WSI's New 2019 Digital Minds Book - Chapter Review

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, November 6th, 2019 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook over here at WSI Digital where we provide services for community banks, small businesses, pretty much anyone looking to engage and attract and interact and influence their customers online. You can learn more about us over at poweredbywsi.com. I mentioned on a prior Free Webinar Wednesdays, we're in the process of actually launching a brand new poweredbywsi.com website that continues to roll along, and we're really excited to get that released here. The hope is by the end of the year, we'll have a shiny new website that we can share with everybody, but we appreciate the patience with our visitors and friends as we work on getting that done. The good news is we keep landing new projects and doing cool stuff for our customers. The bad news is that detracts time away from us to work on our own stuff. But in the grand scheme of things, as a business owner, that's a pretty good problem to have. So, but we'll get there, and we're pretty excited that that new website is coming down the pike. Today's show and all shows are recorded and made available at Free Webinar Wednesdays. We have not had an opportunity to push out last week's show Yeah, the video is online and it is at YouTube in our playlist for Free Webinar Wednesdays. So you can always get to it that way, but we, we still don't have the write-up done yet. But that should hopefully be wrapped up this week as well as today's show for you folks. Those of you that are joining the show live, thanks for spending time this afternoon or this morning or this evening, depending on where you're coming from. We love— I say we, me and the dogs that are sitting at the base of my desk here— but we love questions from the audience, keep it interactive. And as you can tell, being a live show, sometimes things go perfectly well and sometimes things interrupt us and we have some challenges, but that's what makes the show so darn adorable, and we appreciate you joining us today. What I would like to chat about is Came across a couple of articles, and I've mentioned our new Digital Minds book that I also want to just give you a little preview of the 12 chapters that are going to be included. And we're in the process of lining up the authors that also contributed to the book's creation. A couple weeks ago, Ellie from our office attended our global convention down in Cancun, and there was a book signing. Party where pretty much all the authors with the exception of myself were present signing the books and handing them out to all the WSI consultants that were there. I couldn't go because I had other responsibilities back here in the States, but the book has formally been kicked off and I'm waiting for my first couple of boxes of books to show up. And there's already a few people that have reached out to me to put in pre-orders. And I've got their names on a list. If you're interested in getting a copy of our Digital Minds book, by all means, shoot me a note and let me know, and I'll be happy to toss you on that list as well. We'd certainly love for you to take a look at it, read it, maybe give us a review on Amazon or any other place that you feel appropriate. But we're pretty proud of its creation. So one of the articles that I came across that had a real good point resonated with me right off the bat. And I've talked a little bit about LinkedIn. I think one of the prior shows, a couple of shows ago, we chatted a little bit about some of the LinkedIn changes that are coming along that they've released in the fall. And I came across this article and it's 5 Things to Stop Doing on LinkedIn Immediately. And some of these I can't really imagine that somebody would do, but others I've seen and I continue to see And I actually had an experience today with someone that went in the polar opposite direction that I certainly appreciated, although I don't know if it was automated or not, but I'll explain what that means here in just a second. So the 5 things according to this article were that you should stop doing on LinkedIn: posting inflammatory comments. So I don't see that happen a lot, I'll be honest with you. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit and very rarely Is somebody out there really trying to cause a ruckus? Normally, most of the time when you're on LinkedIn, you've got a pretty good understanding that it's a business environment. You don't really want to get into a verbal battle with someone. If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it at all. Typically is the reaction most people have on LinkedIn. I've seen it every once in a while where somebody has said something that kind of fired it up, but I would say that inflammatory comments. Just kind of keep an eye on what you are and are not posting. The second one that resonated with me though, as I was kind of going through the list, selling via LinkedIn messaging. This is a pet peeve of mine, and I'm— I've got some colleagues that have been on the fence as it relates to automation and is it good. And so you, I'm sure, probably all received the invitation from someone who wants to connect with you. You might not really know who they are. But in my case, because I do webinars and I speak around the country at conferences and, and, you know, try to be somewhat of a thought leader in the space, I'll get people that will reach out to me and they'll ask to connect. And sometimes they're people that might have sat in on a webinar or seen me or read something or caught a replay. But oftentimes, if it's someone that I don't recognize, and I've actually started spending more time filtering my invitations because of this, You'll get the invitation to connect, you'll look at their profile and go, hey, I think maybe okay, and you'll click on okay. And then within a brief period of time, you'll get this email that will like roll in and it'll be this 4 or 5 paragraph thing that you know that they just didn't type up. Hey, we do this and this is what we do and here's some of the sites that we've done and this is what our costs are and they're immediately coming back and Couple things on that. One is there's services out there that you can use that will automate some of this stuff, and automation is being looked at by LinkedIn as a bad thing. And if you're caught using automation-based technology in LinkedIn, you can get in trouble to the extent that they'll even give consideration to banning you from LinkedIn permanently, and you'll be basically kicked off the platform. A lot of these I guess LinkedIn sales messages feel like they've got an automation to it where it's just people going out generating invitations to connect. You'll accept the connection and then the system will sit and after about 6 hours it sends you a canned, hey, here's my services, hire me, hire me, hire me. Here's my link to my Calendly account so you can set up an appointment to talk to me so I can convince you to hire me. I'm beginning, and I use the word hate rarely in the digital space because sometimes you can feel one way or the other, but to actually say that you hate something is pretty strong. But I'm really beginning to hate those messages. And so what I'm doing now is I'm either immediately unconnecting or disconnecting with the individual that's jumping into a message without even getting to know who I am and trying to sell me stuff, or I respond back to try to engage in a conversation to see if they'll even talk to me. And in either of those instances doesn't go so well because most of the time they're not even checking the messages. They're just basically blasting stuff out. I had somebody send me a message the other day. WSI is a franchise. I purchased a national franchise license with WSI to be part of the agency network that is WSI back in 2007. I had somebody get in touch and I accepted and they immediately said, hey, we help franchise owners find profitable franchisees to sell them franchises, like I worked for WSI. And I kicked back a response and said, you totally got me wrong. Obviously didn't even look at my profile, don't have an understanding of who I am. And so in this instance, the individual actually did respond back and apologize. But, you know, selling via LinkedIn messaging. So the one thing on this I had somebody connect with me. I expected it to go the same way. He was a digital consultant. He helps businesses grow their organic reach, blah, blah, blah. Well, I do that too, but I'm always looking to connect with like-minded individuals and maybe compare notes. So his invitation basically said, hey, I'm not trying to sell you anything. All I want to do is connect with individuals that are interested in what I'm interested in. If you'd like to connect, I would certainly appreciate the connection. And it was upfront, gave me the message at first, and I shot him back a note and I basically said, thanks for not trying to sell me something. I'm getting really sick of this stuff. Now, he hasn't responded to me yet, so that in and of itself could have been an automated message. It just has a different feel to it. But if you are going to pitch anything in a LinkedIn message, you better make sure that it's relevant, that it's asked for, and that it's expected. In my opinion, because people are abusing that. And it used to work maybe a year ago where you would get a message, you'd be like, oh, this is informational. Now everybody seems to do it and the market's getting saturated. So I'm going to get off my soapbox. You kind of know how I feel, but selling in LinkedIn messaging is a no-no. And stay away from, um, stay away from automation. That's just bad. Yeah, it takes extra work. Roll up your sleeves. Anything that's worth doing is worth doing well. And you know there's manual stuff. Automation serves its place in other areas, but not in building relationships. The third item the article mentions is tagging unrelated people in your posts for exposure. And this was a trend in Twitter, and I've seen it used in Facebook. And every once in a while, I fall victim to it because people. Might know that I've got a lot of connections or a lot of followers, and so if you read an article— now granted, if somebody finds an article on digital marketing that's related to community banking, oftentimes I'll have friends of mine or colleagues that will find something on like The Financial Brand, which is a website that deals pretty much exclusively with banks and credit unions in the digital world. If they find an article that they think I would be interested in, they'll tag me or they'll say, hey, I wonder what you think, @EricCook, and they'll pull me in and genuinely are interested in getting my opinion on what an article shares. But if you're doing it just purely for the attempt to gain exposure and there's no reason why I'm being tagged in an article— the other one that I'll oftentimes get tagged in is if somebody finds an article or some sort of a post that has a golden retriever featured in it, I'll get tagged in that. And just for the record, those of you that are listening, if you find any cool articles, pictures, videos that have golden retriever, you have my permission to tag me in those. I'm always up for a good golden retriever photo, so feel free to go ahead and do that. But if you're just doing it to try to pull people in to gain exposure, or you think, well, hey, if I tag Eric and Eric shares it, then I'm gonna get all this extra visibility, but I really don't care what Eric thinks, I just want to use all of his connections, you're doing that for the wrong, wrong reasons. And on the LinkedIn discussions that I've had here on Free Webinar Wednesdays, I The strategy of making sure that you always have the other person front and center. Not why am I sharing this and how does it benefit me, but how am I going to do this is going to benefit somebody else. I think I told the story about giving one of my colleagues a kudos because he shared a bunch of really good information for me in his LinkedIn training. I had no interest in doing anything that was going to benefit me. I just simply wanted to tell the world how awesome I thought Francois's training was. And he ended up generating business as a result of it. And that certainly has strengthened our relationship and our friendship because he's very appreciative. But I made that initially and always about the other person. So making sure if you're tagging people, doing it in the right way. 4th one, no surprise, talking politics. I think that should probably be kind of an understood or table stakes as it relates to LinkedIn. Most of the time, if you're going to see any political posts, those are going to go and end up over at Facebook anyway, or they're going to rant on Twitter. I don't see a lot of political posts happening on LinkedIn, but please make sure that you know when you go down that road and you start talking politics, even if you're trying to maintain a middle of the road and you're just getting ideas, if you're going to light the fuse on a powder keg that is politics and the personal feelings that people have, not just for themselves, but their businesses and society and finance and whatnot. That is not something that I would strongly recommend. And this article certainly reinforces that. And then the last item is going around the job application process to senior leadership. And this is another area that fortunately I've not had to really worry about for the last 12 years. Well, pretty much for my entire career, because prior to that I was with one organization for 15 as a banker. So very rarely have I had to go out and actually look for a job. But the, the pros and the cons of social networking today are the accessibility that you have to individuals in senior leadership positions, and you can very easily connect with the CEOs and the EVPs and some of the mucky-mucks at businesses. through social channels like Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and others. But if there is a job opening or an opportunity and you intentionally go around that and try to circumvent it, I can kind of see a pro and a con here. If there's a legitimate reason why you may know the CEO of an organization and it's a natural fit for you to reach out to that individual because you've known them from the industry, you've worked for a complementary service provider, maybe there's some sort of a prior relationship there. I think it's going to be a little bit better that you go to senior leadership, but you certainly don't want to make HR and the hiring process that any organization has in place feel like you're trying to backdoor them and go in a direction and not follow the rules. So if there is an organization that you're going after looking for a job change or a career shift, and they've got some sort of a process in place, I would say, and it's kind of mentioned lightly in the article itself, go through the process, make sure that you're following the rules. If there is a logical reason and you have a good excuse for reaching out to someone that's higher up in the food chain that might be able to provide you with some benefit, in that hiring and decision-making process, then do that. But if you don't have a foggy clue who the CEO is and you just happen to get connected with them, but they don't know who you are, if you couldn't pick up the phone or they didn't have the ability to recognize you at the grocery store, you want to be really careful because that could actually backfire on your employment strategy and kind of result in maybe the, the the result of not getting the job or getting an interview and, uh, and really, you know, blowing up in your face. So those are the 5 things that came out. Again, I just, I saw it more as an opportunity to rant about my growing displeasure of selling in LinkedIn messaging and automation and whatnot. Um, but if you are so inclined to have a little fun with those messages and respond back and try to engage them in conversation. It's almost like getting a spam call and pressing the button to take the call and then trying to keep the individual on the line as long as possible and just kind of monkey with their brain a little bit. So every once in a while when I'm feeling a little spunky, I'll do that, but not always. So, so there you go, some things on, on LinkedIn. What I want to do next is I'm going to do a little flipperoo here, and I'm going to pop over and— whoops, click the wrong button. That's what I wanted. Swap displays. And I'm going to make sure we've got just a few slides that I put together. What I wanted to do today is introduce you to the 12 chapters that exist in our new book. So there's a copy of the COVID It is our 3rd edition. Edition number 2 that's out now was released in 2015. Still has a lot of good merit, and I still deliver that presentation to this day, although the next version of my Digital Dozen presentation is really gonna focus on the next 12 chapters of what we're talking about here in the world of WSI. So this is a book that was created in collaboration with consultants. So WSI is a global digital agency network with offices in about 80 countries around the world. So there's roughly 1,000 independently owned and operated WSI offices like ours around the globe. And so what corporate has done over the last several years, last 2 books, is identified thought leaders within the WSI network. And I'm very honored and pleased to have been selected all 3 times. As an author, the first 2 chapters I wrote were focused purely on mobile marketing. This next one I wrote, chapter number 7, and you'll see what that is here in just a little bit. So in today's Free Webinar Wednesdays, I just wanted to give you an overview of what the chapters are, give you a little bit of a high level. And I've not gotten through the entire book yet, but I know all of the authors pretty well. And just to give you an idea of what's there, and then like I said at the beginning of today's show, working with our network of consultants and authors to put together schedules to try to get folks to join me here live on Free Webinar Wednesdays and give you a deeper dive into their chapter, be available to ask questions, kind of go back and forth. So I'm pretty excited, and my hope is at least throughout the end of this year and certainly starting 2020, we'll be able to get some of my WSI colleagues to join us and share some of their insights about the chapters that they've authored for our new book. So the first chapter is very similar to the first chapter in the latest edition on competitive research, but this one expands a little bit more and talks about analyzing not just your competition but looking at the market in which you operate, taking a look at your products and services and how they stand up, to the competition. Are you better? Are you worse? Do you have something that's innovative that you've introduced, a secret sauce, if you will? And of course, taking a look at your competitors to determine where they're positioned in all of this. So as the global marketplace, and even in the world of community banking, we used to be able to very clearly identify who our competitors are because it was the bank or the credit union across the road. Your products and services were very clearly defined. You had a checking account, you had a savings account, you had a mortgage loan. Now you've got a growing market where you could actually be competing against services like a Quicken Loans and a Rocket Mortgage, push button, get mortgage. That's something that didn't exist back when I was a banker. And from what I've heard, it's very difficult to achieve that level of simplicity even when you work with that service. But the, the world that has evolved into what it is today, I've talked about banking, but whatever world you're from, whatever industry you're in, you can probably think of very similar situations where your products, your services, your competition, the market in which you operate, um, has probably changed pretty significantly over the last several years. And so making sure that you have a clear understanding of that, because one of the things building off of this is, is a digital strategy. And this is really one of the, the goals of this book and the goals of the prior 2 books were to educate you on what constitutes an effective digital marketing strategy, what are the elements that are part of that process, and then how do you build that and put something together that's gonna move the needle from a business results perspective within your own organization. And starting off with really getting a hard look of what you do, how it stacks up to the competition, what other options are out there, definitely something that is a good starting point. The next chapter talks about what is referred to oftentimes as a persona or a profile, but really defining who your ideal customer is. So when you think about who you want to attract more business from, you need to understand— if you think oftentimes I'll use the analogy of going fishing, you have to first understand what kind of fish you like to eat. Based off of taste and texture and, you know, whatever other variables that you feel are important when you sit down and have a fish dinner. And then you're going to determine, you know, where do those fish typically hang out? Are they in fast-moving streams? Are they in deep water lakes? Is it freshwater? Is it saltwater? Then you have to figure out what type of lure they typically are going to hit on. So what kind of a marketing strategy do you need to have in place to make them interested? How do you convert them? So when they bite that lure or they read that marketing piece, is it going to be a quick sale where they'll come in? Do they require a lot of thought? Maybe they need testimonials to validate. So, you know, that in the fishing world would equate to, you know, how strong of a line do you need to have to pull them into the boat or to get them over to you if you're fly fishing in a river in Montana? But defining your ideal customers, developing that persona so that when you put together a marketing strategy to go out, you know who they look like in certain cases, because a lot of times in persona development, you'll actually go out and find a photograph of who the customer typically represents. Is it a middle-aged person? Is it a younger person? Is it a couple? Are they male? Are they female? Is there an ethnicity required? You know, is there a minority involved? Whatever the case might be, do they have children or do they not? So figuring out who your ideal customer is and then when you're developing your message, being able to craft a message that resonates with that ideal customer so that you have the highest and best chance of bringing them into the organization and having them become part of your customer base, which means they're going to pay you money. or in the world of fishing, you know where they swim, you know what bait they like, you know what type of strategy you need as it relates to using your lure and your line. 'Cause at the end of the day, you wanna get 'em in the boat so you can take 'em home, fillet 'em up, and stick 'em in the frying pan or put 'em on the grill and enjoy a good dinner. So defining your ideal customers with persona development, certainly an important thing so that your messages are relevant. Planning an overall digital strategy, kind of putting together all the different components. This is a newer chapter that was introduced to the book, and it really talks about the, the whole kind of the bigger picture components. So a lot of what is part of the book gets referenced back into that, but this is really going to be more along the lines of just getting things organized so that you have a clear definition. Do I need to use video? Do I need to use content? Do I need to put together imagery? Do I need to Have a blogging strategy? Do you know, how do we stack up from an SEO perspective? And is that something we need to move the needle on? And so the development of a digital strategy is one that will help you essentially create that blueprint. And then you can use a lot of what is in the book to help fill in the gaps and determine what needs to be there. Generating demand for your products and services. This is really figuring out how to get people interested in what it is that you do. A lot of times, That practice is referred to as SEM or search engine marketing, SEO, organic visibility, or paid search where you're going out and you're buying ads or placing advertisements on destination sites or leveraging remarketing, figuring out ways that you can get people interested in your products and services to bring them back to you. The inbound marketing best practices Is another new chapter for this book. There was some discussion as it relates to inbound during the marketing automation chapter in our prior book, but this is really more along the lines of getting traffic to come to you because of the content that you're producing, the reputation that you're creating, kind of the positioning that you have in the marketplace. Advertising historically has been seen much more as an outbound marketing strategy where you're doing ads and you're pushing them out in front of people to try to grab their attention. Inbound is much more of a strategy where you're producing content that people are interested in. The article that I shared with you about the 5 things that you should be doing, uh, or you should not be doing on LinkedIn is an example of a content strategy generating an inbound lead, uh, or an inbound interest. If I visited that website and there were other articles about LinkedIn and different sorts of things that I felt were valuable, then what I may decide to do is subscribe to their newsletter. And maybe the owner of that website also happens to own a digital agency that sells services that I may be interested in purchasing or partnering. But what got me to their website wasn't an advertisement or any sort of a paid promotion. It was content that grabbed my attention and pulled me into them because of the information that they were sharing. The next chapter is all about conversion, and I had the opportunity to partner with a colleague of mine in Atlanta and work on a project with a very large insurance and financial service provider. And we partnered with one of our network companies, a company that specializes in conversion optimization. And the owner of that company refers to his art, I'll call it, it's a mixture of an art and a science, but he refers to his practice as being the gift that keeps on giving. So oftentimes we talk to businesses and they want to generate more leads. I need to get more visibility on search. I need to generate more traffic to my website. But the thing that oftentimes gets overlooked, and this is why I'm really excited that this chapter is part of the edition, is if you're driving traffic to your But you're not looking at when they get to the website, how you actually convert them into a lead, which then gives you the opportunity to then eventually, hopefully turn them into a customer and you can make some money off of them. If you're not looking at that process, it's like filling a leaky bucket with water. You can go out and grab as much water, but if your bucket has leaks in it, it's going to be really difficult for you to hold on. And if you're using that bucket to put out a fire, you're, you're only going to be able to do so much until you realize that the more the water that you put in is just going to leak right out. You need to fill those holes, and that's what a conversion strategy does. A platform that optimizes your visitors and looks at different conversion strategies, things like page structure, the presence or absence of a navigation menu, the presence or absence of secondary content, the utilization of testimonials? How long should a contact form be? What color does the button need to be? What is the wording on the button? Should it be learn now, learn more, get started, get in touch? Different ways to test. So we get into things like A/B testing and site design and layout, because if you can take a landing page or a website and make it convert better, then while the traffic that's coming in will just do a better job of turning into leads or subscribing to your newsletter or asking for a consultation, but then once you get your conversion process in place, then you go out and you then focus more on the traffic generation, which is part of number 4 and 5. And now you're driving traffic back to a website that instead of a 2 or 3% conversion rate, you're at a 5 or 6% conversion rate. And that's why the thought around the gift that keeps on giving— you optimize your website for conversion, you don't have to come back and do that on a regular basis. You might want to review it every 6 or 12 months, but once you figure out how to improve your conversion rate— and so this project that I did in partnership with my colleague down in Atlanta and this company that does conversion rate optimization we were able to work with them and their team on developing some pretty substantial lifts in their conversion rates. Now, they were managing the advertising campaigns and they were driving leads, but our job was to make the leads that they're driving back to the website actually turn into real leads by getting their names and their email addresses and their phone numbers, because that's when the phone calls and the contacts could take place, and that's when they had an opportunity for their sales reps to generate sales. And so that was a really exciting project to be a part of, and we were able to produce some pretty impressive results. And this chapter kind of goes through a lot of that whole process of developing a structure or an engine that keeps on giving, if you will. The last half of the book starts with my chapter, number 7, shortening the sales cycle with what's referred to as conversational marketing, or a lot of you may have heard of the term chatbots or messaging. Although I did read an article recently that says that our love affair with chatbots maybe is already starting to wane, and so I'm hoping that the information that I shared in the book doesn't become irrelevant very quickly, because oftentimes, like with any marketing technology, it can be overused and abused, very similar to messaging and messaging sales on LinkedIn. Now when I get a message, I kind of cringe where I used to be like, oh sweet, somebody sent me a message. And now it's just most of the time somebody trying to sell me something, which drives me nuts. But you can't go to one of the big sites on the internet now, a large organization that's selling things, providing information services. If it's a substantially sized organization, I'm willing to bet they have got some sort of a messaging or a chat feature. Built within their website. And so the whole concept of conversational marketing is how do you leverage that chat experience, use technology such as artificial intelligence, bots that will look for ways to pull someone through. The problem with a lot of these is they're not done with a lot of strategy behind them, and so the bots are cumbersome, the information's not relevant, There's no human that's available behind the scenes. So if you get on a site with a bot and you ask it a question and it doesn't know, you want to be able to jump out. And if it's 2 o'clock in the afternoon and a human should be available because the business is open, you need to make sure that the bot technology that you're using gives your visitors on the site the ability to connect to a human so that you can answer that question. So I think a lot of organizations became enamored with bots and messaging technology, but didn't really fully appreciate everything that really needs to go into it. And so there's some examples in there. I could talk an awful lot about this chapter since I wrote it, but there's some banking-related examples. There's an example that I bring in from Amtrak, if you can believe it or not, from a public transit perspective, an online sales experience that I personally had, through a Facebook Messenger bot right on Facebook as a result of a click on an advertisement that I was targeted in. So I think if you do it right, and my hope is that when you read that chapter, you'll have a clear understanding of what that really means, but how do you actually leverage a bot and conversational marketing to be able to help you shorten that sales cycle, to build the relationship and get somebody from being just interested to being more of a customer, of your organization. The next chapter on video— whoops, let me go back, my mouse did a little quick flip here. The next chapter is about video, and in the previous edition, that was my 13th chapter. For whatever reason, I don't know why, it was like right at the cusp when we started writing the book and we released it. There was not a chapter on video in the current version, so oftentimes When I do my Digital Dozen, I'll call it the Banker's Dozen, kind of a playoff of the Baker's Dozen where you buy 12 and you get the 13th one for free. So I'll typically toss in an extra chapter on video just because I think it's so important. Now we've got it formally included in the book, and I'm really excited about that because video is becoming such an important component, not just recorded video, not professional video, Not just, you know, animated versus, you know, recorded and human involved, but you've got live streaming video, all the platforms, even LinkedIn. It now has live streaming video that's been in beta with LinkedIn influencers for several months. It's just a matter of time before LinkedIn releases live streaming video to the general public. And people that watch video, people that use video, Know that it works, and it's a great way to gain credibility. It's a great way to share your information. One of the tools that we're actually starting to use is with another one of our partners. They've got a little plugin that you can use in your Chrome browser that allows for you to flip on your webcam and it shows your screen. And what we're starting to do is when we deliver a proposal to someone or we have a performance report that we want to share with one of our clients about the activity that's gone on. While we're still doing a write-up, if you will, of what we, you know, what we produced or what the agreement is or what the proposal is, a quick little video that maybe lasts, you know, a minute or 2 at the most to say, you know, hey, it's Eric over here at WSI. Attached is the agreement that we've talked about. I just want to point out a few things, or you had a couple of questions in your redline. I want to make sure to clarify this. Here's the information. If you've got any questions, let me know. We're working on a pretty complicated multi-site proposal for an organization that manages multiple sites related to web accessibility and web content and ADA. And so some of the nuances of this are a little bit of a challenge, and the individual that we're talking to is very intelligent and super smart, but she's definitely admittedly so, not a technical person. So I need to be very careful when I'm sharing and explaining things because talking about web content accessibility and ADA and individuals with disabilities and HTML, it can get complicated and technical very quickly. A video along with the agreement and supporting documentation was a huge help, and she even admitted that in the email back to me that, hey, the video was a great help, totally makes sense now, thank you so much. I've got the information over to my supervisor, my boss, whatever, and, you know, we'll be back in touch. So with any luck, we'll have some good news to share in a couple of weeks that— well, I don't know if I'll necessarily share it here, but I'll share it with the team— that they've said yes and we can bring that project on. But there's so many different ways that you can leverage video in your process beyond just taking a video and pushing it out to YouTube. So this chapter really dives into a lot of that. The 9th chapter is thinking about search engine optimization and social networking and social media and social content in your overall search strategy. This is a little bit of a complement to the gaining visibility and generating demand, but search optimization, being able to rank organically is kind of gone beyond just 10 positions on Google. You've got things like rich snippets and instant answers. You've got things like the 3-pack, which is related to Google My Business and the ability to show if you're a local service provider where your office actually is physically located. That's also pulling in things like reviews and recommendations. And then of course, social has got an even bigger influence in SEO today because that's where people are having conversations and talking about you. And you can, you know, produce content on your website. It's still very important, but social networking platforms are the distribution or the broadcast channel so that more people are going to see that information that end up coming back to your website and reading the full information and maybe exploring other stuff that you also have to offer. Those are all ways from an SEO and social perspective to amp up your search strategy to be seen across all the places where your customers are hanging out. Again, going back to one of the chapters earlier, thinking about defining your ideal customer, thinking about, well, what social networking platforms do they hang out in? If you are in the arts industry, you want to make sure that you own everything related to you and you do a really good job on sites like Instagram and Pinterest, because that's where your ideal customer is hanging out. If you're a B2B and you're primarily interested in selling business services and you work a lot with corporations and executives, then, you know, your social strategy is going to be significantly influenced by LinkedIn and how you come across as a professional on that network. So, search optimization and social are all very powerful combination to making sure that you're seen from a search perspective. Next is really talking about once somebody is in your database as a lead, how do you manage them? How do you get them to go from just being someone that's interested in your service to somebody that's actually paying you for their service? Or if somebody's paying you for a little bit of your service, how do you make sure that they understand all the other things that you can do for them? One of the things admittedly we probably don't do as good a job of here at our office is making sure all of our customers know all of the things that we do. Sometimes, and this is maybe more of the community banker coming out in me, it was not really a sales-driven type of an environment where I spent most of my career, 15 years. Sales oftentimes was perceived as something negative where The thought was, you know, well, if they were interested, they would ask me for it. I don't want to impose. I don't want to be told no. I don't want them to think that I'm trying to sell them something that they don't want. But the inverse of that and the way that data has changed the way that we sell and provide services is you no longer feel like you have to just come out of the blue and ask people random questions and feel like, you know, there's no real reason why you're asking them those questions. Taking your database, giving people the ability to segment themselves, you what they're interested in, looking for buying clues, engagement through platforms like marketing automation and analytics can make those conversations a whole lot easier because now instead of just coming out of the blue and saying, hey, how about digital advertising? You know if somebody has been looking at blogs and reading information or downloading white paper info about advertising, and then when you bring that up as a conversational item, because somebody's in your database and they've told you they're interested in something digital ad related. It's a whole lot more of a comfortable conversation for you, and it's a whole lot more relevant to the person on the other end as well, because now you're using that information that you've now got access to and can use to help frame that chat and to make it relevant. Um, kind of dovetails into customer loyalty and making sure that the folks that are with you stay with you long-term, but not just them, but do you have the ability or are you leveraging that loyalty to help you even grow because they may know of others from a referral perspective to help increase your book of business. And if you can grow your customer base at the recommendations and referrals of your existing happy customers, it's going to be a lot less expensive for you first and foremost because that's less you're going to have to spend on promotion and advertising. It's going to be likely more successful because your customers are actually bragging about what you do, and they will seek out others that will likely value what you do like they do. It's almost like oftentimes businesses will want to hire someone, and instead of just putting an employment notice in the newspaper, they'll release it to their staff first and say, hey, We're looking for a customer service rep, or we're looking for a bank teller, or we're looking for whatever position. And if you happen to know somebody, a lot of organizations first will allow, you know, the referral to come in and they'll pay— I don't want to say a bounty because that doesn't make it sound real great, but they'll pay some sort of a referral fee or recognition. So if I recommend someone to come into the organization and they last past 90 days or 120 days, You know, I might get a couple hundred bucks as a thank you for introducing a great employee to the organization. I'm only going to bring people into the organization that I feel would mesh well with the culture, which I understand as an employee, that are going to do good because I don't want to bring someone in that's going to do bad and then make me look bad. And I'm going to want somebody that's going to come in that's going to stick around, that's not going to be just job hopping. And so from a customer loyalty perspective, You're going to get some of those similar characteristics, but also how do you build customer loyalty to understand, well, what is it that customers value? Why would somebody stay with us? What are the things that we're doing on an ongoing basis to provide a tangible value to our clients? And this is another area that we've done a lot of talking internally within our office about. We think we provide a tremendous amount of value to our clients, obviously, otherwise why are we in business? But we also know that that may not be clearly understood by our customers either because we don't tell them all the things that we're doing, all the effort that we're undertaking to keep their website safe, to make sure that everything loads fast, to keep on top of research, to bring them ideas. And so looking at ways that we can actually do a better job of measuring customer loyalty and then ensuring that our customers understand clearly what the value is that we bring to the table by working with us. And by doing that, that's gonna ensure, or at least help to ensure, a long-term relationship with your clients, generate referrals, and everybody's a lot happier. It takes work, and there may be some questions that we ask that we might not necessarily like the answers to. And, you know, it's not like we want them to hurt our feelings, but, you know, we want honest feedback, and there may be some things that we might be able to do better. And until you ask those questions, you're gonna really know what those things are. And then finally, in the last book ended very similar in nature on analytics, but really tracking the insights that matter. And 2 words there, insights and matter. First, the insights area, figuring out what it is and where the information exists so that you can go in and find, you know, social performance, organic search performance, competitive information, Product-related and sales information. There's a ton of different insights out there and metrics that you can track, but it's figuring out which are the ones that matter most, are the ones that are really going. So, you know, if a client doesn't really care about their bounce rate because they know that a vast majority of people show up to the website and click the button to go into online banking, and it's a really high number. Then that's not one that we track a lot. But maybe they are very interested in how many times a contact form gets filled out, or maybe they're very interested in how many pages per visit, or how many times somebody actually goes to the blog and reads information or subscribes to a newsletter. Those are the things that really, um, we need to make sure are being tracked because those are the things that matter to our clients. If you're going to read the book and you're going to implement some of these things at your business, and you want to make sure you spend some time with senior management. If you're not senior management, or if you are, spend some time with the different divisions and areas to make sure that everybody understands what your expectation is on the variables that matter. But then figure out, okay, what are the things that we really want to track? And then you go back and you find the insights. That tell you what is and isn't happening for those metrics that you feel matter most to your organization. So, so, you know, again, that's oftentimes referred to as kind of analytics, but, you know, you can jump into Google Analytics and spend a day picking around and looking at all the different insights that are there. But if you don't first go in with a plan of attack to figure out and say which which metrics matter the most, what are the business results that I want to pay attention to? If you don't define those things first, then you're gonna spend a lot of time tracking data and looking at statistics that won't mean a hill of beans to you, and it'll be a lot of waste of your time. So those are the 12 chapters. Again, I'm really excited. Each one of those is written by a consultant like myself from literally around the globe. And so there's a ton of really good conversations there that I'm pretty excited to tee up on. The last thing that I'm gonna share with you, this is an article that I discovered out of Chief Marketer, and so as we think about 2020 suggestions and I go, went through the book, I kind of was like, well, what other stuff are other people thinking about? And so there's some things in here that carry across with our book, there's some other things that might be a little bit different, But these are a handful of things that the article from Chief Marketer. So these are 7 items, content marketing trends to consider for the coming year. So first off, the social influencer. This is where you identify somebody within the social world that is relevant to your organization, relevant to your industry, and this is kind of the word of mouth, this is the reputation. But how can you take a social influencer and figure out how to get them talking about your service, your product, your business. Because if they go out, the influencer goes out and talks about you, sometimes it's compensated. But if you can do it organically, I'll give you a perfect example. Howard Stern, love him or hate him, but he's a media machine. He has been talking about on his show the Peloton bicycle and not compensated for it. It's not an advertisement to the best of my ability. I can't tell. There's no like You know, hey, we're sponsored by Peloton, but I really love it. He bought a Peloton bike because he wanted to get fit. He wanted to lose some weight, and he talks about that on his show on a regular basis. As you know, and I'm sure the folks at Peloton absolutely love it when he goes on his Howard Stern Show and brags about, you know, Jen Sherman, who's the trainer that he absolutely loves to follow, and she does great workouts. I'm betting that they absolutely love it when he goes out and starts talking about all sorts of different things. Streaming video— whoops, hold on, finger. I got one of those Magic Mice from Apple and sometimes it's a little sensitive. Streaming video and ad management— this goes back to video, pulling videos into advertisements, streaming video, being live. And how can you tie those things into one another? So that's certainly an area that we've talked about. Emerging technologies that are out there, and the article specifically talked about, you know, the influence of 5G, faster connectivity through mobile devices, if that's going to make a change in the type of information that we're sharing through mobile platforms. Artificial intelligence, chatted a little bit about that as it relates to bots and other sorts of conversational marketing. But as people cut the cord and and they're going to connected televisions and using other sorts of video sources, being able to tap into those networks beyond just traditional interactive content by putting stuff out there, giving people the ability to play little games and click to choose different directions for where the advertisements are going. Those are different things to pay attention to, the micro-moments. You know, life blogging comes to mind, although I don't think that's what the article really was referring back to, but just different small little things that happen within the life. A lot of times they'll say some of the more powerful things that you can do as a result of a social strategy is to bring people behind the scenes, give them kind of a backend look at your organization, at your life, what goes into the creation of something. And you don't have to spend a tremendous amount of time doing it, but it's those little micro moments that are just interspersed amongst all the other content that people seem to resonate towards and find very entertaining and beneficial. That also bleeds into stories. I've talked about the power of stories on the show before. Instagram, Recently, I don't say recently, but Instagram, I say R&D, rip off and duplicate. They did an R&D on Snapchat's technology where Snapchat had disappearing content. Oftentimes it's referred to as ethereal content where it just goes away after a certain period of time. You're seeing Facebook and Instagram and other platforms pushing that content to the top of their stream. It maintains prominence in their mobile apps, and more and more people are sharing information through stories as opposed to just general content because they're more engaging, they pull people in. And so if you're not participating or following or learning about stories, that was something that I would strongly suggest that you put on your list. Um, and then the last thing is experiences of what you do, not necessarily the information that you want to share, articles that you've written, but the experiences of doing things are becoming more content marketing than articles and other sorts of traditional content marketing. So, you know, if you're comfortable with blending your personal brand with your business brand, I feel that I'm doing that because I don't really have a WSI persona where I only talk about digital stuff. And then an Eric Cook persona where I talk about golden retrievers and bicycling and those sorts of things. But my experiences, I go for a bike ride, I take the dogs for a little trip to Starbucks, I do something in my RV. The experience is becoming the content, not the content of just writing articles and sharing knowledge, because I think it further helps to humanize either the individual, so you get to know me as a dog lover, as a cyclist, as an outdoors enthusiast, and then you get to know me and hopefully like me and trust me, and maybe there'll be an opportunity to do business together. Or the content experiences that an organization shares with its employees and its culture and its values and its belief systems, that also allows you to get to know and like and trust that organization and the people that make up that organization. And those experiences are really the content marketing that needs to go out to help people get trust in what it is that you do. So those are 7 more items. You can hop over to Chief Marketer and check it out if you're interested in kind of picking around some more information there. So that concludes the info that I've got for today's show. There was a question that came through the chat questions about availability of the book. It has not been officially released yet. Again, I don't even have my copies yet. I'm waiting for a couple of boxes to show up, so we don't have it available to deliver. I don't know, last I checked it wasn't available on Amazon quite yet, but very soon when it is for the general public, it'll be available on Amazon. As with the prior books, it'll be available on a Kindle version. The 2015 book of Digital Minds, 12 Things Every Business Needs to Know About Digital Marketing, is available on our website if you go to poweredbywsi.com/whitepapers. And I'll just pull that up for you here real quick. And then I just noticed there was one other little funny story that I wanted to share with everyone to make sure you caught it, but let me go to If I go to poweredbywsi.com/whitepapers, you can see all 12 chapters are available as a download. The cool part about this for you is this is not a cheesy lead gen strategy. We're not putting behind any sort of, uh, give me your name and email and I'll throw you into a mailing list that is going to send you information that you don't care about. This is actually just free download, grab the information, it is yours. So if you're interested in snagging any of the existing chapters from our book, you can get them at no additional cost. So great question there. The last thing, did you guys catch in the news that Facebook released their new logo? And so Jack Dorsey, the CEO over at Twitter, has actually gotten a couple of digs on Facebook recently. I did post, and this was maybe in the eyes of what I said not to do, and that probably explains why I didn't get very many comments on it, but Twitter announced last week that they were no longer going to accept political advertisements as part of their Twitter platform. And Facebook has come out and said that they will take advertisements related to political ads, and they don't even really do fact-checking to determine if they are true or not because they are just just free economy, we'll go ahead and grab it. So he shot a note across the bow on Facebook that, that they weren't going to take political advertisements. And now Facebook's come out with their new logo. And so in the bottom of all of their platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram and Messenger, it's going to say Instagram from Facebook in all capital letters just to make sure that it's clear and conspicuous So Jack went out and put Twitter from Twitter in all capital letters. So I thought that was kind of funny and somewhat a little bit of a poke. So they go back and forth. I'm sure Zuckerberg's laughing all the way to the bank still, because from a revenue perspective, I think they're still crushing Facebook. But I don't know whether this is that big of a deal, but certainly everybody, including yours truly, happened to be talking about it. So I figured I would just share that and you know, draw attention to the fact that even billionaires like to poke fun at each other. So there you go. That concludes today's Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thanks everybody for joining me. Hopefully you got some good info and some cool ideas. I will tell you, next week's show will be canceled. I'm actually going to be in Dallas with the Independent Community Bankers Association, uh, participating in their marketing conference. So Wednesday I'm gonna be sitting in a session from Becky Drohota from Mills Marketing and taking in all sorts of awesome stuff that she's gonna share. And then Thursday I spend the day talking to bankers from around the country on— guess what— digital marketing. But digital marketing, social media, and all sorts of other cool stuff that, that we're gonna share. So no show next week, and then we'll be getting close to Thanksgiving, but I think we're going to be able to sneak at least one more in before Turkey Day shows up. We usually take the week of Thanksgiving off as well. So, but with that, have an awesome couple of weeks. We'll see you online. Keep an eye out on Free Webinar Wednesdays for both of the recaps and reach out, connect, let me know what you think. And if you got an idea for a future show or some other questions, Would love to hear from you. So until then, have a great week, everybody. Thanks for joining me. Take care. Bye-bye.