Episode 82 LinkedIn Events, Live and Audio Rooms

Intro

I've had the privilege of being in and around banking for more than 50 years. Lots of changes during that time. We've gone from ledgers to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same banking. So people business and I'll be talking with those people that make banking grade here and Jack Rants with Modern Bankers.

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0:00:29 - Jack Hubbard: It is Thursday. Hello, Brynne.

0:00:31 - Brynne Tillman: Hello, Jack. Excited to be here.

0:00:35 - Jack Hubbard: Well, we've got a great topic today, but before we, before we do it, just a couple of things and this is an unpaid testimonial. Yesterday I was out playing our opening day of golf with a bunch of buddies that I've been playing golf with for now 60 years. That's our 60th year. Wow. And we just had a blast. And two of the four of us in the group had PXG irons. And I got to tell you, if you're going to, if you're a golfer and you want to go out and get some amazing golf clubs, PXG is fabulous. I'll say more about that as we, as we go forward down the line here. But the next thing I want to talk about is our public library.

0:01:18 - Jack Hubbard: I'm really excited. We've reached almost 1000 people in our library. It's free and we've added about 30 ebooks, all the replays of our programs. And Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. Are there some webinar replays and a lot of really good stuff, white papers, etcetera from both vertical IQ and RelPro. It's all there in the public library. It's all free. The last thing I want to talk about is next week in Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. This is a great program. Richard Bliss is my guest. Next week. Richard Bliss has the, it's called Bliss Point. That's his company and Digital First Leadership is his book. And we talked about in our interview, just a wide-ranging discussion, including the algorithm because he's associated in the algorithm study with Richard van DER Blom. So great. Next week, noon Eastern time.

0:02:20 - Jack Hubbard: Wonderful stuff today is, it's really a favorite of mine, Brynne, because a, I was brought up in the radio business, so audio is cool. And then I love these live shows. So we want to talk about live events and audio rooms. Let's start with some discussion around the definition. Talk about LinkedIn Live, which we're doing now, what it is, and how you set this up. Because it's a little different than audio.

0:02:53 - Brynne Tillman: It is so LinkedIn live, believe it or not, you could actually do recordings on LinkedIn Live. For example, your interviews that run on LinkedIn live are actually recorded, but they are being live-streamed. So that means that at any point someone can join in on that event, or actually it runs on your banner on LinkedIn. And so people can come in. Now, we are live right now, so you can ask us questions and we will look at them in the chat section.

0:03:31 - Brynne Tillman: But either way, when you run either a live or recorded that is live streaming, you do need a third party with LinkedIn, whereas you don't with YouTube or Facebook. So you can go live directly, natively inside of those platforms. But LinkedIn has to be integrated with a third party. We use restream. There's a streamyard. Even I believe Vimeo can do this, and it is a premium. You can't really do much of it for free, although I'm sure there are a couple of trials out there.

0:04:10 - Brynne Tillman: Generally, it's worth the investment if you are going to go live. Here's what we know. People connect with people when we're live. It's as natural of a conversation as you're ever going to get on when it comes to content on LinkedIn. So the value of a live is significant. There are a couple of things that audio does better than live doesn't. So I'll talk about the gaps and then how audio fills that in easily.

0:04:46 - Brynne Tillman: It's not easy to bring a guest on to a live unless you are prepared. They need a special link to come in, and if someone has a question, they can ask in chat. But it's not easy to get them on audio or to hear them, in this case, visual. However, when we talk over to audio, we'll talk about how easy it is to bring people on to talk and swap them out. So it's a bigger, better audience conversation on audio, and there are other value-driven opportunities in audio.

0:05:25 - Brynne Tillman: But for LinkedIn Live, I think it's one of the best ways to connect personally with your network.

0:05:34 - Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and people often say, well, how many people are on your LinkedIn lives? And, you know, it's that, that is really unimportant to me for two things. Number one, when we're done here live today, it'll replay again and we can keep replaying this over and over again. The second thing is you reach a target audience, and if you're providing a lot of value, that's what's really important. So I really like the live shows.

0:06:06 - Jack Hubbard: They're really fun and doing it with you, I think with another person. And you and I have both done these alone because you weren't available or I wasn't available, and it just isn't as good. Cause you get to bounce ideas back and forth off people.

0:06:25 - Brynne Tillman: Yeah. And plus, this is like my time, where I learn from you, from the week, and you might learn something from me, but, you know, the conversation I always leave here having personally been better for it because of some collaboration and conversation or something that you spurred in my head. So that's always fun. So it's also, you know, and we hope we're doing the same for our audience. I just made that all about me, didn't I? I didn't mean to do that.

0:06:55 - Brynne Tillman: But, you know, if I'm learning something, hopefully, our audience is learning something. So it's very inspirational and it really is one of my favorite times of the entire week. So we appreciate that we get an audience to kind of dip in and get to hear what we're chatting about. It's almost behind the scenes, but it's transparent to the world.

0:07:18 - Jack Hubbard: No, that's true. And before we leave today, we'll circle back to this. I want to talk about marketing's role and how important it could be to get a banker. If you were to do something like this on the program and you interview the banker, etcetera, I think it'd be a great value to the community. Let's jump over to audio.

0:07:37 - Brynne Tillman: Yeah. And then I want to talk about inviting you to everything as well. So the marketing of both. So audio rooms, so clubhouse, if anyone is familiar with that, launched during the pandemic, it did exceptionally well because everybody was, you know, stuck in their houses and they were in their t-shirts and sweatpants. So audio rooms, you know, they didn't have to take a shower, you know, get ready. And so audio rooms took off like crazy.

0:08:06 - Brynne Tillman: The audio rooms are incredible for larger conversations. So it's done. You could do it on a desktop or you could do it on your mobile, but you have a stage, essentially. So you might have your host or your co-hosts up there. You have a topic. People can raise their hand and be brought up on stage, share their experiences, and they can either stay there or go back into the audience and other people can come up.

0:08:34 - Brynne Tillman: So it is a much more collaborative event than maybe a LinkedIn live. There are some real downfalls to it. One is there's no visual. It's while we do encourage conversation on the original post, there's no real chat feature inside that where people can chat to us. So we're like, oh, added to the public comments on, you know, whatever that looks like so, and that's fine. It works. But it is, it does attract different people.

0:09:13 - Brynne Tillman: So there are folks that may be, you know, I'm going to hop in. I'm going to watch live for five or ten minutes. It feels less of a commitment than if I actually go into an audio room and there's a high level of conversation and request for engagement.

0:09:32 - Jack Hubbard: Yeah. And I'm curious, for those of you that are on live, if you've experienced either an event live or a sponsored one or go to an audio situation. Eric Cook, our friend Eric Cook does something called happy hour, and he's on, I think it's the third Thursday of every month at 05:00 Eastern time and he'll get a very good audience. And I'll tell you, the other thing that I really like about audio is that you can go to everybody who's in the room and you can click on their profile.

0:10:08 - Jack Hubbard: And so I've done that and I've seen, we have a lot in common here. Let's connect. And I've done that. So I really like audio a lot, too.

0:10:18 - Brynne Tillman: Yeah. And they both serve very different purposes for sure. But, yeah, that's, that's a great point, and anyone in the room can see everyone in the room. So that's, yeah, that's, that is fantastic. For sure.

0:10:32 - Jack Hubbard: Now I just jump in because I'll forget. I think one downside of audio is they aren't recorded. And, but there are ways around that, I suppose. I hate to do that because it's maybe not legal, but I know people who have done that, recorded it on their phone, etcetera. But that, I do think that's a downside because there have been some times in Eric's program I thought, wow, that's a really good point. I'd like to hear it again.

0:11:03 - Jack Hubbard: And then you just lose it unless you're making lots of notes.

0:11:08 - Brynne Tillman: Yeah. So I'm going to say that I don't know the user agreement around this, so I will check. But if you are going to record, you need to be transparent. People need to know. And sometimes people will put the red dot in the title of the event so it shows like, and it'll say we will be recording. It's very important that you're transparent if you do record. And I think one of the best ways to record if you're going to do that is actually open up a Zoom that records your desktop while you're on and so you can record the Zoom of the event.

0:11:46 - Brynne Tillman: But again, to your point, Jack, I think just we have to make sure that it's totally compliant. And whether it is or not, you still, well, if it is compliant, you still want to make sure it's fully transparent, that no one expects privacy in that room.

0:12:04 - Jack Hubbard: Absolutely. I get questions from people and say, gee, how do I find these programs? Now you have one called making sales social, and you do it twice a week, too. And one of the things I like is you really focus a lot on the sales navigator, which is excellent. And then you have guests as well. And then you and I are both on, on Saturday morning at 08:00 the sales logic program for with Meredith Elliott Powell and Mark Hunter.

0:12:35 - Jack Hubbard: So, and by the way, I'm doing you a disservice. Talk about your program making sales social.

0:12:41 - Brynne Tillman: Well, I mean, it's very similar to this where we have topics and that we discuss them. And so, you know, we do that live. There are three of us, so sometimes all three, sometimes two of us. And that's every Monday at 12:30 Eastern. And then Jack Rants with Brynne is every Thursday at noon Eastern. And really it's about us sharing our insights with all of you out there, hoping that what we bring to you brings actual value to you personally and professionally, professionally and personally. Right.

0:13:16 - Brynne Tillman: We want to make sure that we're bringing value and that's really our goal on all of these. So that should be your goal, too, right? The value you're bringing could either be around banking. The value you're bringing could be around local community events. It could be around promoting a local business. I mean, there's a lot of different topics and categories that are about bringing. It's really about bringing value. It doesn't always have to be around interest rates. Right.

0:13:48 - Jack Hubbard: That's true. And Stan Robinson junior and Bob Woods, let's give him full credit, really bring a couple of other things, nuances to the table because Stan's so good with sales navigator and Bob's really steeped, as you are, in AI. So that's a really good program. So here we are talking about all these shows. And if I'm out there listening, I go, gee, this sounds really good. But Brynne, how do I find these shows?

0:14:15 - Brynne Tillman: So the easiest and first step is when you are on your homepage with your news feed on LinkedIn, if you scroll down on the left-hand side, you're going to see events. It's a hyperlink. When you click through to that event, it's going to give you lists of events, ones that you have either said you were going to attend or you'll go down and it'll say top audio events and it'll say recommended for you.

0:14:43 - Brynne Tillman: So that's a good place to start. But if there's a particular topic that you're looking for, you can certainly go up into the search bar. And for example, you could put banking, if you were looking for banking events. So you put that in, and this is global. So you're going to get banks in Europe and Africa and everywhere. You're just going to get them all. So if you want to drill down, let's say you only do banking in the US.

0:15:10 - Brynne Tillman: And by the way, if you're an international banker, that's a great opportunity. But if you're only banking in the US, you could do banking and use boolean search logic. So banking and then, and is the modifier a n, D, all caps. And then you could do us and it'll drill it down to the banking events in the US anyway. So you can play with that, but it will start to show you more relevant events based on your search terms, not just what LinkedIn thinks.

0:15:46 - Brynne Tillman: However, once you've attended a few events, LinkedIn gets smarter and smarter and starts recommending events that match more of your habits of what you like to attend. The next thing that you can do, if you go into, into search and you're looking at events, you can take a look. Oh, you know, I'm looking really quickly, and I apologize. I thought, let me, I'm going to try something really quickly. I believe if you add.

0:16:22 - Brynne Tillman: I'm adding Jack Hubbard. I'm doing this in real-time. How about that for live? It didn't do it. So I'm hoping that this comes soon. At one point, we could search for a name, and then any of their upcoming events with them would show up. So it's not now. I hope it comes back. That's. I just wanted to check, but I could definitely do bank and Jack Rants comes up. So that's great.

0:16:50 - Jack Hubbard: That is good. And when I did it, banking, I put in us, and I had 450 events. Now, there were, when we did this before we started, there were 570,000 events, both audio and live. Now we want to focus on banking, but you in the audience might want to focus on a particular industry. So I typed in dentist and us, and there were 20 results. For example, one is online empowering dentists with neuroscience.

0:17:30 - Jack Hubbard: This was done on April 29, 130 attendees.

0:17:35 - Brynne Tillman: Wow.

0:17:36 - Jack Hubbard: If you focus on dentists, I think you can do two things. Number one, if you signed up for the event, you could also link that and then invite some other dentists. So there's some value there. And then you attend the event, and you might say, hey, I attended this event. It was terrific. Here's the link to the program. And even if you didn't want to do that, you could get some additional knowledge about what's going on in dentists.

0:18:05 - Jack Hubbard: With neuroscience, all these things are done and they're free, Brynne. So, great. So we've talked about what they are. We talked about how we find them. Now, why? One of the things that you talk about is this idea around amplifying engagement. Your own and your audience talk about that.

0:18:29 - Brynne Tillman: Well, let's take a look for a second at these events. Like they're a keynote at a conference or a trade show, and the hosts of the event are the speakers and all of that, 130 people that are attending. You are one of the people attending this conference or trade show. Now, when it's a lot of a future event, once it's over, you lose the opportunity to do this. But when it's a future event and you say, I'm going to attend, you can see the folks that are going to attend.

0:19:07 - Brynne Tillman: If they're already a first-degree connection, you can message them. If they're not, you can connect with them around both attending this event. Make sure you've got some context around that. But these are people that you have in common. Well, so you want to engage with the attendees. This is the attendee list. So if you were at a conference and you got an attendee list, would you reach out to them or at least go through them and see how many of these folks would I like to set up a conversation with at this event?

0:19:38 - Brynne Tillman: Right. So if we would do that in a real event, let's consider doing this virtually. We look at them, we reach out. I see we're both attending the Neuroscience for Dentists event. If you're open, I'd love to connect and learn about what other events you're attending and share some of mine. What other speakers are you following? I'm happy to share some of mine. It's not about selling banking services.

0:20:07 - Brynne Tillman: It's about networking and bringing more value. And if they're attending one event, they may be attending many. You can also not to go down a rabbit hole, look at their activity, feed on their profile, and see if there are some current events that they're going to. So there may be others, but you want to look at all of the attendees as a networking opportunity, not just, I want to have a conversation with the keynote, although the keynote is always a great thing. And you can always invite them for an interview afterward because, you know, they like that because they're doing that.

0:20:46 - Brynne Tillman: So. So keep that in mind. The one thing we didn't talk about that I just want to throw in quickly is when you create your own event, you can. No, I'm going to take that back for a second. In any event, you can invite up to 1000 people a week from your first-degree connections. I started to say when it's your own event because that's the ones I do. Right. If I have an event, if we're doing an event and it's listed, I will invite my connections and I can actually search them by banking as an industry, there are a few things. So I can.

0:21:21 - Brynne Tillman: And there might be some folks on right now that got the invitation from me. Right. And that might be why you're here. Ultimately, we have the opportunity with click of a button really quickly to invite up to 1001st-degree connections a week. There's a lot of power in that. So. And that's for all LinkedIn events.

0:21:45 - Jack Hubbard: Yeah. And it does take time. But if you're doing a specific event, what you can do to your point is to look at location, you can look at the type of industry. You can even look at schools, you can look at the type of business. So let's say you really wanted to invite a particular business in your community to this event. You can go up and you can type in the name of the business and it will show you all the first-degree connections that you have and you can invite them.

0:22:15 - Jack Hubbard: Now, that's a nuance, but you have to be connected at the first degree to be able to invite these people. Am I still correct on that, Brynne?

0:22:26 - Brynne Tillman: So, yes, you only have the ability to invite your first-degree connections that way. Yes.

0:22:32 - Jack Hubbard: So there's another reason. People often ask, why do you want to connect with all these people? And there's another reason, there are so many reasons to be able to do that. Now, you talked about networking, and I want you to comment on this. We network on Meredith and Mark's show and we network by commenting. And. But, Brynne, one of the things you taught me very early on is don't poach the event. Talk about what that means.

0:23:10 - Brynne Tillman: So, I mean, you don't want to take advantage, and that's probably good. Take advantage of someone else's hard work, number one. And you also have to make sure we do not compete with Meredith and Mark. We are complimentary. We can refer them to business as they could refer us. There's no overlap. You definitely don't want to go on to a competitor and go out there and go, hey, look at me over here. You don't want to do that.

0:23:39 - Brynne Tillman: It's just not appropriate or business-like. And you really want to show up as the best human being you can be. And your integrity and credibility mean more than a sale every day of the week. So don't do anything you wouldn't want someone to do to you. That's probably the best way to look at it. If someone did this to you and it would make you uncomfortable, then the answer is don't do it. So you can engage with someone, but don't, you know, out and out poach them and say, hey, you were at this LinkedIn event and they're talking about this, but we do it better. Come over here.

0:24:21 - Brynne Tillman: Right. If you want to engage with them and they will organically find you, that's fine, that's fair game. But just make sure you have your integrity hat on the whole time.

0:24:32 - Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and I agree with that. And I, you know, LinkedIn does some really good events and they do get a lot of people. There may be a thousand people on. Now, LinkedIn's reach is certainly huge. And one of the things that really dismayed me was as I'm looking at the comments, somebody will say, here's a link to my website or Here's a link to my newsletter. Look, that's fine to do it later, but not during someone else's event.

0:25:04 - Jack Hubbard: It's just wrong to me.

0:25:06 - Brynne Tillman: Right.

0:25:08 - Jack Hubbard: I want to end by talking about, and certainly if there are other things you want to talk about too, is getting your CEO or a bank executive to go on these shows and to model the way for others at the bank, model the community aspect of the bank. Now I got to tell you, these aren't easy. We rehearse, we pick the topic. We have to post the event. There's some stuff to do. But that's where marketing can come in as a partner.

0:25:47 - Jack Hubbard: So talk about this executive banker modeling the way and then talk about how marketing can be a partner in this.

0:25:56 - Brynne Tillman: Yeah. So a program like this where prospect by interviewing is one of the things that we do, where we're interviewing prospects. But even through leadership by interview, interviewing your chief lending officer, your C-level suite, even your top board members that are producing would be, or that are referring could be a great way. And it does a few things. It builds loyalty. You expand your network to their folks, they have an amplified voice.

0:26:27 - Brynne Tillman: But we're also getting a message out into the community that we're a team, right? This is bigger than just the brand of the bank. It's about the people of the bank. And so I love the idea of interviewing your c level executives and your board members. And I think the way that marketing and sales can work, is we do this all the time. We help marketing and sales bring this kind of solution together.

0:26:59 - Brynne Tillman: And it's really about, it's a checklist. Here are the things that the salespeople need to do. Here are the things that the marketing people need to do. And here's what we need to do together. So for example, the salesperson goes to the CEO, or the marketing person could do this and say, hey, this banker may have exceeded quota this month. And one of the benefits is they get to interview the CEO. Big win, right? And I might pick someone from like that.

0:27:28 - Brynne Tillman: And so now you get together with the banker and the CEO, or even separately and say, you know, what are some of the hot topics that our prospects and clients care about, not what we want to talk about. What are the topics that are going to attract? And your banker, your selling banker that's out in the road will probably know this better than anyone else because they are having conversations with the clients and the prospects every single day.

0:27:59 - Brynne Tillman: So coming up with a list of here's what I'm hearing in the field, here are the questions. Bringing that to the CEO and then the CEO saying, I've got some great insights around this and how we can. And so that collaboration of bringing in what's happening in the field with the knowledge of your chief lending officer or your CEO can bring some incredibly powerful content. So now the marketing can help to really hone in on those questions.

0:28:29 - Brynne Tillman: They can have that recording, whether it's on teams or Zoom or whatever you're using. And then marketing can come and they can edit that and they can now live stream that edited video so that it is sent out to the community. Whether it's the bank followers, if you're live streaming it from the company page, or maybe you live to stream it from the bankers page, maybe it's the company page. Day one. The next day we're going to livestream it from the banker's page and then the next day from the CEO's page.

0:29:03 - Brynne Tillman: And the exposure is phenomenal. But even more importantly, the connection to the human beings behind the brand is what will drive new business.

0:29:17 - Jack Hubbard: Boy, that was just outstanding. That was a great riff on how important it is to do this. And again, it's not the hardest thing in the world, but it's not easy. You have to put a little thought into it. And I'll give you a couple of examples. We know a bank really well, Oconee State Bank down in Georgia. Neal Stephens, the CEO, actually interviews prospects, does exactly what you suggested, and then they're out. They put them out on LinkedIn and a podcast.

0:29:51 - Jack Hubbard: You are going to be a guest coming up on a show that's going to be a webinar, but Vertical IQ is going to do that. I think that's on May 7, isn't it? Brynne?

0:30:03 - Brynne Tillman: That sounds right.

0:30:04 - Jack Hubbard: Yeah. And then RelPro is doing a great program coming up with Mark Gibson from our friends at Capital Performance group. And so you can take all of these things that we're talking about, and you can turn them into different kinds of approaches. And one thing I like is our team does such a great job. So I'll do the Jack rants with modern bankers, and I'll go back through, put my intro and outro on it, and I'll look for little two or three-minute snippets.

0:30:40 - Jack Hubbard: And then I can use that to kind of market the program. So it's unending. And then you can put the videos, and you taught me this, you can put the videos on your featured section on your profile. It's unending. Brynne. Well, this was great. Any final thoughts on live shows and audio rooms?

0:31:00 - Brynne Tillman: Yeah. So I would say before you attempt to run them, attend them. So if you're listening to this on podcast and you've never gone to a live event, every Thursday at 12:00 Eastern, you can hop into Jack's profile and it's running in his head and his banner. So if you, if you're live now, great. That's awesome. We love having you. But attend, go in and find a couple of audio rooms and attend them. And if you're going to do an audio room, make sure you have a plan.

0:31:35 - Brynne Tillman: Don't just do random acts of social by. I'll give it a shot and see what happens. Everything we do affects our reputation and what it looks like out there. If you have questions about this, join our free library. So it's themodernbanker.com public library. There is a community where you can ask questions and Jack and I can answer them. It's free. You don't have to pay. It's https://www.themodernbanker.com/publiclibrary. 

0:32:05 - Brynne Tillman: And you could say, I want to run an audio event. How do I start? Or I'm looking to be, you know, I'm alive as a guest what should I prepare for? So we are here. I mean, really, our mission is to help as many bankers succeed as possible, especially in a struggling market, right? Or an inconsistent market. And we've got some wonderful ways to make sure that you are optimizing your relationships so it doesn't affect you the way that you may think it's going to affect you. There are definite there's still a lot of business out there and we want to help you get it.

0:32:46 - Brynne Tillman: And so our community is there for free. Again, it's https://www.themodernbanker.com/publiclibrary.I can't recommend it more from content, but also from getting help. Our community is there to be support for you.

0:33:02 - Jack Hubbard: Awesome. Great show today, Brynne. Great to see you as always.

0:33:06 - Brynne Tillman: I love it, Jack. I'll see you next week.

0:33:09 - Jack Hubbard: Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.

0:33:11 - Brynne Tillman: Bye, guys. 

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Outro

Thanks for joining us for Jack Rants with Brynne, brought to you by our good friends at Vertical IQ and RelPro. We're live on LinkedIn every Thursday at noon Eastern time, helping bankers turn connections into conversations. Don't miss an episode. Visit https://www.themodernbanker.com/tmbpodcast. Leave us a review, if you would. You can also listen to this program and the new Jack Rants with Modern Bankers on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and iHeartRadio. We're on YouTube as well. Subscribe at https://www.youtube.com/@TheModernBanker. Finally, don't forget to make today and every day a great client day.