What's New on LinkedIn (and other platforms) with Jack and Eric

All right. So let's just do a quick check. We just got the notification that Eric is live. I see it there.

You see it on LinkedIn?

It is on LinkedIn.

Now I should see that if I turn my LinkedIn on, right?

Yep. If you pop over to my profile. So I'm just gonna go—

Oh, I see it. Let's see if Dana Perkins will be there.

I am going to grab the link.

And will I be able to see who's in the room, or will just you be able to see that?

Um, I'm not really going to see who's in a room per se. We're gonna be able to see who's chatting and interacting with us. So there's Christy. Hello, Christy, you are live confirmed. See, we got, we got at least one viewer.

Yeah, there you go.

I'm waiting for my mom to show up. So awesome. All right, we'll, uh, we'll give it another minute. I said 5. We wanted to start a little early and, uh, make sure that everything did what we wanted it to do. So glad that you are here, Christy. Thank you for joining us. A couple of the new features that we will talk about today did not get activated on my profile, so I can't see them actually working.

I neither.

Get a chance to check them out.

It'll roll out slowly. Those, those are, those are pretty cool though, Eric.

So let's see, here's my little chat overlay. Tim, so boom, there's Christy. Hey, look at that, I can show my buddy Tim. At least I think I can. At least I think I can. Oh, there we go. I can turn off the chat overlay, but then there's where Tim shows up. Happy Friday. Happy Friday to you, sir. All right. Well, it is five bells Eastern time. It is four o'clock Central where you are sitting right now, Mr. Hubbard. But I think we're gonna go ahead and we will get the ball rolling. So welcome everybody to a 501 Friday LinkedIn Live. I'm not suspecting I'm getting a lot of my Eastern time zone friends because it is five o'clock on a Friday. Why am I doing a live stream on five o'clock on a Friday? But I figured why not? Might as well. I am super excited that my good friend Mr. Jack Hubbard is joining me. And did I hear right that this is your first LinkedIn Live? Am I like your first? Like, it is.

No, you're exactly right. And I couldn't think of a better person to do this with. We were talking offline before everybody got on here, and I just don't know of another gentleman in banking that's, that's more adept at technology than Eric Cook. So it's a lot. I will learn a lot. You'll all learn a lot. Great beer.

Is this when I get my $20 out again?

Yeah, yeah, you need to be sending a lot of $20.

Exactly.

So I got, I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you a quick story. So, um, as soon as this is over, my wife and I and Bob St. Meier and his wife Mary We're all going to go out to New Year's Eve dinner. We typically do New Year's Eve together, and because we're elderly, we go at noon. And but today we're going at 5, and we haven't had New Year's Eve last couple of years. Well, last 20 we did, 21 we didn't. And so we're all vaccinated, and so we're all going to go out to this neat Italian restaurant and have New Year's Eve dinner. So I'm excited about that, but More excited to be here with, uh, with you, Eric, and all the great people. Good to see Keith out in Los Angeles. I've done a lot of work with his bank, American Business Bank, and it's great to see everybody and glad to be here, Eric.

Yep, absolutely. I'm rolling through the comments right now. We're going to try this interactive. Dougalicious has joined us, and I appreciate you keeping it PG there, buddy. Uh, Doug and I like to go back and forth with each other, so it's, uh, great to see everybody. And hey Joyce, thanks for joining. So Yeah, I was just thinking the video that you and I put together for another one of our mutual friends and their sales rally. I played the $20 as I was editing the video, threw the $20 up in front of the camera and caught your hearty laugh because it was perfect timing. So what we want to talk about today LinkedIn has been making a bunch of announcements, and I'm a LinkedIn social nerd, so I'm following all this stuff. But Jack, you and I are connected to a lot of bankers, and I think it would be safe to say that a majority of them probably don't spend as much time on LinkedIn as what you and I do. I think that's probably a safe assumption. So they get in and they might catch some things, but I'm following a lot of the really high-end LinkedIn consultants that are diving deep. They're going into the code of the mobile app and they're dissecting to see what sorts of features are going to be coming out. And I don't suspect that many of the bankers are really paying attention to a lot of that nerdy stuff. So I want to spend some time just sharing some of the elements that I've seen that are coming out, how I think They could have potential for our banker friends. I know you wanted to chat a little bit about Clubhouse and the increasing popularity of a voice-only social network. There's this thing that I've heard you talk about called BEC that I want to make sure we spend some time on. And of course, you know, we're always happy to talk about The Linq Banker. I've got my swag and a little bit of branding, so We're building that LinkedIn, uh, social media, digital strategy, you name it, way to help bankers understand how to connect and engage with their audience through that mastermind community. So would love to have folks join us over there. Um, before I jump in, are there any new features that you have heard about that you want to maybe start with Or do you want me to just kind of run through my list and we can talk a little bit about them?

Well, we had it. We, this is all new to a lot of folks. And I know that LinkedIn Live is, is, uh, is probably one of the latter versions of the live-ish kinds of things, because there is, there's Facebook Live and you can do Instagram and Twitter. And I'm sure you do all of those. LinkedIn is a little later to the party and is a little more restrictive. So I guess I'd like to start with that since we're here on LinkedIn Live anyway.

Yeah.

How did you get there? And I guess the ultimate thing is that what's, what's behind the scenes, because we're on one of the platforms that you kind of chose and talked about, but then the other thing I'd love to know is, okay, I'm a banker on here, or I'm Joyce from 360 View and I'd like to, do something on LinkedIn Live? Why? Why would I go about doing that? So riff on LinkedIn Live, if you will.

All right, let's do a little riffing. I wish I could play the guitar. I wish I was musically inclined. I would love nothing more than to really do some riffing, but we'll pretend. Live video, and especially last year with COVID Live video is really the way that you can communicate across massive distances and get your message across and interact with people. I mean, we're pulling up comments from here from people that literally are all over the country, international. My buddy Doug's coming in from Canada. I had other colleagues within the WSI ecosystem that indicated through our network that they might be joining. So the live video, one, the networks know that it's attractive and sticky. So if you go live on Facebook, that's some of the most valuable content that you could produce on Facebook. They will do more from an algorithmic distribution perspective of making sure your friends and connections know that you're live on Facebook than any other type of medium that you can post because they know that people like it and they can interact with it and they can see you and they can comment and they can go back and forth. So having comfort in going live and being able to communicate through video, I think, is a skill set that a lot of us are becoming more comfortable with thanks to the Zoom world that we have all had to figure out how to embrace over the last year because we just couldn't physically get together with people. And so the acceptance of people watching live video and the acceptance of people delivering it, I think, have all gone up a notch, which means if you're not doing it as a banker, but your competition might now be exploring it, you're already behind the 8-ball. And your customers are seeing other businesses, they're seeing other people go out. Their expectation, and you and I know this, you know, before social media even existed, banking is so much a relationship business. They want to see you, know you, like you, trust you. And before social media, that was handshakes and community volunteering and other sorts of things. Now, this is the way to do that. So, I mean, it's just a huge opportunity. The reason beyond the fact that staring at the camera might freak a lot of people out and they're worried what they're going to say. You just gotta get over that because I trip on my tongue all the time. Compliance, regulatory concerns, security— those are all valid concerns. What if I say something as a banker that I'm not supposed to say and I get in trouble? You have to have a risk-reward analysis and say, is it better to assume the risk that maybe something might be talked about, that you can always delete it afterwards, you can edit it, you can You can fix it, but is the reward of being there, being present, sharing your thoughts, is that really overriding the risk that is keeping you off of it? And I think that it is. I mean, everything has a risk to it. Bankers manage risk for a living. So, if you never did a mortgage loan because you were afraid you were going to lose money on it, you'd never do another mortgage loan ever again. And that's not how bankers live. So—

Well, you know, and from a business banking perspective, which is, you know, as you know, where we really play, one of the things I'm wondering, and I wonder out loud, and anybody can kind of jump in if they've done this. If I'm Keith out in Los Angeles and I've got a cadre of clients that I work with and centers of influence and prospects, And I'd like to be able to talk with them about a— about an issue, not a product, but an issue. It could be PPP, it could be forgiveness, it could be whatever the case might be. I would think this would be an outstanding platform to be able to do this.

Absolutely.

You could have a guest on, you could have your bank president on, you could have a treasury management person come in from the outside. I guess my question is, You know, is there— are you seeing— let's go to the Facebook because you do Facebook Live quite a lot. One of the things, if I'm Keith or Joyce who always is looking for new business or anybody, are you seeing leads come in as a result of doing these live sessions, Eric? Because it's all time. Time is the issue. It's not fungible like money. I can give you $20 and you can go do whatever you want to do with it. But if, if we're on from 5 to 6 Eastern time, um, that we can't do anything else. So the time is very valuable here. How, how, what's, what's the value in this?

Well, to say that I've done a live stream and then immediately got a message from a bank saying, hey, we want you to redo our website, I would be lying if that were the case. It's like anything else. When you go into social media If you go in with the assumption that you are going to turn that into business, people are going to see just by your mannerisms, just by the way that you're talking, by the way that you're sharing information, that you're there to sell them something. And you do this really well, and I've learned from you, from watching you, and even from your offline sales, is if you focus on adding value and you focus on educating and teaching people and you focus on Getting them comfortable with you as a person. I can't say that it's not going to result in business, but that's not the reason why it's done. But I can certainly say that it's not hurting the fact that people get to see you. It creates top-of-mind awareness. It makes them think about you. It makes them go, you know what, I really should give them a shot. Or my bank's not telling me anything about PPP. I can't get a hold of my loan officer. But, you know, I met Jack at a chamber meeting years ago and he seems like a good guy and he's telling all of his customers all this stuff. It plants the seed of question and doubt in their mind if they're not working with you. Why wouldn't you wanna work with somebody that's going online, being transparent and sharing information with their audience? Those are, I think, enhancers. I can't say that there's a, hard dollar ROI, dollar for dollar, but we often refer to it as ROE, where it's return on engagement. And I have to think that that moves that relationship that much further down the line, that gets closer to hearing the cash register ring, if you're going to use an e-commerce or kind of a retail sign of a transaction happening.

Well, it's a valid point. And the other thing is, I probably am older than combined than everybody else on this program today. So I've been around a long time. And I, when I started in banking back in 19— not '18, but 1973, um, one of the ways you built your network was you went out and you met people face to face. You shook their hands, you hugged them and things like that.

Absolutely.

And, and I don't think that'll ever get replaced. I think social media is a great thing to do, but it will never replace that face-to-face when we can get back out and doing it. Yeah, you mentioned something that's kind of interesting, and I'd love your take on this. There are 3 people that I follow on LinkedIn that I view as kind of gurus, and I'm sure there are thousands of others. But number one always comes to mind is my friend Bryn Tillman.

Yep.

Who seems to have, like you, a a real good radar about what's going on with the new things on LinkedIn. There's a guy over in England named Mark Williamson that I follow. He's really, really good. And there's a guy in Chicago named Andy Foote who really picks at LinkedIn pretty well. And I'm curious if you follow those 3 and/or if there are a couple of others before we move on, 'cause I'd like to have you talk about a couple of these new features, But who are you following on LinkedIn?

Yeah, so I'm just going over to my little LinkedIn list here. I would say Mark Williams is one, definitely. He's got an amazing podcast. I listen to it almost every weekend. He's Mr. LinkedIn. Kevin Turner is Kevin D. Turner. Is another guy that I follow. He puts a lot of really great technical information out there. John Esperian is another one that I love listening to. And other than Bryn, and I don't think Kevin, but the rest of those guys all hail from England, so they've all got really cool accents that I love listening to. One of our development partners is over in the UK, and when we bring him in on project calls, uh, and I get to listen to his voice, it's just something about the, the British accent that I love listening to. But, um, yeah, they're, they're, uh, they're all great thought leaders and share a ton of information. And by plugging into them, it just helps, um, figure out where things are going. And, and much like what I know you do is trying to take all of that and boil it down, and how do I bankify it? You know, there's a lot of really cool things that could be done on a lot of different platforms. But at the end of the day, what does a banker really need to know? What are they likely going to and not be able to do as it relates to technology and firewalls and compliance and security and risk and culture and some of the other stumbling blocks that we get to experience as bankers? But yeah, I think that's probably a really, really good list. And as we know, yeah.

One of the challenges that, that we see as we get into these new things, Eric, that we're going to talk about is both you and we do training on LinkedIn for, for bankers. And, uh, you know, both, both are excellent at what we do. Uh, and I can say that because I don't train it. Brynn Tillman trains it for us. But our challenge, like yours probably, is that, oh, Unlike a traditional sales training class or other class that you might have in marketing, putting materials together for LinkedIn is really tough because it changes so often. It's impossible. We tried it when we first started and we just gave up because my son Adam, as you know, he does all our materials. He couldn't keep up with it. So we just kind of stopped. LinkedIn has, from what I understand, about 100 people around the world that are called innovators, and their job is to change LinkedIn and make it, make it up to date. And I think it's gotten more, more interesting since Microsoft bought LinkedIn. They have more resources, more dollars to, to kind of slam against stuff. And I also think their competitors have helped them in, in some ways. LinkedIn has put together a couple of fairly new things, Eric, that I know you're on top of, even though neither of us can get them yet. I know you're on top of a couple of things. What's going on on LinkedIn?

Yeah, so I'm scrolling some of the love that we're getting from the chat as well. So a big thanks to Keith and Tim. Looks like I'm gonna be doling out more than $20 to you on this webinar livestream. So keep it up. I love seeing the comments. Yeah, so I mean, to answer your first question as it relates to live, it's not something that's available to everybody, but it is something that I would encourage you if you'd like to use this either as an individual or you can apply for the live streaming option as a page or as a brand. You have to apply for it, and I'm actually going to pull up a quick little screen if I do a little flipperoonie here and we can take a look. If you do a search for LinkedIn Live in Google, you're going to find this page, but it's underneath their marketing solutions area for LinkedIn Live. This is where you can go make the application. And I was telling Jack in the green room beforehand, I actually applied for LinkedIn Live 6 times before I got accepted. I started a weekly webinar show back in April of 2009 called Free Webinar Wednesdays. And unless I was on an airplane or at a conference on stage, usually I was live every Wednesday at 1 PM Eastern time. And I sent them links to all of the webinars that I was doing. I wasn't doing a lot of video on LinkedIn and they were looking at that, but I made it very clear that I wanted to take the live functionality outside of the webinar platform and just be able to use their platform as a broadcasting tool because I was running into problems with GoToWebinar and registrations and all this other stuff. But it took me 6 times, and not that I'm by any means the level of the experts that we just mentioned earlier, But I'm on it quite a bit. They have simplified it. So if you would like to just dip your toe in the water, I will tell you, if you do get accepted, unlike Facebook and Twitter and some of the other platforms, Instagram, where you can just get your phone out and press live and go, you have to use a streaming service. We use Restream.io. StreamYard is another one. They've got a list of providers that you can use. As you dive in and take a look at all the different requirements on the LinkedIn Live platform. But you have to use a third-party streaming tool to get into LinkedIn. The cool part about that is you can set it up so that when you go live on LinkedIn, you can also push that out to Twitter. You can push it out to Facebook. You can push it out to Twitch if you decide you want to get into video game streaming. I have a Twitch account, but I've never put anything there other than the fact that maybe at some point I would want bankers to follow me on Twitch. Who knows? So that's the one area that I don't think I really meant I finished answering when you asked about, you know, the LinkedIn Live process. So I just wanted to go over that. I'm excited about a couple of the new features. One of them is called Creator Mode. I switched my primary connection method from connect to follow for a reason that I'll mention here in just a little bit. But when you— if you want to be seen as a thought leader, and they're trying really hard, I think, at LinkedIn to embrace the creatives and the creators. So they've introduced this mode where your connection method gets switched over to follow. You can still get access to connect with somebody if you want to have direct message functionality, but it switches it to follow. And then in front of your connections, where normally it says 500+, it will put before that the number of people that are following you as an indicator. So if I had that turned on, it would show, you know, 5,400 followers with 500+ connections. You don't really see who your connections are. You only get a chance to see that. But that gives you also the ability to put in, I think, up to 3 hashtags of the things that you typically like talking about the most. So, yours obviously would have something related to sales, something related to banking, and probably something related to LinkedIn. I might weave in a website or a mastermind community in there. But it gives people a sense when they look at your profile, what are the things that you like to talk be a thought leader on, and what type of information do you typically share so that I may be interested in hitting the follow button? The reason that I switched to follow about a month ago is LinkedIn Stories, which were introduced as a follow-up to Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories, the disappearing content, ethereal 20-second lasts for 24 hours, is if you have more than 5,000 followers and you switch your primary connection function to follow, it added the ability for a swipe up. And some of you might even be here because you might have seen my story about being on this live stream with my buddy Jack. I tagged him in the story. I provided the link to the event on LinkedIn so that you could swipe up if you happen to see that within the 24 hour period. And it just creates a more interactive story when you're connecting and sharing information with your connections, because that really doesn't go outside of your connections. The only people that see your stories are people that are connected to you. But it's one more way that you can build a little bit of visibility and share when you're doing things. And that link does not have to be a link that's on LinkedIn. It could be a link to your blog, it could be a link to your website, it could be a link to your online mortgage application system. It could be a link that goes anywhere, but now you've got some swipe-up interactivity that you can introduce to the stories functionality. So that's been pretty cool to play around with. That's available on profiles as well as on pages. Speaking of pages, I'm on a roll here. They introduced admin roles, so you can now invite somebody that's not even part of your organization to help be an administrator. Of your page. Much like Facebook has introduced administrators where you could bring in either a full admin, a content administrator, an ad analytics, you now can bring other people in to help kind of elevate your game. So if you are the administrator of your organization's, your bank's face— or Facebook— LinkedIn page, but you want somebody to come in and take a peek at it, or you'd like some assistance, or you're not sure how something works, It's a lot easier to assign administrative rights and change some of the roles and things that those people can do while they're logged in and getting access to your page. So that's pretty cool. One of the features that I was really hoping that I would get access to before today, and I've seen it in the live a couple of times, is the ability for your hero image on your LinkedIn profile to convert to the video of a live stream that you're doing if you are on LinkedIn Live. That has not been enabled for me. So if you go to my profile, you're just going to see my picture of me with my banking school friends from PCBS in Seattle, actually. But for some of the ones that I've seen that turned on, if you visit their profile, It's actually with the sound off, a replica of their lives. So if you happen to visit somebody's profile and they're live and you didn't catch it, you can jump right into their livestream and see what they're talking about. That's one of the things that I'm super excited about. The COVID story is another element where you can turn in a 20-second video that when you visit and you get cover story and you visit another profile that has the COVID story enabled, your little hero picture will show briefly and then flip off and show like a 3-second preview of a video where you can say, hey, welcome to my profile. This is what I do. I'm excited that you're here. And you've got 20 seconds to put a little video along with your profile picture. When that happens, you'll see a little orange ring that will glow around it so you know that that's turned on. Somewhat similar in nature, and I think this is rolled out to everybody, you do have the ability to do an audio recording. And you can only do this on your mobile device. But if you go to your profile on audio or your profile on mobile, you'll see a little speaker. You can touch that and you can record a little message. Now it's designed to try to, uh, like tell people how you pronounce your name. Not a lot of people get confused by Eric Cook. So there's really no need that I need to— hi, you pronounce my name Eric Cook. But you can use it for a little intro in just— not that you want to turn it into a cheesy sales pitch. But if you visit my profile, you can listen to it on desktop as well as on mobile. But you can only record it on mobile. Just like if you get the COVID story, you can only record those videos on mobile devices. But you can hear me say, hey, my name is Eric. Welcome to my LinkedIn profile. I'm looking forward to connecting with you. And that's about it. You don't have a whole lot more time than that anyway. So those are a couple of the ones. I'm going to take a breath and see if any of those sparked a thought from you. And I'm going to also take a quick peek and see what we've got. So, So Danielle, thank you very much. I'm gonna throw that up there and just do a little flashback love for Free Webinar Wednesday. So yeah, I actually got hit up on Twitter this week from somebody wanting to know whether or not Free Webinar Wednesdays was still going, and it might come back. I gave it a little bit of a pause and was trying to shift some of my focus going over here. So So any, any thoughts on your part?

Well, there, I think the frustrating thing for folks, and this is why Eric and I talked about having the, those followers, those gurus of LinkedIn, because you'll get more and more information. And I like Mark Williams over in England because he's, he's very, Very specific about how to do it. And so is Brynn. I like those practical approaches. Philosophical doesn't work for me. I want to know, okay, if I get creator mode, how do I go about doing that? Where do I click? Because I'm not as technologically savvy as some. We had a couple of questions about— and I think the question is, do I need to get LinkedIn Live to get creator mode and cover story? They're separate. And it's, it's going to be rolled out. I mean, LinkedIn has 800 million people around the world, and I don't know how they choose who gets it and who doesn't.

Yep.

My sense would be that it would be those people that had the most followers, the most connections, the highest usage. I'm sure the algorithm knows all of that and that they push it out to those people so that they can get more publicity out of it. But I'll tell you what, as soon as I can get it, I'm using it. It's extremely, extremely valuable. And when I talk about it, the creator mode and certainly the COVID story, both are very important.

I think we're going to go matrix mode here. I'm going to pull in a live stream of my site, my page. And Danielle just posted, she popped over to my profile and it looks like even though I didn't turn it on, it must've just activated for me. So I might be a little closer to creative mode than what I think. Um, but my live stream is appearing, so that's pretty awesome. Thank you very much, Danielle, for the heads up. So, and I made sure I got a screenshot of that because that looks pretty cool. That will be something that will show up in future training material, even if it changes. Uh, I'm gonna make sure that I keep that. So, uh, yeah, good catch on that.

So, and I, I would say too, Eric, that for those bankers that are on here, and I know that You know, we've got a couple of folks, Joyce and others who may be consultants or sell, sell other services and solutions. And they're probably on a little bit more. The average banker is on LinkedIn 17 minutes a month. I'm on 2 to 3 hours a day. Now I'm not on 2 to 3 hours constant, but I'm always checking a variety of different kinds of things. I'm checking who's been to my profile. I'm checking a lot of the notifications. All those different things are really important. We all have day jobs and, and, you know, LinkedIn is not going to pay our salaries, but, but LinkedIn is a gateway to becoming that more of a thought leader as a banker. And if you want to be ahead of things, I've seen bankers who have actually had a lot of experience on LinkedIn and actually led LinkedIn sessions. for their customers in a virtual kind of way. So knowing more about what goes on in LinkedIn, staying current on those kinds of things can really make you a thought leader in your community.

Oh, absolutely.

I'd love to shift gears a little bit and maybe we won't talk a lot about this, but so I get this message from Bryn, uh, oh, a few weeks ago. It says, you got to join Clubhouse. Uh, and I thought, well, okay, what the heck is Clubhouse? And you gotta be invited to it. And it's only on an iPhone and, and, uh, it's only audio, but, um, it's an interesting—

Only, only, only, only so many restrictions. Yeah.

A lot of restrictions, but you're probably on. I'm on in kind of listen mode. One of the things I was talking to my daughter who does, uh, you know, a lot of social media, she's a chief people officer. And she was showing me her phone and she said, Dad, I must have 30 requests to come into a Clubhouse room. Eric, what's Clubhouse?

What is Clubhouse? Oh boy. It's quickly being copied. I call it R&D, rip off and duplicate, because it has grown exponentially, especially last year. Clubhouse is an audio-only Social networking platform. It does not record the audio, so it generates a little bit of a FOMO effect. You know what FOMO stands for, don't you, Jack?

I do.

Yep.

So they're missing out. Absolutely.

Fear of missing out. It has got some exclusivity to it, so it is iOS only. I actually had to join Clubhouse using my iPad because I did not have an iPhone. A little difficult to listen. remotely on an iPad, but I've joined the iPhone family now. My friends are all excited that I'm a blue message instead of a green. I'm still trying to figure out what that exactly means, but if you're an iPhone user, you know what that means. But it's audio only. You have individuals that are creating rooms. They can establish clubs. You have experts that go on stage. If you think about the typical conference experience where you go someplace and I'm really stoked because I get to listen to Jack Hubbard. Jack's going to be— and I'm not going to say on stage because I know you get off the stage and you walk around in the crowd and you interact and mingle. You're like me, I can't stand in one spot. I got to fidget and walk around and be a little mobile. But I'm going to that room and I'm excited because I'm going to get a chance to listen to Jack and what he's going to have to say. Clubhouse is a little bit more of like a panel discussion where maybe Jack and Brynn and maybe Mark Williams and some others are going to be up there. And I get to sit in the audience and I get to listen and hear what they're saying. It's real time. I can raise my hand. I can ask a question if I'm unmuted. If I want to learn more about Jack or anybody else that's up on stage, when you create your profile, you can connect your Instagram as well as your Twitter accounts. When you are listening to that person, you can click on those profiles and the audio continues to play. So just because I'm like, well, who is this Jack guy and what's he all about? And I can go out to Instagram and I can learn more about you. I can see what you've been tweeting and the audio is still there for me to continue to listen. So it's like a live real-time interactive podcast, if you will. And the thing that's really cool about it is What this is doing is it's providing people an opportunity to go live without the fear of the camera, without the fear of— and I worry about this a lot— what my hair looks like or what kind of background I have or whether or not I'm in an appropriate— you know, I might be out on my pontoon boat. Maybe I don't want people to see me if I'm live streaming and I decided to work from my pontoon. Some people might be offended by that. Most people that know me know that I work from pretty much anywhere. So that's not a surprise. But people don't need to know where you're at because you're just engaging and participating in the conversation and you're doing it on the phone. And so the Twitters and the Facebooks and now even LinkedIn are all quickly investigating how they can launch their own. Twitter has their platform now in beta. That they're actually— they've got some people that have been invited. It's called Spaces. Facebook, I've not seen where they've given it a name. LinkedIn is working on their own voice-only service. And I'd even read on TechCrunch last week that Twitter was in conversations with Clubhouse, and the number that was being thrown around was $4 billion.

Wow.

And this is a social networking platform that's been around for just over a year. And only exists on iOS and is invite only, and they already have a valuation of $4 billion.

And I don't— how is that possible? They do no advertising. And yeah, you know, I've just— I've never gotten that.

They're, they're, they're, they're not making any money because they're, you know, so, so what they're doing is they're presenting an opportunity for engagement and interactivity. They did introduce the ability for somebody to be able to provide some funding. So if I sit in on a Clubhouse event and jack, almost like a Patreon type of a situation where I could send $5 or $10 if I wanted to, and I suspect that Clubhouse is gonna take a cut of that as part of the fund delivery process. But they're setting the stage for a conversational network. There's the potential to have these conversations, to be monetized, to be sponsored. But like with a lot that comes out in the technology world, the business model might not make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but people are recognizing this as an opportunity. And you don't put a $4 billion valuation on something without some reason behind why this has got some potential. From a mid to long-term perspective.

So you have to be invited. So that's, that's kind of interesting.

Yes.

I agree with Christy. Christy in the chat says it's addicting. It is. It reminds me a lot, and this will date me, but it will, it reminds me a lot of when I first heard of AOL and you'd go on AOL and you'd go into these various chat rooms. And I love baseball cards and old cars. So I'd go into these chat rooms and before you know it, it's 4 in the morning and you're going, oh my God, I should probably be asleep here. And so I agree with Christy, it is addicting. It's also kind of interesting because from what I understand, you have to use your real name.

Yes.

So I'm in this chat, I'm in this Clubhouse thing last Saturday and it talked about something around LinkedIn and what have you. And all of a sudden, some famous person— I won't name them— but some famous person came into the room, and the hosts of the room all of a sudden were all Twitter-pated because this very famous person came into the room. And they brought them up on stage, and of course then the famous person took over.

And it was— was his name Jack Hubbard?

Uh, he's not a famous person. So, um, uh, so It, it, one of the things I do like about it though, is that it allows you to kind of be more incognito versus on camera. And a lot of people are more comfortable in that mode. The second thing I really like is that the rooms that I tend to go to, which are more LinkedIn-like rooms, tend to be very practical. People come up and they're very open to sharing. what they do. The real challenge with it, Eric, is, as you mentioned, it's because it's not recorded. If you don't take really good notes, you lose a lot of what they, of what they say. So it's an interesting approach. I don't know of— I did go into one of the other things you can do is you can actually, once you sign up, you can almost go through a list of the kinds of rooms you want to go into. So if you want to do sports or business or arts or whatever the case might be, and then things will get pushed to you, uh, in terms of the kinds of rooms that you can, uh, you can get into. So I find that to be interesting. So I went into the banking rooms and there's a few international banking kinds of things, but I don't see any bankers or many bankers on Clubhouse, Eric.

I would agree with that. Because I think it's early. And let's face it, a lot of the bankers that likely need to be building relationships and performing sales functions have been up to their eyeballs in PPP. So when you suggest something that they should be doing to generate more business, they're not getting any sleep as it is now anyway, taking care of all the small businesses that are out there needing their attention. But I do want to say, Don't ignore it. And, and, you know, Jack and I are both on Clubhouse. If you are interested in getting an invitation, all you need to do is reach out to either one of us. As long as we can get your cell phone number, because you sign up with your mobile number, it is for an individual, it's not for a business, we can go ahead and put you in our address book and get you an invitation and, and get you in the club, uh, so you can be part of the cool kids. Um, if you are an Android user, you can do what I did and go buy an iPad. Or I have heard rumors that within the next couple of weeks that they're going to be releasing an Android app and then everybody will be able to participate. May still be invite only, but at least Android will be able to be there. I will tell you that the creation of clubs, which is like a business page, if you will, if we're going to equate that to LinkedIn, you can now do that. There's instructions on how to do that. I'm not going to go through that now, but you can find out how to do that. But I do want to mention that The Linked Banker has a club. And so while The Linked Banker Program is restricted to members that are paying the monthly membership and part of our mastermind sessions, we've made the decision to create a LinkedIn or a Linked Banker Club to have conversations and to spark thoughts and, and have some dialogue there. We've yet to go live. I was thinking maybe after this, I would hop over to Clubhouse and just fire up there and see who wants to join and hang out and have a little post-Oprah after the show, if you will, conversation. But I think bankers should plug into this. I think they should pay attention to it. I think they should see how the conversations are evolving. I think it could be one area that they could use or at least learn what's going on in the world of social media so you can remain more relevant. The one thing that I do want to rewind real quick on, because you said stuff moves so fast, I've been in a couple of events where somebody has mentioned that if you direct message them on Instagram, that they will send you a link to the show notes. And they've had somebody specifically attending and scribing the information. So it's not a replica or it's not a recording. So you're not violating the terms and conditions. But if there's mentions of sites and people and URLs and addresses, you're getting show notes. So blow-by-blow, much like a podcast will have show notes, you can actually get that. And they're doing that to drive engagement over to Instagram. You're creating a direct message, so now you can get another follower on Instagram or DM me on Twitter. So, so they're figuring out ways that they can get around that. And if it is a conversation, that you want to know more about and somebody is taking notes. I've actually done that a couple of times. And that's a way that you can then provide additional value and some stickiness to what otherwise would just disappear like a story and poof, go into thin air. So kind of a cool idea.

Well, and I agree with Jeremy when he, I'll paraphrase, he's talking about getting in front of things. And I think too often what happens is we as bankers, because we're very conservative, and I was, you know, I was in that club for many, many years. I was a banker for a long time and we only work with banks. You do have to be careful because there is a lot of risk, uh, and not just monetary risk, but, but reputation risk and a lot of other things. So you have to be careful, but on the other hand, As he says, if you can get into things like Clubhouse and put a room together, because you can start your own rooms and you can invite people in your community to be talking about business-related issues, I think that's pretty powerful. And it doesn't have to be an hour, it can be half an hour. But I think that's a powerful way to enhance your bank's brand. Enhance your thought leadership and, and, and, um, uh, and, and show people, because here's what I believe. I think that when we want to go out and sell a technology product, whether it's digital banking or RDC or whatever it might be, I think people have to know that we as bankers are technologically savvy as well. And I think there's a subtle message when you're on Clubhouse or you're on LinkedIn Live or whatever.

Right.

You don't have to be perfect at it, but it does show that you have a certain level of technological savviness that I think makes a difference in people's lives.

Yep, I would agree. And it's, you know, it's like 2 or 3 years ago when I started really hounding on, you know, you need to get a personalized URL on LinkedIn. If I see somebody's LinkedIn profile of eric-cook-42767xyv, What I'll occasionally do without being like condescending is I use a tool like I use Loom, Loom.com, which is a great little plugin that you can use in your browser. But I'll do a Loom video and I'll say, "Hey Jack, thanks for connecting. It's awesome to be connected to you on LinkedIn. I noticed that you don't have a personal URL for LinkedIn. I'm gonna show you a real quick and easy way you can do that and up your game. I'm gonna show you here. This is this da da da da da." And I will get so many responses back from those quick, simple little messages about, oh my gosh, that is so cool. Thank you so much for showing me that. I appreciate it. No strings attached. Some of the conversations end right there until I have a birthday or an anniversary, and then I hear them, congratulations or whatnot. But those do spark conversations.

Mm-hmm.

And that was the indicator that you knew what you were doing. And now it's, do you understand what Clubhouse is? You know, we had a story, one of our LinkBanker members, we talked about this a couple of months ago, and she got into Clubhouse and her daughter heard about it in her marketing class in college and came home and her mom was like, yeah, I learned about that last night on my LinkBanker. And so the mom got to play the trump card that she was ahead of the daughter in college learning and knowing that stuff was ahead. So being able to be perceived as Technologically adept and knowing what's going on is not a bad thing. And doesn't mean you have to be bleeding edge, but to know what's happening is a pretty cool thing. So, yeah.

Yeah.

So I just looked at the clock and we're like 10 minutes. And I thought that I'm like, well, we're like 15 minutes into this. Time always flies. And even the pre-promotional stuff, I said, we're going to talk about some new LinkedIn stuff. We're going to talk about Clubhouse. And then probably whatever else you and I want to chat about, because I always enjoy talking with you. I want to give— I want to make sure that I give time for you to talk a little bit about this BEC concept, because I think, I mean, it's preaching to the choir. I totally agree. But for those folks that are not familiar, and you dropped it in a couple of LinkedIn Status updates. What does BEC stand for? Why are you excited about it? What does it mean for bankers? And how do we take advantage of it?

Yeah, you know, this, this has been a really interesting year. It's, it's been the year of disappearance. Everything seems to run together and it's all blurry. And we all had to pivot when we when we faced what we faced last March. And there are a lot of businesses that didn't make it. And a lot of organizations are gone as a result of their inability to innovate and the desire to do it. I mean, there were some people that were in business for a while and just said, I can't take it anymore, I'm out. And that's okay too, I get that. But we had to make some decisions because as a family-owned company, we said, well, look, we've got family members in here. We've got people we've known for years and years, and we've got clients that kind of depend on us. So what do you do? Well, we kind of bifurcated the company and we put together this video series called Remote Relationship Development that's been very popular and it's worked out really well. But now people are starting to move back toward the office. And when I say toward, I don't mean to. Because there's a very small percentage of offices that are 100% open. Some are, most are more in a hybrid kind of approach. And as you know, we, you know, I've taught 70,000 bankers and that's what we do. And we typically teach business bankers. And one of the questions I always get is, are we remote? Are we doing remote Zoom calls or are we doing face-to-face? The answer is yes. So BEC is blended environment conversations. And if you look at any data, What business owners are telling us is that they want some of those meetings to be in a virtual mode. They want bankers— we got a hall pass for 9 months and it was okay if, you know, if we weren't as adept at this, but now we need to be looking at the camera. We need to be knowing how to take notes. We need to know how to use the whiteboard and share our screen. We need to do all those. After 9 months, we should. So now what we have to say is, at what point does that buyer want me to come out, or when do I need to go out? And if I do need to go out, how do I do that safely and effectively? There's another concept. When a partner comes onto the scene and the partner is remote— Keith, for example, one of the best bankers I ever met, Keith Cherwinski out in Los Angeles. So when Keith brings out a treasury management professional, when I say brings out, it could be a virtual thing that, that, that person could be in San Luis Obispo and he's in Los Angeles. Keith could be live and the treasury management person could be on the video screen. Have we rehearsed this? Do I know when I'm going to turn control over to Jack, my treasury person, et cetera? So all this becomes very important. There's another concept. What happens when Eric Cook Manufacturing Company, after I've bought you flowers and candy and met the parents and wooed you and romanced you, and you said, yes, and I'll marry you and I'll be your relationship and I'll come into your bank and be part of you. How do I keep you from leaving and going back to your previous bank? Well, one of the things we're talking about now is team boarding. The ability for you as a bank to bring in a branch manager, a loan assistant, a treasury person, even your sales manager, and inviting them to introduce themselves to Eric, our brand new customer. What does that do? It lets Eric know that he is important. He or she is important. It lets them know that where the bodies are buried in the bank and how do I, how do I, where is the politics here? It lets them know if Jack isn't available, who else can I contact? All these things are very important and it doesn't have to be done face-to-face and it doesn't have to be done all virtually. It's a blended, a hybrid kind of approach. And I think the banks that realize this now are the ones that are gonna be more successful, 'cause here's what's gonna happen. Something else is afoot. This is not the last bad thing that's going to happen to us. We need to be better prepared. We need to be prepared with software and hardware in our homes, in our banks, and we need to be prepared from a training perspective so that when the conversations do occur, they occur in a viable, valuable, trust-based way, whether they are face-to-face or in a virtual setting, Eric.

Cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because The olden days of 2019 when we didn't have to worry about these things, when we didn't have to wonder virtual versus in-person and all of the different elements as it relates to technology and wrinkles. I sent you a picture before we did today's session. And what was the caption of that picture?

Turkey feathering. So, so, so here's—

Talk about that.

Yeah. When one of the real keys here, and there are these, I've always believed in subtleties that make the sale. And one of the small keys in virtual selling is your ability to look at the camera. And it almost seems like you're staring at the person. But if you think about your news person tonight, if you watch the news, And they're constantly looking down at their papers, that doesn't inspire a lot of, a lot of confidence. So then the question is, how do I not look down because my notes are down here? Well, you do what's called turkey feathering, as Eric's showing right now. Across the top, down the sides, as long as you don't cover up the green dot because that's where the camera is, as long as you put some quick bulleted notes around there that you want to talk about. Or questions that you want to ask, you're, you're golden. And here's the other thing that's kind of interesting, Eric, and I know we're bumping up against time and we all, we all have to leave and happy hours and dinners and things like that. But one of the things that amazes me is that bankers don't record every call. And we could spend an hour, maybe the next time talking about this. But if you think about this, We're recording this. Um, and, and so I don't need to look down at my notes. I don't need to take notes about what Eric is saying. I can really focus on the camera. For me, the salesperson, if Eric is my prospect, I can go back right away, get my email, go back through the call, and I can send Eric a follow-up or what we call a conversation recap. But there's more. My manager, Bob St. Meyer, could also get a copy of my recording and I could forward that to him. And now he can coach me on a key area where I'm deficient. If Bob can help me be better at a certain thing, maybe it's questioning or whatever the case might be, I'll make more sales. So it just shocks me that the number of banks who either A, don't allow their bankers to record, or B, even worse, don't even know that they can Yep, absolutely.

It's funny, I was shockingly— I can't remember if it was TikTok or Instagram or whatever, but spending time browsing around, and there's a Kickstarter initiative now where they've actually come up with a webcam that instead of sitting on top of your monitor— because most of the time what happens is you want to look at the person, so I'm looking at you right now, Jack, because I'm having a conversation with you. But when I'm doing that, my audience is not seeing me looking at them.

Right.

And so this Kickstarter initiative is this little camera that's on almost like what you would expect to stick in your drain to look to see if you have any clogs. And it's got a 90-degree and it hangs down on your screen and you put the camera right on top of your face. So now when I look at you, I'm actually looking at my camera because my camera is no longer at the top of my screen. It's now hanging down in my monitor, small enough where I can still see what's going on on the screen. But now I'm looking at you and I'm looking at the audience. And I haven't pulled the trigger on backing that yet. I'll probably wait and see if it comes out and then the second or third generation will be even better. But that's the concept. And until we were participating in these types of real-time conversations and dialoguing with folks, Folks, there was never the thought that that would have been an issue or that that would not have been acceptable, that you need to look. And it's the same thing when you record on your mobile device. If you're doing live video, the temptation is to stare at the screen instead of knowing where the camera is and looking at the camera because that's who you're looking at and that's who's looking back at you. So absolutely. So Jack, in the last few minutes that we have, I'm going to pull up a little— make sure I pick the right one here. You've got a private group called the Rant Pack, and I am super excited that I'm on the inside of that Rant Pack. But for folks that maybe aren't, share Rant Pack and what you talk about there and why people would maybe want to become part of the cool guy and girl club.

Yeah, 30 seconds or less. 12 years ago, I got a call from a guy that helped us start our business, Brian O'Connor. Brian was at Fleet and was at Citizens— is at Citizens Bank, real senior guy. And he said, you know, you have so much to offer, why don't you write something and share it with us? And so I started doing it with Brian, and over the 12 years, I've put together what's called Jack Rants, which are kind of irregular, irreverent, kind of fun. fun looks at sales and marketing and things like that. Uh, and so my daughter-in-law Amber one day said, you know, dad, you're sending out all these emails on Saturday mornings. Why don't you just push it out? And so we put together a hashtag rant pack. Uh, and if you want to join, um, it's, it's all free. Uh, we put articles out there that are kind of fun and interesting. Uh, and they're irregular. I don't, You know, maybe this week I'll do one, next week I won't do one, but they're all kind of fun, Eric. So like your Link Banker, which is just awesome, we enjoy the Rant Pack and we enjoy having folks comment on some of our posts. It's great.

Yeah. So to find Rant Pack, here's a quick little— you just do a search for #RantPack because I love the fact that you worked a hashtag into the actual name of your group. But just do a search for hashtag rant pack and then select groups, and voilà! There it is. 399 members, and I am one of them. So we'll see who actually ends up becoming 400. But it's an unlisted group. There's our little there's our mug back when we were together a couple of years ago having dinner in lovely downtown Madison, Wisconsin. I think this is one of the dinners that we actually were able to use. A credit card for payment, which I think that's right.

We're gonna, we're gonna do that again in the fall for our, uh, sales and marketing school for sure.

Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm excited for that. So cool. Um, so those of you that are interested in learning a little bit more about The Linked Banker, I would love for you to hop over to thelinkedbanker.com and, uh, click on the join button. You can click on the media button. I'm super excited that I got to tell my story and talk about my passion for building connections and sharing your personality with, uh, my good friend James Robert Lay, the author of Banking on Digital Growth and the founder of Digital Growth Institute. So I am episode number 81, which is pretty cool. 36 minutes of me and, uh, uh, JR just chatting about all sorts of cool stuff, social media related. But would love to have you check out The Linked Banker as well. And then you know what I think I'm gonna do? I, uh, as much as my wife probably wants me to stop talking and join her for a Friday afternoon drink, um, I am going to suggest those of you who might be interested, and it may be a half an hour, and I don't know, Jack, if I can convince you to hop over afterwards, but if you are on Clubhouse and you're watching this live, if you catch this as a recording, I'm probably not going to still be there. But if you're watching this live right now and you would like to just do a little test, I'm gonna hop over into Clubhouse and with my new iPhone look for the, uh, the blue Linked Banker Club. I'm gonna go ahead and fire that up. Um, I'll probably hang out for 5 minutes, nobody will show up, and then I'll disconnect. But hopefully some of you will join me and it'll be good to have maybe a follow-up conversation just to chat and See whatever else we want to talk about.

So, well, thank you, Eric. I'm gonna go have some Italian food, but it was—I really enjoyed this. It was a lot of fun. Excellent.

Thanks, Jack, and thanks to everybody that joined live and all of your comments. This was awesome, and we will see you on the next live stream for sure. Take care and have a great weekend, everybody. See ya. Bye, everybody. Bye bye.