved in those platforms, which is, hey, the way you tell a story and the way you engage in a story is highly personal. And if you make your workplace personal, then you have a huge value to offer other people. So, when you start out a post like this one, here's what I've learned, or in that case, the worst advice I've ever been given, right? So, every high school student, we don't have to explain this to a high school student because we'll say, hey, look, things that are black or white, I love it, I hate it, those are high emotions, high contrast. Those get success on social media. If you throw out something like I'll see a lot of adults do where they'll say, You know, like it or not, I'm experiencing this tension between these, like, like they're sort of like vanilla posts in the middle, right? Like they're sort of saying, you might like this, but I kind of like this. You say, you know what, you need to use stronger language when you're posting. Like, the thing I hate is, right? Start out your LinkedIn posts with things like that and you'll start to experience a whole lot more traffic because people can react to it. You know, you say, the thing that I hate about, you know, lending, or the thing I hate about— it can be very boring topics, but when you bring emotion and personal life into it, it becomes, you know, much more engaging.

Yep. Now, there's going to be a certain camp, especially in the banking world, because you and I have met many of them over the years, that aren't comfortable blending personal with business. And there's some of that mentality. My thought is those are going to become extinct and they'll eventually retire. And the next generation to remain relevant is gonna have to be able to embrace that. That's one of the reasons why even with our business, up until like the last probably year and a half, even as a digital agency, we really didn't even have a Facebook page for our WSI agency. It was all me on Facebook, and people got to know Eric Cook as the person. And they knew I was a cyclist, they knew I shaved my legs, they knew I liked to play with golden retrievers, and I was a geek, you know. So whether you like that or not, but the— I mean, is there any solace to the traditional business person that wants to keep those things separate, or has that horse left the the barn and we don't have the luxury of not allowing people to look behind the curtain any longer.

You know, what I would tell people is it's a lot about who you are when you're in front of a client, right? The way you build relationships for your business to be as successful as it is now is probably how you're going to build that on social media channels, right? So, if I go in and work with a, you know, a bank president who says, hey, You know, the thing is, we build really good relationships here. I'll say, okay, that's, that, like, that's phenomenal. That's a great place to start from, right? Like, that's, that's really good. And then, then you'll sort of hear this apology and say, but I don't think that, you know, so we don't really want to do this social media thing. I'll say, well, wait a second. Like, the way I know Eric Cook online And the way I know him in person are identical. Like, like, we know each other, we're friends. This just gives me a better amplification, right? This, this gives me that amplification. So I'll tell the story sometimes. You know, I'm about— I was driving to visit a client of mine, and she's about an hour away from my home. So I go out to visit her. We go sit down at Starbucks and she says, oh, hey, before we get going, I wanted to tell you, I was just at a dinner party this past weekend and we were talking about your dogs. I said, oh, okay. It was, I clearly post about my dogs on social media. And so she said, yeah, they just came up. It was kind of funny. And I was like, oh, that's funny. Anyway, then she says, we sit down and I kid you not, she says, okay, so Ben, is it really worth it for us to put lenders on social media platforms? She goes, is there any value in a business sense to doing this? I said, well, actually, there was a dinner party last weekend in which I was not attending. It was 60 miles from my home and they were talking about my dogs, but this is actually a business relationship that I have. She goes, okay, okay, I got it, I got it. I see what you're saying. Yeah, no, like, yep, it might be personal, but when we're doing that, that's the way I build relationships. If you're the type of salesperson that builds personal relationships in person, then you're gonna do the same online.

Absolutely. So it's, it's good to hear the dog theme continuing. So you were— in case you can't figure it out, folks, we're both very big dog people. So 4-legged furry children running the roost here. So very cool.

We're a little suspicious of cats, but, you know, I'm totally about dogs.

They're just shady. You just never know what they're thinking.

So a couple thoughts to sort of give you when we start thinking about what does it take to learn. I think it's interesting to think about Is this something that we give ourselves permission to do, I think, is one of the things. So, one of the things that I've tried to adopt, you know, this past weekend, you know, my wife and I are, you know, running different directions, doing a lot of different things. And one of the things we sort of realized is we kind of have to just schedule things out. So, like my Saturday afternoon, I just sort of scheduled myself out. And what I did was I just kind of scheduled myself to be at a coffee shop. And I have— this was one of the webinars or presentations that I needed to do over the next couple of weeks, but I had about 5 presentations. And so I'm like, I just need to— like, rather than kind of sitting and looking at PowerPoint and thinking, how do we sort of walk through these? I just took probably 2 hours to be lost. On a Saturday afternoon. Now, I know that's tough, and, you know, with families and all that sort of stuff, to find those little times. And sometimes you have to do it in your office. I get that. But some of the time, you know, rather than jumping right into creating some new content, sometimes we have to kind of get lost in something. Sometimes it can be a very productive thing. My wife is a is a cook. She's actually becoming a certified chef as well. But she's in, you know, but her background's all as a dietitian. And so for her, sometimes that's cooking something, which is a fantastic hobby for me.

Because I was gonna say, you get to reap the rewards of that, don't you?

Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, for her, she's like, I need to go cook something. And I'm like, Yeah, yeah, of course you do. But for some of us, it might be a hobby, it might be golf, it might be some of those, but letting our mind really wander and think, but then also picking up things that sort of seem abstract in our learning can be really helpful. Travel's another way that my wife and I try to focus on. Hey, Eric, let's travel to somewhere that kind of stretches us a little bit.

Yeah.

little bit, or, you know, doesn't even have to be far, right? Like, it can be an hour away, but like, just kind of like getting out of what is comfortable sometimes is just something I have to think about consciously.

Well, and I go back to a comment you made earlier in our conversation about accepting the position for a board seat with the local hospital, stretching yourself, getting outside of your comfort zone. Didn't know a lot about the healthcare industry. When doing that, my gut tells me, even though you're, you know, not gonna quit your job and go back to medical school, that there could have been things through that discussion that you had with those physicians that got you thinking of things differently. And all of a sudden, something ends up making its way into your existing business that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of, just like spending time at a coffee shop or traveling to a place or walking down a cool little alleyway with some creative little graphics like you see on the picture on the screen right there.

So, um, yeah, this is, this is actually—

it's all meshing together.

Yeah, I know, you're right. This alley, actually, I took that photo last week. It's— this is around the corner from my office. So if I walk one way, I walk a little bit shorter, but if I walk half a block more, I walk down this alley, which is super fun. It's really cool at night. They have like lights up in those, up in the top area too. So, it's all kind of lit with crazy colors. But, letting yourself kind of have those moments is just really helpful and kind of, we've been talking more and more in our culture about mental health and things. But, even if it's not something that you feel like— I'm not a person who naturally gravitates towards depression, but—

Yeah.

I am somebody who, if I'm not thinking creatively, you know, I'll stagnate or I'll feel like I'm not moving forward. Yeah, that's, that's something I have to do. So letting myself just walk the extra half block so that I can walk down the really cool and weird alley and, you know, I don't know, appreciate some art or laugh at it or whatever is just a really helpful thing.

Yeah. Very cool.

So a few other things that we try to do, you know, we've been actually at our last all-company meeting, we talked a little bit more about learning and just how do we learn. So these are just, I literally a couple days ago just pulled some of the most recent conversations out of, we use a tool called Slack for a lot of our communications internally, but which just, by the way, went public. Great company, doing really well. But, you know, these were some conversations that we had in Slack. And I think it's important that you have people around you who are curious. And so these are a couple employees who were communicating about it. One of them, Stacy, was posting about one of her lender friends had messaged about this 'cause it pertained to the Super Bowl ad where she was kind of, you know, here's our local lender. One of her friends was communicating about what the local lender like compared to Rocket Mortgage. And then, you know, we have a— Courtney does our fun facts of the day at the office, which is always kind of fun, just really random stuff. This one was actually about one of our coworkers who I did not know until this moment was an ordained minister. But fun story.

I thought you were talking about Saved by the Bell. That's where I went. So I was thinking Saved by the Bell. But it makes it more relevant since he's in your office.

Yeah, super relevant. And then, you know, of course, Adam was watching the Oscars and was like, oh, hey, you know, here's something you didn't know about Billie Eilish, right? And so, you know, when we have those kind of like random conversations, it's kind of like your water cooler conversations, but when you can kind of curate those and learn from them, I think, you know, even though they seem like really random pieces of information, they help us to To challenge ourselves to be learning more and trying to share those things with our, the people around us.

I just got a comment in the chat. Oh no, Saved by the Bell. I'm gonna save my Screech reference for later, but yes, I totally dropped the Saved by the Bell reference on a Free Webinar Wednesdays. So good catch there, Kenneth.

Nice, Kenneth. Yes, my My wife calls me out every once in a while if she thinks that I'm dressing a little too like I'm trying too hard. She'll be like, you just want to be Zack Morris today.

Totally got it. That's hilarious.

Too funny. Yeah, no, I think those are fun ways to think about it. Yeah, another thing, a few tips for bankers and organizations of all types is one of the things we have to— as somebody who wants to learn new things, it also forces us to have this challenge of, oh, we've got to humble ourselves enough to know we don't know the answer. We don't know this answer to something. And I think that's a really important step that it starts to make us more of community leaders when we're going to somebody and saying, Hey, I, I'm not really sure what to do here, or I'm not sure what's next. I think too often we approach meetings in particular, where we go into a meeting and we say, OK, here's what I want the outcome to be. And a lot of times we have to go into a meeting and say, hey, what I want to understand is what your objectives are, and then I'll try to, I'll try to help you. get there. And when we kind of take that philosophy, a lot of times it really changes that dynamic too.

Cool. I'm curious, and just before we continue, I know we're kind of rounding the corner here. Aside from the Saved by the Bell, and I did get one comment about, did you just say you shaved your legs? And yes, I did mention that, but I'm a cyclist, not Any other reason that your imagination might go— It makes it okay. It makes it okay. So anyway, I'll— this is being recorded, so I have to be careful of what I say because it's going to be preserved for posterity's sake. I'll move on. But I was curious, for those of you that are attending this live, as we've kind of given some examples of getting outside of the box or pushing creativity, I'm curious if you are experiencing any of that and have a specific example that you'd like to share in the chat of where you've done something like what Ben is giving an example of, of the, the board or go for a walk, or how do you get outside and cause your mind to break free and be exposed to some new stuff? So just, I'll keep an eye on the chat, see if we get any comments, but I wanted to throw that out there. So continue, Ben.

Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. I'd love to hear some ideas. I had one yesterday. My alma mater is a small liberal arts college in Nebraska. And so, you know, I was meeting with some of them. They're trying to do some more stuff with computer science and, you know, kind of we're, of course, you know, wanting to connect with them 'cause it's always hard to find software developers And so anyway, we were having lunch yesterday and they said, what do we do as a college to kind of like, what should we be doing? And I said, well, one of the biggest challenges with any organization of size, and they only have 2,000 students or a little over 2,000 students, so small college. But I said, every time we get an institution that's growing, it's really hard for them to think entrepreneurially. I said, you know, you have a campus that's an hour away that you're struggling to get a whole lot of enrollment up on. I said, you know what, you know, you've told me, hey, we built that other campus. So what about busing kids from this campus to that campus? What about going and surveying the C students at your college and ask them what they think? Because they probably have part-time jobs and they— you probably don't listen to them very often, but we're told that we're going to work for C students. Like, why don't you go ask them? Because they'll give you real honest opinions about things where your A students follow the rules and they probably won't give you very honest opinions. They'll give you politically correct answers because that's how they got A's. And, you know, so when you, when you kind of like respond to organizations with a counter thought, you know, hey, we tried this, it doesn't work, and you flip it the other direction, all of a sudden you say, well, maybe it, maybe the opposite works. It's not rocket science.

Right.

But, you know, a lot of times as marketers, that's what we're doing, right? We're just flipping stuff upside down and saying, hey, maybe this works. Cool.

We got a comment. So somebody bit on my request. So, goes to a happy place. Picture on his credenza brings him peace and back to a time, less stress, more centered. Says the picture connects with others young and old, more of an abstract, abstract, not really any specific meaning, but just something that works. So, you know, don't even necessarily have to leave the house or the office if there's something. I know that there's a couple of podcasts and audio apps that you can also use that will help you get away I've had people that have told me that meditation is something that would be helpful. I have a hard time sitting still. I don't know if you've ever gotten into that, but being able to just zone yourself out— my mind races way too fast to do any of that meditation yoga stuff, but for some people it works. I don't know if that's anything that you've ever experienced, Ben.

Yeah, I'm not— I too am not great at meditating, although I do still try it. something that we try to learn and being mindful, taking those moments like you're biking or doing exercise, things like that, where I can kind of put my mind in a different spot. I love the concepts of what are triggers that you can use. In my office, I have— my wife gave me this old cover of a Time-Life magazine. And it is from the '60s. It was found at her family estate sort of thing. And she said, you need to have this. And I was like, this is the most amazing thing because it's the COVID of a Life magazine, but it's got an astronaut and it says, we're leaving for the moon. And so, I've always seen this stuff that say, we landed on the moon, but never the, we're leaving for the moon. And I've used that in some presentations to say one of the things we forget a lot of times when we're doing social media or story creation or stuff is realizing that we need to tell the beginning of the story and that we need to help people to see where we're going, not where we've been. It's not always a history lesson. It's more about, hey, where are we going to go? That's one of those key reminders right on my wall, right behind my desk that reminds me that, hey, we're We gotta go somewhere. Like, where are we gonna go? So yeah, I love that reminder.

That's a really cool thing. So sweet. So in the last few minutes— yep, go ahead. I think I know what you're gonna say, but I'll let you say it.

We talked about some different social media channels that I think are kind of fun to talk about too, right before we were getting started. Right, we talked about some other ones as well. Maybe you want to pick those up.

Well, you were— so, so the one that you mentioned that, and I oftentimes will refer to ethereal content, which basically is the whole— people think of Snapchat content that disappears, it just poof goes bye-bye. When I say ethereal content, everybody thinks of Snapchat, and Facebook tried to buy Snapchat, they wouldn't. And so I oftentimes will say, well, Facebook just did a little R&D, which most people equate to research and development, but I use it as rip-off and duplicate. And that's what they did with the stories on Instagram being disappearing content to Snapchat. But you dropped a little nugget of R&D that Facebook did related to TikTok and a little app So you want to maybe talk a little bit about Lasso? And because I'd not really— I think I'd seen it, but it was one of those passing glimpses of, I'm not gonna use TikTok, so I wouldn't use that. But yeah, so that one's got me interested. And then the other one, that's the Vine alternative. So let's just chat about those 2 before we end our day together.

Yeah, yeah, you know, like One of the things we try to do around the office too is just chat about, hey, what's happening? What are new? And so sometimes somebody will be like, hey, I'm going to try this new thing. And then they'll report back or whatever. But about a month or two ago, Facebook decided, hey, TikTok's growing really rapidly. I'm sure they decided this 6 months ago, but they ended up building their own app to compete with it. It's fascinating because if you go download Lasso, you actually log in with Facebook credentials to be able to see it. And if you're used to TikTok, it is an identical experience. I mean, it is almost literally identical in every way. The button placements are all in the same place. They look the same. You could screenshot both and a lot of people would be confused as to which app you are in. So really interesting to see Facebook just kind of I mean, just completely rip off the competitor app. I mean, they ripped off a lot of components of Snapchat, but this is identical. So pretty interesting. Also interesting to see because a lot of times Facebook has this perception that they don't care much about your data, but then we have this competitor TikTok coming in that is basically Chinese-owned, who I would say the perception is much lower. The perception that they care about your data is far lower than Facebook's. Facebook may end up really having a great race in that one by doing it this way. One of the interesting things is they started TikTok or they started Lasso and went after the Brazilian market first. Rather than going after the US, which is really competitive and costs a lot of money to get followers in, they started marketing it heavily in countries where they had a big enough social media following, where Facebook is really popular. Facebook's really popular in Brazil. And so they took that there and said, hey, let's grow a following here where we can get some density of followers so that they're all communicating. So when you log into Lasso, you'll see a lot of stuff is not in English. It's getting them a base of posts and content because, as you can imagine, one of the biggest problems to starting a social platform is like there's no content. There's no people there, there's no content there, and why would you go there? They kind of started there, which I think we'll see where it goes. Right now, it's not that interesting to me because the content is not that great yet. They don't have enough users, but that could shift in a big hurry if Facebook really decides to make it go that direction.

And then Vine, for folks that might not remember Vine and its video format, give a brief background and then the new version that is now out in a Vine-like experience.

Yeah, so I loved Vine back when it was out. Twitter bought a company called Vine, I wanna say, I'm gonna go 6 years ago or so, they bought Vine and basically shut it down. shortly after that. So it's been gone from us for probably about 4 years. But Twitter bought this platform, which was kind of the original 6-second videos. So you could only— the longest video you could shoot on it was 6 seconds. You could do them as stock photography if you wanted to. So you could kind of press down the button for a short amount of time and do sort of stop action if you wanted to. You could upload some videos into it. A lot of creativity. A lot of people gained a huge amount of following on there. One of the original founders, I'm guessing that they had a non-compete with Twitter and must have just expired. So they just launched this past month, launched Byte, B-Y-T-E. Cool platform. It is Vine. If you miss Vine, Jump on there and you'll feel like you're right at home again. If you missed out on Vine, jump on there, check out their 6-second videos. So one of the things I think it starts to teach us, though, is like, you know, the way you shoot video has changed because of these kinds of tools. So if you're using something like Instagram, you know, you might be posting a similar style then, but these platforms, because they're newer, kind of They kind of help you be a little bit more cutting edge when you watch them.

Right. The last social network that launched that I thought I was an early mover on was Ello. I don't know if you jumped on that bandwagon. I just did a quick check of my screen to see if I still even have the app installed, and sure enough, it's in my social icons collection, but I don't know as if I've been back in there in quite some time. Yeah, just being open to exploring where things are headed, you know, kind of ties back into what we talked about today. So very cool. Well, any, any closing thoughts before we formally adjourn and put a bow on what I think has been an awesome show?

Hey, Eric, I think it's just a lot of fun. You know, when we catch up, we kind of have these moments where it's like, hey, where are you learning? What am I learning? And I think that's just kind of fun to get to share on, you know, a platform like this. So I'm excited to get to share that. If you've got other questions for me or things like that, my contact info is here. Always willing to, you know, just, just chat about things, or, you know, follow me on Twitter or whatever, and we'll always have something crazy.

Cool, sounds good. Well, thanks again to everybody that joined live. Thanks for the feedback and commentary and tolerating some of the goofiness and somewhat random thoughts, but I think overall there was a really good theme here, and I know I was really looking forward to spending the hour with you, and it did not disappoint. So thanks for joining me on the show. That concludes today's episode. Recording will be made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. We're going to continue over the next several weeks the Digital Minds book tour, and we'll be inviting other fellow authors to join me here on the show chatting more about some of the other digital marketing topics that appear in our 3rd edition of our Digital Minds book. So keep an eye out for that, but until then, make it an awesome week. Thanks again for joining me, and we'll see everybody on freewebinarwednesdays.com. Take care. Bye-bye.