Episode 17: Bankers + Collaboratives Articles = Thought Leadership

Jack Hubbard  00:01

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 Ledger's 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.

Happy Thursday, everybody, middle of July, dog days are common and it's great to be with your Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  00:38

Hey, Jack, I'm really excited about our topic this week.

Jack Hubbard  00:43

You should be, you know, it's an exciting topic. And it's one that you kind of talked about with me this week, because recently, you were at the LinkedIn headquarters in New York, you and a lot of other LinkedIn experts kind of brought together to talk about collaborative articles. And I really liked the topic that we're going to talk about today. Bankers plus collaborative articles equals thought leadership. Bankers want to be thought leaders. In fact, I was at a bank the other day and one of the bakers was in a very vertical, very specialized kind of industry. And one of his questions was, how do I penetrate with content? And I think were going to cover today, something that's really important around collaborative articles, Brynne. So let's start out by talking about what they are, what are collaborative articles.

Brynne Tillman  01:36

So this, to me, is something that I never pictured LinkedIn doing. And they're doing it well, which is wonderful. They're taking AI. So the ChatGPT's of the world, they're sticking in topics, industry topics, and creating questions and topics that we then can engage on and add our perspective. And this is in its infancy. It started in beta in March and in June, they brought us together in New York. It was a wonderful opportunity to share how we're using it, what we'd like to see, what improvements we'd like, and they are really open. 

Now, why is this important? Most bankers, most professionals want to write content that's of interest, to their buyers, to their prospects to their customers but often we're stuck in the banker brain, right?  About interest rates and what's happening in the banking world. And it's hard for us to move from what matters to us in our industry, in the banking industry and the economics, to what do my buyers care about? What do my prospects care about? And this collaborative articles area allows us to see the content that's trending in those industries. Whether you're selling into telecommunications, or oil, and gas, or manufacturing, as many of our clients are, there are an enormous amount of articles that we have an opportunity to read and put our perspective behind. 

And we'll go on to why this is important but that's really what collaborative articles are and we think that this is a game changer for bankers who want to be thought leaders in the world of their clients.

Jack Hubbard  03:44

Now, I do believe and you'll probably talk about a little bit later on that you do have to register for this, and we'll talk about that. But let's talk about the verticals you mentioned and you talked about manufacturing in oil and gas. And this indeed is something that our bankers are all interested in, in terms of CNI lending and deposits. How do I go about finding a topic that I might comment on in a collaborative way?

Brynne Tillman  04:12

Yeah, so the first thing we're going to do is, you know, what are the industries we want to engage in and we want so if you go and you can actually scan the QR code, if you're here live, if you're listening, you can go to linkedin.com/advice. And that's going to take you to the collaborative articles and when you get there, there's a menu on the right hand side that has little bubbles and in those bubbles, it has topics and it only shows about 10 or so there is a show more button so you can go and explore further topics but it's not really limited to the topics you see there because once you click through for example, manufacturing, you're gonna get a, you know, a dozen or so. And so you can drill down into areas that may be even more relevant. 

So lots of opportunities to get very specific with the content that you want to engage in. Again, a lot of this is taking a look at what are the industries that I'm hoping to attract. And there, you know, I mean, there's construction there. I mean, there's so many industries that bankers would love to be part of, you know, we would love to be part of the conversation and so you can play around with it. There's also leadership and soft skills for our leaders who may not be prospecting into a specific niche, but really want to share their leadership, talent and ideas and concepts. So this can go beyond prospecting, it could really help you to get, you know, maybe you want to be known as a mentor in the industry. So it can really help you do that.

Jack Hubbard  06:13

You know, and if I think practically about this, as I scroll down, because I'm signed up to do this as well, I'm going to look at people that I view as credible. So if I am not following someone, and I see an article, and maybe I click on it, and I want to collaborate on that article, which is comment on it, I might say, Okay, before I do that, so that I am with a credible source, I might want to go out to their profile, look at them. Where are they from? How long have they been on LinkedIn? How many followers do they have? Because I want to make sure Brynne, whoever I'm collaborating with, in effect, or commenting with, I want to make sure that that's a credible resource. I'm not sure if you talked about that on LinkedIn but I know you have a strong feeling about that.

Brynne Tillman  06:58

Yeah, well, the interesting thing, and that is, so first, whenever you're engaging, that's important. The interesting thing is these topics are AI generated. So, you know, the credibility is a little bit different compared to engaging with other content that real people actually wrote. So that, you know, this is one of those interesting, what does AI do in this world differently. But to that point, you have a little more leeway to set them straight, because nobody's gonna take it personally. So if you disagree, or you have a different viewpoint, now, obviously, you still want to come off professionally, not attacking but you can say, you can literally say, you know, this is an interesting perspective that AI pulled, I'm a very different one. And if you're engaging in human beings' content, you could put someone off doing that but no one will be revealed, no one will feel rejected or upset with a different viewpoint. So I love that you asked that question, because it's just a different animal.

Jack Hubbard  08:17

Fascinating. So let me play this out with you. So you always put out amazing content, and I'll get the content and then I'll comment on your content, which goes under your article or your posts so people can see that I've commented, etc. What about this? I know they're in a line? What happens if I comment on a particular article? Where do people see that?

Brynne Tillman  08:47

So that's interesting, it will go to your news feed. It does not. If someone has rung your bell, so you can ring someone’s bell and when they share content, you're alerted, it does, it is not affected by that yet. So it's actually a little more difficult at this point, again, in beta. So that's a really good point. But you can go to somebody's activity feed and look at it won't be in the post section. I'm actually hopping into LinkedIn to make sure that I'm accurately stating this but when you go into somebody's activity feed, there is a section that is comments. When you click on comments, it will be there. So if you want to see if someone is specifically engaging on collaborative articles, it will be there but it will be there along with your other comments, so you'll have to scroll through.

Jack Hubbard  10:03

Interesting. Look, Brynne. Elizabeth has a really interesting question here. So do you see this more for individual bankers who want to build their reputation? Or do you see this as a way for banks to help themselves stand out too?  Iif the ladder in the org chart would be the best person to represent the bank? That's a very thoughtful question. 

Brynne Tillman  10:25

That is. Okay, so let's start with generally, right now, collaborative articles are about the individual banker. And, you know, you can as a bank set guidelines, like you can add lots of insights here, here are the 10 Things you can't mention. can't mention rates you can't mention, right? Like whatever those compliance things are, and then allow them to share their thought leadership, again, recognize what we're asking them to do, or we're not, we're not asking them to do anything, what we're recommending that they do is actually engage on nonbank content.

So most of this should be engaging in manufacturing. So maybe a question comes up, let me go, I'm gonna go into one, and I'm gonna read something that it might be like, Alright, I'm just gonna go into real estate because it's in front of me. And I'm gonna go into commercial real estate analysis. So what are the key components of a feasible study for a CRE development? In that case, there may be some kind of advice around banking, if they're in that particular case, but you really want to talk about things like, you know, whenever we work with commercial bankers, here's some of the things that we take into consideration when it comes to real estate. Actually, there's a lot in here, how do you incorporate lease comparables into your financial modeling and cashflow? 

So it might be, you know, every company does this differently. As a banker, we look at these things. In that particular case, actually, as I look into this, you could talk about how that topic and banking will fit. Now, you know, if we went into, let's say that manufacturing, and I go with one of those topics, I could go into manufacturing and purchasing. Why does anyone care about those things, people that are buying and need cash flow to buy, right like that, like, so that's a topic. So how to use data and analytics to optimize your purchasing decisions. If you give a perspective on this and maybe it's you know, a lot of the procurement professionals that we work with by offering lines of credit for cash flow, do this, this and this. Right, and be authentic and honest. And by the way, you can certainly ask your procurement person what they do, and actually quote them and mention them if you have permission. 

So there's a lot of ways to use this. So that's a long answer to your first half of the question, Elizabeth. The second half is, you know, who in the bank could do this? Now, I actually think marketing could probably own the, here's a piece of content. I'd like the treasurer, the treasury management person to answer. So I'm still an individual and marketing could absolutely answer some things but what marketing can do as a team, you could decide, here are all the topics that are relevant to our customers. And let's assign a couple of those topics to a certain number of commercial bankers or public facing bankers. And marketing can push and say, Hey, your insights on this article would be great. 

So that's how I would see the collaboration but at the end of the day, thought leadership is about a person, it's hard. A thought leader is a person not an entity. That's probably the best way to say

Jack Hubbard  14:36

yeah, and a couple of comments here. First of all, I love your idea on marketing. If I'm a marketing professional at a bank or a credit union, I'm going to look into this and I'm going to beta test it myself. And I'm going to see how this might work. And then I might be able to have a meeting with my bankers and say, you know, I'm in this. I'm using this collaboration process, I found it to be really effective. Let me share with you how this might work and how you might use it. That's number one. 

Number two, Elizabeth's comment is really a good one. And so as yours, as it relates to what you can do on LinkedIn, in individual Bay, there are still some banks who unfortunately have such restrictions that their bankers cannot use LinkedIn for its ultimate effectiveness. There are other banks who don't have a problem with bankers posting, the bankers just don't know what to do, how to do it, and when to do it and choose not to do it. So it goes back to the FFIEC and your LinkedIn, social media policy, what can you do?

 And I would certainly recommend the banks within the guidelines in your market, etc. To be as open as possible and allow your banks, bankers to go out and post good content, knowing that you hire adults, and they're not going to do anything crazy. And share your policy with them. Certainly, that's important. Well, so when Brynne and I prepares for these things, she'll send me a few ideas. But there are times when she will tell me the answer. So I'm, I'm in the dark on this one as well. There's something called up voting, this is new, tell me about the up voting.

Brynne Tillman  16:27

Yeah, so up voting is essentially a reaction to somebody's contribution. So the more upvotes you have, the more value LinkedIn sees your perspective was. So when you are looking at other people's contents, and you Oh, that's good. And by the way, many of them will be in the industries you serve, they probably won't be in your geographic area and so I don't look at it necessarily as a prospecting opportunity but when you get on the radar of someone in supply chain, right, and you're now engaging, maybe they're not a prospect, but there might be content that your prospects in supply chain, and procurement might might feel valuable. So you can up vote for other people, and other people can upvote for you. Now, that will lead into LinkedIn seeing you as a thought leader. So just adding your perspective is not enough to get a badge. And I know we're going to talk about that next but when you get upvotes, when people vote that say, Hey, that was a great insight, you could actually earn badges about being a community voice around a certain subject matter topic.

Jack Hubbard  17:51

All right, so I'm a Cub Scout and this was not one of the best parts of my life, it took me a long time to get my tenderfoot badge because I didn't know how to tie knots. I wasn't terribly good at that. So I'd love to get a badge. So how do I get the badge? You talked a little bit about that and if I get a badge, who sees it? And where is it on our profile?

Brynne Tillman  18:15

Yeah, so can I just brag for a moment, go look at my profile, because I have my badge. So it's a little yellow badge that lives right under your headline. It has a little light bulb. And it'll say mine right now is the top social selling voice. Now I have a second one, which is the top entrepreneurship voice but you can only show one at a time, you can pick however, when you're editing the top of the fold, when you're at that little pencil, you can pick from the drop down which one you want to show. My goal is to get 11 by the end of the year, you do not need 11. But you know, that's a goal I set for myself. But it's very prominent, and it is a minimum of 60 days. If you continue to contribute, you'll continue to have the badge. If you get the badge and you fall off and don't do it anymore. The badge will go away.

Jack Hubbard  19:19

Well, that's a good behavioral thing. It holds you accountable to not just get the badge, but you have to do something to be able to keep the badge which is really good. Now let's go back to something you said earlier about geographic situations. So let's say you're commenting on something in plastics manufacturing, because you have some expertise there. But we are commenting that it's all over the country. It's not in your local area. However, if you continue to do this, you'll get the badge and let's call it you know manufacturer, plastics manufacturing expert, and I don't know what the badge might say but well…

Brynne Tillman  19:56

We'll just probably say top voice manufacturing

Jack Hubbard  19:59

Okay. So when you put that on your profile, when someone in Secaucus or in Holyoke or LG most of your profile sees it, they see you're a top voice that gives you additional credibility locally, even though it's a national kind of a thing.

Brynne Tillman  20:18

Absolutely. And there is so much credibility in that top voice. And so you know, working toward it is important, but it's beyond that it hones your skills, right, it homes, it allows you, I'm just going to kind of go on my little like, Riff here for a moment. It gives you some social listening skills and what's going on in the industries. You'll have aha moments, you'll even research before you comment, right? You could go out and say, Hey, I'm curious how this is what's going on. If your bank allows chatGPT, you can use chat GPT to help you come up with your perspective, but add your voice. 

So there's so many things that you could do, but as you're doing this, and you may say, Well, you know, it may take you 10 minutes to write one perspective. But you will learn so much about what's going on in that industry and what's important to them, that it's going to help you start more trust based conversations without being salesy because you know what's happening. And you could say, hey, you know, I had recently come  across an article on LinkedIn, I put my perspective in on this, I'd love to hear yours. And you can send a link to the article where you added your perspective. And you can ask, so there's so many ways to use this beyond, hey, I want to badge  even though I love the badge, the badge makes me very happy.

Jack Hubbard  22:01

Let's go beyond this [inaudible] Brynne. If you're thinking out loud. I always like to think globally around this whenever I see a resource like this. So let's say you're calling out a manufacturing company, and realizing that AI may have written all of these articles, there may be some nuggets in each of them, or two or three of them, that you can bring up on the call. And you might say I found this post about this, how does that relate to your situation? Or it may create some question opportunities that you could develop and use on a business development call. So it's not just the article itself? It goes way beyond that.

Brynne Tillman  22:40

the topic is such as I love that. Alright, see, like your nuggets are brilliant. I mean, this is, you now have unlimited, almost unlimited topics to talk about that LinkedIn curated for you.

Jack Hubbard  22:59

Right? That's right. And if you if you combine that with many of the bankers that we know with that subscription, you have to vertical IQ, where you get very specific articles from very well known and well thought of publications, now you've got a variety of things that you can do, then you add all of the neat things that RelPro does with with their research, when you can find out certain awards that a company has won, you can really your planning time can be very short and much shortened by using these variety of tools, which I think leads us to our last question which we sort of been talking about, what can we do with our answers beyond the collaborative articles? We've discussed a few. Are there others?

Brynne Tillman  23:48

Yeah. So one of the things I started to do is answer in numbers or bullet points. So I look at this, and I'm like, so it could be an article that asked, you know, what are some of the ways you preempt customers objections? So here are the five things. I'm interested in five things that I do, number one, tell case studies early, when you know that there's going to be an objection around something, you know, because there you will always get that objection, tell a case study early that overcomes it. I mean, I could go, you know, so, and then I have my list. 

Now with that list, by the way, it does go into your comments feed, but I can create a post with this. So I can go a little bit deeper. I can take each one and go a little bit deeper. I can use chat GPT to say go deeper on this and then put my own voice around it. I can create an ebook. I could go on Zoom and talk about these five things and have a little video Upload. 

So this is this content starter. This really allows us to get inspiration, we type out that inspiration, inspiration. And by the way, I was doing this when I was walking my dog and I was in collaborative articles on my phone, you can text to talk, talk to text, your answer. So I literally clicked the microphone on my keyboard, on my mobile phone, and I said the answer and had very little editing to do. So I was able to go through a lot. So there's so many different ways. So now we have this, these are my ideas, use chatGPT, to hone them in to write a blog post based on those ideas. And then but the key is do not copy and paste that you need to read through it. You need to make sure it's 100% in your voice, that it's compliant, all those things. But you can get so much from these articles from inspiration that will convert.

Jack Hubbard  26:12

out outstanding, great show. And I want to mention, I know we talked about it at the end of the show, the public library. The reason I wanted to bring this up is because I got a question from a banker on the phone who said, you know, I missed your program last week about the Seven Tenants of profiles. I said, Well, it's in our public library. So what's the public library? So this is what I was counting today, we have 21 ebooks in our public library, little things that you can do 12 ways to talk to your alumni on LinkedIn, things like that. All of these shows are in our public library. 

So I hope that you'll all consider. It’s free. And I hope you know both of us by now Brynne, the hardest working woman on LinkedIn, and myself doing this for a long, long time, that it's not a salesy kind of thing, sign up, and you get the benefit of it. Nobody's going to reach out and say, Hey, do you want to buy something today? So I hope you'll sign up for the public library. 

The second thing I want to talk about Brynn, as we kind of bring this to a close is, this is in beta. But I gotta tell you that LinkedIn does a lot of beta related things but this must be really important to them to bring many of you to York up. So I got to believe this is going to happen. I'm curious, in your opinion, what, how long will this beta thing go? And what changes might you think about are going to happen for collaborative articles down the line? If you could, if you could just take a crystal hat and put it on? What do you think?

Brynne Tillman  28:11

So there are a few things that I think and I hope, I'd like this to be an opportunity to add your collaborative articles to your featured section on LinkedIn, I'd love to have a link on my profile that are on all of our profiles, where you can click on it, and see all of my comments so that they all can come in. I love that we use proprietary hashtags to find content, I'd love to be able to click on that and see everything that all of the modern banker team members put in there. You know, I think there's so many ways to leverage this, I would also love to have a place where we could recommend topics for the collaborative article teams. I would love to subscribe and get push notifications when topics on that I want to engage on or publish. So I mean, I could go on and on and on but I'm gonna say this is a wish list. I wish it were a crystal ball but we shared a lot of these things with the team when we were in the headquarters. They were very, very receptive to our ideas. They'll pick which ones they think make the most sense, but I hope it's all of them. 

Jack Hubbard  29:50

Well, great to be with you. As always, every Thursday we see each other almost every day, but it's great to see you on a Thursday live. I'm really excited about next week's topic. We've had a lot of requests because we talk a lot about this algorithm. And there's some changes that have gone on to the algorithm this year. So next week Brynne, we're going to talk about the algorithm and the changes involved there.

Brynne Tillman  30:15

Yeah, and I can't do this without a huge thank you to Richard van der Blom, and we will give him credit everywhere, who is just a brilliant, brilliant man who has done an incredible job every year of testing, A B testing, and testing and testing. And so we'll talk, we're gonna go through his report, and we'll have a link for you to his report, so you can see it directly. This was very nice from Elizabeth, excellent presentation, lots to think about, I'm a bank board member, much of this will apply to my day job work, too. Thank you.

Jack Hubbard  30:59

That's great. And I'm on the board of a bank as well, as many of you know, and I'm not dressed to be on the board today. I'm dressed to go play golf but these are the kinds of things I think that board members can bring to a meeting at the board, not to take over the bank, but to bring up strategic ideas that you know about that might benefit the bank. So congratulations to you, Elizabeth. I don't know what bank board you're on but they are going to benefit significantly from your expertise, I'm sure. Well, Brynne, thanks very much for this opportunity to be with you today. I look forward to seeing you next week with the algorithm and by the way, many of you are going to be invited to this next week's program, as you are virtually every week. A lot of people have said to me, Well, I can't make it. So I didn't register. Now, please, please register. Because when you do, you'll get the replay of this and I think that can be really important because we're all really busy and we can all be together at noon Eastern time every Thursday.

Brynne Tillman  32:03

Yeah, and you know, it's never been easier. With LinkedIn. All you have to do is click attend an Add to Calendar. And that's all you have to do to register. So it's that simple. If you don't get it into your inbox, just message either one of us and we'll make sure that we send you a link.

Jack Hubbard  32:23

Awesome program today, Brynne, I learned a lot. Thank you very much for your expertise. Great to see you.

Brynne Tillman  32:29

Always great to hang out with you, Jack. This was a lot of fun. We'll talk soon.

Jack Hubbard  32:34

Every Thursday. Jack Rants with Brynn See you next week. 

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. 

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