Episode 79: Richard Bliss

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 is a people business. And I'll be talking with those people that make banking great here on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers.

Welcome to Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. It's brought to you every week by our friends at RelPro and Vertical IQ. After six decades in banking, it's time to give back. And I really hope this program amplifies that. Every week, I feature top voices in financial services, Bankers, consultants, best selling authors, and more. The goal here is simple. It's to provide insights, success practices, and to bring you a few ideas that you can use to maximize your results. 

My guest today is Richard Bliss. Richard is an internationally recognized speaker and authority on, amplifying your social presence. Richard is a military science graduate from BYU and served our nation for 14 years in the Army National Guard, and we really appreciate and value his service to our nation. An early stage investor and senior executive at several startups, Richard launched BlissPoint in 2019. BlissPoint is a marketing and consulting firm that prepares leaders to create and amplify their social presence, and he does it really well. Richard has more than 112,000 followers on LinkedIn, and his best selling book, Digital First Leadership, was published in 2019. Want to learn a key secret on being more and better seen on LinkedIn? It's here in the middle of this great interview with Richard Bliss on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers.

Here we go. Well, we have a lot to talk about, and you have a lot of expertise, in an area that I have a passion for. Let's start with Blissoint, your company. Talk about what you do and who you help.

Richard Bliss: Well, we're very specific. I'm a Silicon Valley based technology company here that coaches, guides, trains, sales, teams and executives on how to take advantage of the LinkedIn platform, particularly to extend their brand, their vision, and, particularly for sales, to reach out and engage with their ideal customer profile. And so that's one of the things we do, training company, as well as coaching executives well.

Jack Hubbard: And you're out on the speaking circuit quite a lot, and you work with a lot of clients, and social presence, obviously, is really, really important. And that's what you teach. And you speak about when you're out with clients or you're speaking, what are some mistakes that you see people in organizations make around this important social media.

Richard Bliss: Well, first of all, it's that oftentimes people tend to treat the social platform as uniform, that it's just a monolithic thing. It's social, everything's the same. And while that might be true for your instagram, TikTok, Twitter, that world of social, LinkedIn is a completely different beast. LinkedIn, I like to refer to it as the upside down world of social media, if you're familiar with stranger things, because everything you do on the other social media platforms harms nearly everything harms or sabotages your efforts to be successful on LinkedIn. And this comes as a shock to people, because oftentimes they're just trained on, okay, I know how to use social media, I've been doing it, my Instagram account, my Facebook account, whatever it might be. And then we have to lay down the law here and explain that those behaviors are the antithesis of what LinkedIn is trying to accomplish with their platform. So that's probably the single biggest mistake that people approach this with. And, I'm going to stick with that one. That's a big one.

Jack Hubbard: It is a big one and I want to amplify that a little bit by talking about a video that I saw of a speech that you made, and one of the things that you talked about, and I think this is another mistake that people kind of get in their head about LinkedIn. You talked about the difference between marketing and sales on LinkedIn. Talk about those two and the distinctions there.

Richard Bliss: Yeah, I'm going to add a third, because I see it as a triangle. At the top is your executives and the leadership of your team. And, ah, one of the points of the triangle is the marketing and their efforts. And the other point is the sales and their efforts. And here's what's interesting, is, on LinkedIn, those three points oftentimes have opposing goals on the platform. So, marketing, what are they trying to do? Well, one, they're trying to build a brand. They're also trying to fill the sales funnel. That's one of their goals, demand generation. But they're also trying just to build awareness of the product, which means their activity on LinkedIn is a general broad broadcasting. Our traditional pr, our traditional brand building. Well, sales, they're not really interested in that. I mean, they benefit, but they just want to open the door of opportunity so they can close business. They have a prospect. 

How do I get in front of that prospect? How do I close that prospect? It's a very singular, specific activity that they are looking for brand building awareness. Yeah, that's helpful. But I have to get my quota by the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that prospect is going to help me do it. How do I get in front of them on LinkedIn? The other one is the executives. The executives fall somewhere in between these two, but really, their goal is thought leadership, extending the vision of the company, extending their own philosophy. And they struggle because that sounds a lot about self promotion, but it's not. It's about being a leader in today's digital first world. And that is a challenge for those three. And so you see, those three, my company, we fit right in the middle of that triangle, bringing together, because oftentimes they're using different languages, they're using different objectives, different goals, and they're, and they're frustrated sometimes with each other, legitimately, not because of on purpose, but simply because of the dynamics of what they're trying to achieve, are at odds with what the time or effort that they have to put into it. And so that's really the difference.

Jack  Hubbard: You see, boy, I gotta pick at something you said. and that's the whole issue around the CEO. I find, and I don't know if this is true for you, banking. A lot of bank CEOs are on LinkedIn, but they're not on LinkedIn. There are a lot of senior executives. Same, same. And one of the things you talked about is time. If I'm a CEO or senior executive and I allude to, or I talk about, well, I don't have a lot of time to be on social media. What does that say to the troops? What does that say to the other folks? How are you helping CEOs and senior executives understand the importance of modeling the way on LinkedIn?

Richard Bliss: The book I wrote, digital first leadership, was designed to talk to these executives. There are three myths that almost every executive encounters when it comes to social media. One, I don't have the time. Two, it's all self promotional. And three, nobody really wants to hear from me anyway. I don't have anything relevant to say. Those three myths have permeated every conversation I've had with executives over my decades of working with leadership teams and serving as an executive myself. There's another side of this, Jack, and that is, it's changing. But oftentimes, executives have also been criticized. Hey, how come you have so much time to be on social media? You should be leading this organization. So it actually goes the other way ever so slightly. Now, that's changing because people are starting to realize that, social media, LinkedIn in particular, is where they are encountering their colleagues, their peers, their employees, their customers, their vendors, their partners. Everybody has a LinkedIn account. That's not true about Instagram, Facebook, but in the business world, every single person is on this platform, whether they're consuming passively or actively participating. And so you need your executives to be there, and it doesn't take nearly as much time as they think. And it's. That's self promotional. They have to get over that. And then we find ways to have them tell the story of themselves and the company in such a way that it's compelling and causes interest in the entire organization itself.

Jack Hubbard: And telling the story leads me to my question about your belief of a secret weapon on LinkedIn, which is commenting. I would love to have you focus a little bit on commenting and why that is so critical.

Richard Bliss: Yeah. And again, here we come to the upside down world of social media. So often we're taught that, or we've just experienced that on other social media platforms, the goal is to post content, and then our content becomes the product. We're the product for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, because they make their revenue off of advertising. So the more content we produce, the more they show it to people, the more advertising dollars are generated. We are. We are the product, not the customer. Again, let's go to the upside down world of LinkedIn. Only 20% of their revenue or less comes from advertising. 

The other 80% comes from paying customers who are subscribing to sales. Excuse me, LinkedIn services. This includes sales Navigator, LinkedIn recruiter, LinkedIn Premium. The willingness for people to pay money to access their social media is very limited. Not very many people are willing to do it. Elon Musk discovered, to his chagrin, that not a whole lot of people are willing to pay for their Twitter account. The challenge then, is how do you drive value when advertising isn't the goal, and this is why it becomes upside down? LinkedIn's goal is to connect you and I, business people, and to have us have a conversation on their platform. 

It's not to entertain us, it's not to distract us, it is to educate us. But more than anything, it's to connect business people so that they find value in the relationship with each other and they want it happening on their platform. Conversations going back and forth. Well, a conversation is not contained in a thumbs up. Like, I mean, jack, imagine if every time you and I were talking just now, you, thumbs, up. Thumbs up. I like that. That's not a conversation. And so that kind of behavior, something that we've been trained to do, gives a thumbs up to let the author know, hey, we see you. I'm almost going to be careful here, but it's almost worthless on LinkedIn. What they are looking for is if you put out a piece of content on our platform, did you start a conversation? And that conversation is measured pretty much in one way. Did it drive comments? Now think about this. 

On Facebook or TikTok or Twitter, I put out my piece of content. They show it to as many people as possible, and then we judge its value based on the number of engagements we get. Let's go to the upside down world. On LinkedIn, they show your content to as few people as possible. Jack, when you make a post on LinkedIn, it goes to less than 10% of your audience, and you've got 17,000 followers. On average, 1700 people are going to see your content on LinkedIn. It is not going to 17,000 people. So what's happening then is for the next hour, the algorithm is watching to see if that test group of people who were shown your content take the time to stop and leave a comment. And not just congrats, well done. Thanks for sharing. But a comment that adds to the conversation. Here's the other secret about commenting on LinkedIn. If I comment on your Facebook post, you see it. If anybody else wants to see my comment, they pretty much have to go to the post and read it. Not, on the upside down world, LinkedIn. If I make a comment, when I make a comment on your post, LinkedIn takes my comment and sticks it in front of nearly a third of my audience. 

So if my comment says congrats, a third of my audience saw the word congrats and nothing else. Well, they do see your post, but they don't know you. They know me. So they're going to read my comment, but they're not going to take the time to go find out why I was saying congrats to somebody they don't know. So instead, when you leave a comment, we need to stop and think, who's listening? So here's how it happens. You make a post, I'll leave a comment. It says something like this, Jack, you make a very good point. Can I restate your point? Here's how I've seen that have an impact on my clients as I'm speaking, as I'm coaching. So I've done a little bit of a pitch of my services, not as a sell mode, but just as insight. Like we were sitting having a conversation. Now, my comment is going to get picked up with your post and put in front of a huge portion of my audience. Now, you respond back to my comment, because who wouldn't? I mean, that's kind of a nice comment. 

Now, your comment and my comment getting put in front of a third of your audience, suddenly my conversation is private, it's not private. That I'm having with you is being lifted and put in front of a massive portion of your audience and a massive portion of my audience. Now, let's suppose somebody else joins in and makes a comment on one of our comments. Boom, it now happens again. My comment now gets put in front of their audience. A single comment has so much more reach than you'll ever achieve on a post simply because of the ability of the ripple effect of the way LinkedIn treats the value of commenting. And I have seen my customers, salespeople, have their prospects cold call them. Now, this is the customer cold calling the sales rep, because the nature of the comments they have seen appearing on other people's conversations that they have found interesting and insightful, causing them to reach out to the sales rep for more information. The commenting approach on LinkedIn is, once you understand it, it transforms everything you do on the platform.

Jack Hubbard: If I had to choose between commenting and posting, it sounds to me like your approach would be, go comment your brains out. And if you want to post occasionally, go ahead and do that.

Richard Bliss: There you go. That's exactly it. And here's a couple of other reasons why. Remember, LinkedIn's checking to see if your content starts a conversation. So you're posting, and LinkedIn's analyzing that to see if you have a conversation. Well, guess what? You only get one post a day. If you post more often than once a day, LinkedIn's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, timeout, timeout. You're starting a conversation. Let's monitor and measure that first conversation. We'll keep that other one on ice forever. And so you have to give time. So you get about one post. Now, a little extreme here, but it's pretty close to about one post a day. 

Also, if your post has a link in it, your audience is going to be cut in half because you're driving the conversation somewhere else. And LinkedIn is like, you know, we don't want you doing that, so we're going to cut your audience in half that sees that post. Oh, by the way, if somebody hits the repost button on your post that you create, it only goes to 1% of their audience. So if I made a post, Jack, and you reposted it, 170 people on your network would see it, 1% of your 17,000 followers. So what this points out is that when it comes to creating content, LinkedIn is pretty careful about how much we're able to dump onto their platform. They're not just going to allow as much as we want because you can't have all those conversations going on, but commenting.

I could do ten, 2100 comments a day, and each one of them is being pushed out into the audience. So, yes, commenting strategy should be, this is why when I come to an executive, you have the time. All you need to do, executive, is make a couple of comments every day when you're out on LinkedIn anyway, because we know they're there. Just stop and leave a comment, add a little bit of your insight. Your audience is going to see it. Your network, your employees, your customers, your vendors, your partner, everybody is going to start to see you participating in conversations. And this is true for a lily, intern salesperson who's just been hired. And they ask me, so what should I do? And actually, right after this conversation, I'm headed over to one of the key players here in Silicon Valley to sit down with several of their transition employees who are looking to move into technology. And, my advice is going to be, you start with commenting on LinkedIn, you go find people who have interesting conversations and go participate. Here's what I tell them, Jack. If you do that, the number of people. 

So here's the challenge. I leave with almost every group I present to homework. Go leave three comments a day for the next five days. Right. And I guarantee to your listeners right now that they'll see a 300% to 500% jump in the number of people actively looking at their LinkedIn profile in the next week. It takes, it's almost instant recognition. If you go and leave all these comments, people are going to say, who is this person who's adding to this conversation? They're going to come check you out. Your LinkedIn profile is going to be your calling card, your digital house. And now you have this ability to wield influence. You see who looked at your profile. You can follow up. They're a prospect. You can see where I'm going with this. I'll stop now.

Jack Hubbard: All right, you had me in the comments. I'm CEO, though. I'm a CEO or I'm a senior executive. I'm willing to do this. How do I find posts to comment on, I don't have time to go through all this. My feed, my God, that would take me forever. How do you find the content?

Richard Bliss: Also, great question, because oftentimes, again on, LinkedIn, your feed is full of a bunch of random stuff, and I hear that all the time. There's a reason. It's because you've told LinkedIn you want to see a bunch of random stuff. Well, what do I mean by that? Every time you click the like button on LinkedIn, that's a signal to the algorithm. I want to see more of that. Every time you visit somebody's profile, you're like, I want to see more of their content. Every time you leave a comment, I want to see more of that content. And depending on the interaction, one of the highest interactions is visiting somebody's profile. If you look somebody else up, profile up, LinkedIn guarantees the next thing they post will be put inside in front of your feed because you were interested. It's like a dating app. It's like, okay, he showed interest. 

Let's see how interested he is. And so we have to be aware that oftentimes our own behavior is what's driving the feed that we see in front of us. So what can an executive do? A couple of things you can do. One, if you have support, a team, a member, an EA, somebody that's able to support, identify some key individuals that you think you should be paying attention to. And now on a regular basis, you can have either your team or you can just in the morning have a small list, look them up and see what they have to say and see if there's anything that you want to comment on. And there's some techniques that you can use to do that. I'll just highlight it and let people know that you can do it. I'm not going to go dive deep into it, but here's what you can do. You can use the search feature on LinkedIn to identify, I want to see posts from, some key individuals, and you can identify those individuals in the search bar. You can then hit the results. I want to see these individuals, and then you can go up to your browser and bookmark those search results. 

So now every morning, all you have to do is click the bookmark. It pulls up all of the recent posts from those five individuals you identified. You can see what they've had to do. That's an easy, simple way to track it. Sales navigator for a salesperson is a fantastic way on LinkedIn because it'll let you know, hey, this person just made a post. Are you sure you want to? You know, it's not a random selection. It's people you've identified. But in general, an executive can be selective, find some people that they want to be. in the conversation industry leaders got. Here's another example. I was recruited by a CEO several years ago to come work for him. 

And in our interview, I asked him, I said, look, I've been watching your social media, and you had a major, news story break, and you had a reporter, a journalist, call you out on social media, called you out and said you just phoned it in, that here was this issue, and you seem to be disconnected now. He's sitting across the table from me, interviewing me, and I'm throwing it, and he's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm like, exactly. You are being talked about online, and nobody's letting you know, and you probably need to respond to that. So for an executive, they need to spend a couple of minutes a day at least, looking to see if they're being mentioned, are they being talked about, and then finding a way to add and be in charge of that narrative.

Jack Hubbard: This is just great stuff. you're not suggesting never to post. you're suggesting to do it selectively. And one of the things you do selectively is you've created a newsletter. You have 66,000 followers on your newsletter. It's outstanding. Talk about the newsletter and the power and the impact of that for an individual like yourself and a company like a bank.

Richard Bliss: Okay, here's what's interesting, is that LinkedIn rolled out the newsletter functionality to everyone in the last couple of months. So if you go out to LinkedIn, you can go create a newsletter. I was recently listening to some LinkedIn influencers, and I've got to tell you, my wife asked me why, because I was. They didn't have any. I wasn't on as a guest. I was just listening, and I was screaming at my computer. My wife's like, what is going on in there? Because they were saying some of the dumbest things I've ever heard. One of the things they said about LinkedIn newsletters was, oh, they're a waste of time, really. A LinkedIn newsletter. If you set it up, anytime somebody connects with you or follows you, LinkedIn suggests, would you like to follow Richard's newsletter? You don't have to do anything. All you have to do is have the newsletter. And LinkedIn actively engages. And then when you publish the newsletter, it goes to their inbox. 

Now, you don't know what their inbox is. And I've heard people say, well, this is rented land. You shouldn't. You should own your own land, have your own newsletter on your own platform. Okay. But I've got free, free real estate on LinkedIn, and they're willing to give me and solicit followers for me. So, in that newsletter, I've been publishing it now for several years. I'm able to talk about a wide variety of topics. Yeah, it goes out to 66,000 people, but, okay, maybe people can't have that many followers. That's okay. If you get 200 people following your newsletter, that's 200 people who are very actively interested in listening to what you have to say.

And in today's world of banking and finance, Jack, and you know this better than I do, the world is changing so quickly, right? I work with individuals, CIo's of major banks in the US, because they want to have a presence. They want to be talking and explaining how they're out in front of, whether it's, cybersecurity, whether it's AI, whether it's, virtual data centers and virtual banking, whatever it might be. They're starting to recognize they need to be participating in the conversation because, one, they're trying to attract talent. And so as a bank leader, whatever your role is, the bank president, the CIO, the CTO, whatever it might be, you have people paying attention to what's going on in your industry because you got the money, right? Like Willy Sutton said, why'd you write broadbanks? Because that's where the money is. 

So let's be active on LinkedIn because why? Because that's where the money is. Our customers, our clients, our partners, and the people who are paying attention to us as leaders are watching us. And if, let's suppose there was a merger of some kind, what's the first thing you're going to do? You're going to go look up the CEO's to see who's leading these organizations. And where are you going to look them up? Oh, yeah, I'm going to google them and read their profile on their website. No, I'm going to go look them up on LinkedIn. Because it's really hard for the marketing team to completely spin your LinkedIn profile. And so that becomes a key element of making this successful. These executives are finding the need to be present. And oftentimes I'm getting that phone call.

Jack Hubbard:  Well, you're going to get a lot of phone calls from this, because bank presidents really need your help around, what I'll call social collaboration. You mentioned a word, however, that brings fear into the hearts and minds of people on LinkedIn that really follow it, and that's algorithm, nobody understands it except for a few people like you. Because a few years ago, and I don't know how many, I believe you partnered with Richard Vanderblohm, who puts out an annual LinkedIn algorithm report. Talk about how you got involved with him. He's a fascinating man.

Richard Bliss: He is. And just. It's. Richard Vanderblohm is how you pronounce that last name. He is Dutch. He lives in Valencia, Spain. Richard and I have known each other for several years now. part so partly has to do with my background. I've been in technology for many years, Jack, you and I both started our careers in the late 1900s. That's not flattering to a younger generation, but that's the truth. Right? And one of the things I see is how data and information is desperately needed in every decision we make today. And what happened with Richard Van Der Blom was that I saw him put out this report. He kind of did it on his own, working with a team. They did some research, and it was fascinating. 

Now, what's interesting is I recognized immediately that for my customers, enterprise sales teams, enterprise level CEO's, this data was gold because it drove the understanding of behavior, not just the outcome. It was the reason behind it. And so I approached Richard, and, in all of our years of knowing each other, we've only met once. He was in New York, and so I live in California. And so I bought an airline ticket immediately, to New York, just to spend the weekend so I could say hello and we could meet in person. So, he's a wonderful man. But I came to him and said, this is incredibly important to my industry. I'd like you to keep doing this. And he was. And I said, and I'm going to be your first and major sponsor. I'm going to give you money to keep doing it. We were friends, and he was doing it for free, but I said, no, there's. There's too much value here. We need to make sure that it continues to grow. 

And so he's done a fantastic job. He has now surpassed me in reach and influence, and he regularly gets hundreds of thousands of impressions on his posts and content. And it's been thrilling to see him become so successful around this. But the algorithm is put out every year. The last one we just came out with, 2024, was done, released in February. you can go to my website to find it. You can go to Richard's LinkedIn profile and find it on mine. It's blisspointconsult.com research. You can go and find it, and download it there. But this year, it's 128 pages. This is not a white paper, like, hold up a piece of paper. It's dense. It's got a tremendous amount of information. For the first time this year, it has company data as well, because company behavior on LinkedIn is radically different from personal behavior on LinkedIn as far as the algorithm goes. 

So this uncovers the algorithm, helps people understand the. Why? The aha's, the shocks, the shock and the audible shocks. I hear, as you mentioned, I travel quite a bit and do speaking. just this year, the three or four times that I've been on stage with hundreds of people in the audience, and I start sharing with them the details of that algorithm, the gasps, the audible gasps that come because they say consistently, oh, my gosh, we've been doing everything wrong. And it's not that you've been doing it wrong, you've been doing it right for the other social media platforms. But what the algorithm research points out is that this really is the upside down world of social media.

Jack Hubbard: Unbelievable. And I know we're running out of time, so let's do a lightning run from the report. I picked out five things I'd like to ask you about quickly.

Richard Bliss: Let's see if I can do this. That's a big report. All right.

Jack Hubbard: The importance of polls.

Richard Bliss: Okay. Polls just for your audience to be aware of, came out about 18 months ago and flooded our feeds and ticked me off to no end because I was getting flooded with, do you like coffee or tea? Red or blue? What's your favorite? it was just like. It was stupid stuff. But when LinkedIn rules out a new feature, they tend to over promote it to see the reaction, and then they dial it back. And so the polls have been dialed back. they're still very important. They start conversations more than anything. For example, when I came out with my book, digital first leadership, I did a poll and asked the audience, do they prefer audio book, paperback, kindle, or audio read by the author? I gotta tell you, Jack, I didn't care what they said, I didn't care about the answers, honestly. 

But what it did do is it put my poll in front of 40,000 people as they gave me responses, comments, engagement polls have a little bit of a hyper, juice to them that when people engage with that poll, LinkedIn sees that as a bit different than simply somebody leaving a comment. So polls can be incredibly powerful, primarily on your company page, delivering polls on the company page. Remember at the beginning of our conversation, I said you got a 10% reach, right? 1700 people out of the 17,000 when you put content on LinkedIn. Unfortunately, on a company page, it's only a 2% reach. so a company with 100,000 followers has about 2000 people who see their content about the equal to what you're able to achieve. Well, a poll, though, on a company page tends to boost that. So polls do very well on company pages and they do pretty good on personal pages, but you don't want to overuse them. If you do three polls in a row, the algorithm is going to punish you because you're not being really creative. They need you to show that content better. So that's polls. They could be very useful. make that, make sure you're finding some kind of value, either communicating value out to your audience or receiving information of value back. That's one of the key things about pools.

Jack Hubbard: All right, that's a good one. Another one that I hear, oh, it's so important, and it's not important at all, is the SSI score, the social selling index? Talk about that.

Richard Bliss: Okay, so for those of you who don't know who are listening, it's linked at www.LinkedIn.com sales slash SSI social selling index SSI. What's going to pop up is you're going to see a bunch of numbers, every single person. This is always fun. At the end of a presentation, sometimes I'll just throw that up and have people just see what their score is. It's a score. And that score generally hovers around for most people, a score of 50 or 60, maybe 70 out of 100. And what it is, is LinkedIn is telling you how effective you are on their platform, using all the features, having a complete LinkedIn profile, actively connecting with people, engaging with comments, having sales navigator boost your score. All of these give you this numerical score. It'll also tell you how well you're doing in your industry. 

So if your industry is in media or tech sales, it's going to tell you how you compare to the average score of other people in that industry. It's also going to tell you how you compare to people you're connected to. How does your score compare to your network of individuals? None of this needs anything. And I always have fun because I asked salespeople to pull it up. I'm doing training. I got 40 salespeople on the call, and I have them all look. And then I ask them, throw it into the chat, let's see what your numbers are. And then I say, but it's not a competition. Oh, Jack, you know that's not true. 

These are salespeople. These are type A personalities. All they're doing is looking at each other's number. Oh, man, I got a 68. Oh, I got a 72. The point here is it has very, very little impact on anything you're doing. LinkedIn has threatened to get rid of it for years. They haven't. And I think because it truly is one of the key vanity numbers of all the data that LinkedIn puts out, it's one of the true vanity numbers. Now, with that said, if you can get it above 70, you start to get a benefit from that. The algorithm treats you differently. It's kind of like having a platinum status at Marriott. you get an upgrade is what you get a little bit, but it has almost no bearing on anything else except for it's just fun to track and see how I'm doing. And it's a three day rolling, so you have to stay active, you stop behaving, and it'll start to dive. Yeah.

Jack Hubbard: Interesting. All right. Another fairly new concept on LinkedIn is collaborative articles. What are they, why are they important?

Richard Bliss: They're important because LinkedIn is trying to start conversations. This is what I started off our call, our little conversation here with. They're trying to start conversations and they're struggling because of the inertia that comes from the other social media platforms where thumbs up and likes and reposts are the extent of a conversation. And so they've come out with collaborative articles as a means of helping or encouraging people to join conversations. And what will happen is it takes about three. If you leave a comment or insight on one of these collaborative articles and you do it several times, LinkedIn will give you a little temporary badge that says a little, pink badge that says you're a top voice in this category, whatever it might be. Branding, marketing, sales, banking, whatever it might be. It also gives you a bit of a boost on the algorithm side because they see you participating in conversations and it allows other people who have never seen you to see how you're kind of adding value to the conversation. Now, with that said, it takes a lot of work. 

Participating in collaborative articles isn't just throwing out a comment to my friend who had a post, and I said, hey, congrats, this looks great, blah, blah, blah. No, a collaborative article. You have to realize, okay, they're asking for my expertise on this topic, and a bunch of strangers are listening. All right, what am I going to say? So, it takes a significant amount of time, but if you have a little bit of time and you're trying to build your own brand, they're a fantastic way for you to be participating in conversations, to hone your message, to extend the vision of what you want to say. So I encourage people to at least dabble and go get a feel for what it's like, and then all of a sudden, you'll see somebody who says, hey, I saw your comment on that collaborative article, and could you talk about that? I found that interesting. 

So they're a new feature. LinkedIn is pretty committed to it, and oftentimes the topics are being generated by AI. And so the AI is going through seeing what people are talking about, they see what you're talking about, and so they send you an invitation saying, hey, you appear to be somebody qualified to talk about this topic. Would you mind chiming in on the conversation? I would not turn down that opportunity. Now, you don't have to do it every time, but just think, LinkedIn is actively trying to put you in front of relevant people on relevant topics that you want to be known for. Why would you not take advantage of that?

Jack Hubbard: Absolutely. last one, in the lightning ground, I've heard from two different sides. Collaborative articles are new, groups are old. it's one of the original features of LinkedIn, I believe, a long, long time ago. Some people say groups are irrelevant. Some people say, oh, you got to be active in groups. It's one of the first times on the algorithm report that I've seen groups even mentioned, talk about groups, their relevance, and why or why I should not.

Richard Bliss: Be on them, say both sides are accurate, and groups have traditionally failed spectacularly on LinkedIn. Traditionally. For many years, LinkedIn experts, gurus, people who want to talk about the algorithm, people who want to talk about how they used Facebook groups do that. The LinkedIn experts are all on Facebook because of the robustness of Facebook groups. Now, with that said, LinkedIn has been putting some investment into their groups. There are challenges. If I make a post in my group, it doesn't get pushed out to my network. So it's a walled off garden. but so my opinion is an opinion. It is not back. I do not have data to back up, unlike some of the other things I've said today, that I've had data and the other things that I just made up. Oh, no. You'll have to figure out which ones I made up. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. He is. What's that?

Jack Hubbard: You are kidding. You are good.

Richard Bliss: I'm kidding. One of the things we have in the groups is I have had people tell me that groups become their primary source of leads and business. Now, some of these people are public professional speakers, and so when they're participating in groups, they're being able to show off their wares, being able to show and demonstrate their value on a particular subject. I've had other places where it's just a ghost town, and all you get are people pitching, selling, selling, selling, because it's a closed group, and you can send messages to anybody in the group. That's one of the downsides. So if you join the group, everybody in that group can send you a message without having to connect to you. And so, Jack, I do not have a definitive answer. Some of my clients have found tremendous success. Some of them had found no success. And so the only answer I can give is experiment. Go give it a try. Take a look, see what's going on there, and see if you can find that place that fits you. So that is not a definitive answer, but that's all I got today for that one.

Jack Hubbard: That's fair. And it's one of those things where you just don't go out and join 100 groups, find some that are going to be really relevant to you and that are pretty active, because it's easy to get in and out of a group if you want to. last of the, of the lightning round, I don't know if this is in the, it's in the realm of comment. I'm on a LinkedIn live show. Okay. I'm on a LinkedIn live show on a Saturday. I have a couple of folks that I. That I watch. Any value for me to comment during the show? Is there any benefit to me doing that?

Richard Bliss: See, yes and no. One of the struggles I have with the LinkedIn live is that after the show, I want to see the comments, but I can't. I have to go roll through the whole show and see the comments pop up, the commenting in the show, it's like it's again a walled garden. I can't get to the comments. and I'll see a post come up where I missed a show or something. I'll make it look great. Look at that, 72 comments. What do they say? I can't look, ah. Unless I watch. And so that becomes very frustrating for me. 

LinkedIn live is something that I struggle with because so seldom do I have the time to watch something live. I timeshift everything, including the warriors basketball game, simply so I don't have to watch them lose again in real time. Right. So, I don't know. you got the bulls, so, I mean, right, we remember the glory days, but with the LinkedIn live, the challenge I'm faced with is the comments, and everything is captured in that one experience, and it's so hard to extract it into the LinkedIn algorithm after it's gone live. And so I really struggle with that. Some people are finding tremendous success with it. Should you comment? Sure. If you're commenting, you're participating actively in that conversation, in that live conversation at the time. But it's not like a normal comment where now I can see it and reference it and respond back. Now, I might be wrong, there might be something I'm missing, but that's been my experience working with the commenting on LinkedIn Live.

Jack Hubbard: Horrific. I can't thank you enough for your time today. Digital first leadership published in April of 2021. You've got your newsletter. How can people get a hold of you if they want to book you for a speech? What's a good way to reach you?

Richard Bliss: probably the best way is a little feature that I would introduce to your clients, and that is there's a section of your LinkedIn called featured section. And what it allows you to do is put anything in there. And so if you go to my LinkedIn, Richard Bliss, it's actually LinkedIn.com. In bliss, I could have gotten slash Richard bliss, but I was, I don't know what I was thinking at the time. So it's just bliss. And if you go there, you will see a featured button right there. Biggest life, my picture looking just like I look right now. Not the headphones. If you click on it, it takes you right to, a place to actually, reserve me or reach out to my agent for a speaking event. It's a very easy way to do that. So you can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me there, or my website, like I mentioned before, blisspointconsult.com. And there's a contact form there as well, if you'd like to reach out.

Jack Hubbard: Richard, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate your expertise, Jack.

Richard Bliss: It's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Outro: Thanks for listening to this episode of Jack Rants with Modern Bankers with the author of digital First Leadership, Richard Bliss. We appreciate and value his time. Next week, we look at the whys and hows of selling your bank as we take a dive into the new book, the Art of selling your bank with my guest, Kurt Knudsen.

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