Ep 18: Building a Social Media Following With Devin Banerjee of LinkedIn (Ep. 18)

Episode 18 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (38:02)

Episode 18 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Devin Banerjee of LinkedIn joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to make the case for treating follower count as a business metric rather than a vanity one. The hosts’ framing is distribution math: an advisor with a service to deliver needs an audience to deliver it to, and attrition means a static client list is a shrinking one. Holt adds a sharper point about how feeds work now. Because what people see is curated, an advisor who is not present in a prospect’s normal day is not merely low priority, they are absent. Banerjee describes what LinkedIn observes across industries, including a broad recognition that most professionals are subject matter experts in something and now have direct channels to demonstrate it. The practical mechanics cover how many exposures usually precede a follow, and how fast social content reveals whether it worked.

What this episode covers

• Follower count reframed as distribution capacity rather than vanity
• Why curated feeds make absence from them functionally the same as invisibility
• Banerjee on the trends LinkedIn observes across professional services
• How many exposures typically precede someone choosing to follow
• Why social testing returns a verdict in a day where print advertising took months

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Derek, why should anybody care about having followers on social media? Hey Adam, that’s an awesome question. I used to not care at all, man. I didn’t care. I didn’t want the followers. I didn’t care. Then all of a sudden I cared. It’s really important.

But why? Why is it important? It’s simple math. And as advisors, I hope hopefully you have some basic math skills. I have an HP calculator. Can I tell you the present value of my followers? You actually probably could do that. I’m not gonna get into it on this one, but yeah, like it’s important. If you’re distributing a product or a service, don’t you have to have people to distribute it to? To monetize it? I mean, I have my clients. I have my hundreds of clients. That’s good enough, right? Can I just distribute to them? Why do I have to go social? Well, do you want more clients?

Do you wanna grow? What about the advisors that don’t have a hundred clients? What about if your practice is struggling and you’re losing more clients than you’re gaining through attrition, death? I don’t know, right? Do you want more clients? If you’re gonna distribute something, you need people to distribute it too, wouldn’t you say? I do. I mean, look, this is sarcasm and rhetoric. We both know how important followers are as a metric for you to run your business. And here’s the way that I have come to believe that it’s important, Derek. It’s that this represents your captive audience of people who care about your voice.

And the problem is, is that today, almost everybody is somewhat how influenced by what I call fake news. Everything is curated propaganda. All of our feeds are curated for what we wanna talk about, look about, think about, hear about. And so the person who you wanna reach, who might be interested in your services, maybe financial advice, if they don’t hear about you in their normal day to day, they just don’t hear about you. You’re blocked out. So you gotta get to a place where your voice, your authentic voice is heard as a credible resource to your prospects. And that’s indicated by followers. Exactly. That’s the one metric we can track really well.

That’s true. I mean, you have no followers. Nobody’s hearing your awesome, authentic voice. Yeah, right? You got the best cheeseburger in town, but nobody knows about it. How many cheeseburgers are you gonna sell? I don’t know. Well, look, here’s a great example. You have done an awesome job of creating followers, even though you come from the roots of being a financial advisor who was never really quote unquote, we’ll say permitted to go outward and market in the way of normal social media. But somehow you garnered all of tens of thousands of people listening to your voice. I did. I did. And it started off, heck, I didn’t wanna be on social.

I fought it early on. The first three years as an advisor, I didn’t even have a cell phone, let alone social media accounts. All right. You couldn’t afford it. Yeah. This is true, right? I was that broke like most new advisors. Like I had no money. So I just couldn’t afford it. Now I have 14 cell phones and 400 social media accounts. You still don’t pick up the phone when I call you. This is hilarious. Your voicemail is not even set up. Not even set up. Oh, we could digress on this one. But I had to change my mindset and then all of a sudden, holy smokes.

Like, here we go. Like I have an unlimited potential to grow and all I have to do is grow my followers. Yeah. So it sounds easy. So I cared first. I had to care first. I was like, all right, well, that’s super easy. I just got to grow my followers. But how? Not so easy. And I think there’s some big trends that we’re seeing here. Well, we’ve got a special guest that we discussed this with. I think it’s going to be extremely relevant for all of our listeners. All of our followers, our two followers. Because we’re trying to grow our followers. No, no, it’s our two listeners and our tens of thousands of followers now between us, which you dwarf me by far.

I didn’t really understand this game actually until more recently when I changed my role from more advisor to leader of a fintech. And I took a lot of cues from you and I learned a lot in this process. And it’s been a really interesting learning experience. By no means do I feel an expert. I just, I feel like a little more familiar with this roller coaster. Like I’ve ridden, you know, the, what is it called? Space Mountain now 10 times. I kind of know where the dips are going to come. So yeah, yeah. But for someone who’s new to this and really hasn’t really gotten into social media and created a following.

And even if it’s a thousand people or 500 people, let alone tens of thousands, there’s a real impact to this. And I want to also explain why I think this is really important. Both of us have talked about it. The future of distribution of information is going to be channels that people opt into. They’re not going to necessarily go to NBC per se, unless NBC is their following NBC. They’re not going to go to the news outlets. They’re going to go to the specific news outlets that gives them information the way they want it. And they’re going to select into them. Now, the question is, if we think social media is going to continue to distribute information and awareness and guidance and understanding and education, you want to be where your customer is actually looking for that information.

And you should be that subject matter expert, which is you should be the credible source, which they will replicate, multiply, share with their friends, if in fact you’re delivering good information. So I really, it seems crazy, but every individual is going to have the opportunity to create a channel, a television or audio channel that represents their brand. And you’re either relevant or you’re not. And so that’s really the challenge of why this is so important. You must arrive in the next two to three years, financial advisors, with either a defined brand that’s digital and accessible or decide you’re not doing it and you’re going to go the opposite way.

There’s not going to be an in-between here. It’s going to be a waste of time, I think. That’s a bold statement. I suspect you’re a hundred percent on there. You actually made me think like, to sum up what you just said, we actually are living in an opt in, opt out culture. Right? I’m going to opt into the stuff I actually want to know about and with people that resonate with me. And I’m opting out of the rest because I don’t want to hear it, whether it’s fake news or any of that other stuff. Like I don’t have enough time. So it’s opt in, opt out.

So who’s going to opt into your stuff? And if you don’t have stuff or have followers to opt in in the first place, what are you doing? I agree. I agree. Well, you set up something awesome and we had a great guest interview in the rethink tank. Devin Banerjee is actually the editor at large for business and finance at LinkedIn. He’s actually a CFA charter holder. So he understands the business of finance. He also comes from a family, which you’ll hear in this that comes from the compliance background. So he’s got a really interesting mix of background and experience. And we had this great opportunity to interview him.

So why don’t we share Derek what that interview was because I think there’s going to be a lot of tidbits here that professionals can pick up. You ready? Do it. Yeah. Some great takeaways here. All right. Here we go. Devin Banerjee. So thank you Devin for participating in Rethink. It’s really awesome to have you and have a representative from LinkedIn be part of this program today. Thank you. Now, interestingly enough, what an amazing background you have, obviously in finance and as the editor at large for the business and finance, I’m sure you have some really interesting perspectives. So give us an idea. What is your perspective or opinion of the financial advice market today?

Yeah. Well, first, thank you guys both for the invite. I’m a huge fan of this pod and the idea behind it. I talk with advisors a lot and kind of observe the financial advice market. And one thing I love about studying it is it’s kind of like applying a litmus to society, if you will, because both the providers of the service, the FAs and the consumers of it, the clientele are so diverse. It’s a cross section of society in terms of generation, in terms of geography, in terms of income and interests and all of that. And so as a result, by observing trends in this market, you can observe trends in society, as cliche as that sounds.

So what are some of those trends that I kind of see and observe from my vantage point? The first, which will come as no surprise is technological enablement, I’ll call it. So yes, of course, what continues to underpin this market is that trusted human relationship between client and advisor. But as you guys know better than anyone, the sourcing and the discovery involved in creating that relationship from both ends and the ongoing communication and interaction in that relationship and the sharing of information, it’s now all enabled by technology. And I use that word enabled versus replaced, which I think you two would certainly agree with. A second trend in this market that kind of mirrors that of society, I think is a personalization of services.

So this has also been enabled by technology, as well as this exponential rise of data that we’re all experiencing. But consumers now demand personalized services across the board, including financial advice. And they want those services delivered faster, better, easier. So I see that in this market and in society more broadly. And the last one I’ll mention, which obviously relates to my role quite a bit is the explosion of content. So we at LinkedIn see this across the board, across markets, across industries, which is this recognition that many professionals, I’d say most professionals or even every professional is inherently a subject matter expert. And this recognition as well, that there are multiple channels, social media channels and others for exhibiting that subject matter expertise to clients, to prospects and to the public.

What is a missing opportunity and or an upcoming challenge that advisors, the financial advice industry isn’t either addressing or just doesn’t see coming at all? Yeah, I would home in on that third trend that I just mentioned, which a lot of the financial advice market has already embraced. And I’m preaching to the choir with the two of you, but I would reinforce that content creation, which stepping back is really, I think a manifestation of this larger idea that subject matter experts are now more generously, more frequently sharing and discussing their expertise publicly. So I would just reinforce that this trend is irreversible. And yes, perhaps not enough people, including FAs realize that.

Over the past two years, there’s been some fascinating research out of the likes of Greenwich Associates and Peregrine and others that just revealed the momentum that content creation and social media usage generally have among both FAs and their prospects. So it’s meeting this new generation of clients where they are, where they spend time and for better or worse, that place is online. So as I said, a lot of the market has embraced this. I still come across whether it’s RIA shops or brokerage houses or individual advisors where either the culture or most of the time, it’s the compliance apparatus is just still behind the curve on this trend.

And yes, I answer their questions about content ownership and edit abilities and space for regulatory disclosures, handling comments and record retention and all that. But I’d say overall what I’m finding is that as more advisors and firms get over those hurdles, more take notice, others take notice. And there’s more evidence all the time that again, this is what the new and next generations of clients want. And that therefore this drives business out, real business outcomes for the FA market. This is almost bringing a tear to my eye. Just hear it. As I said, you guys are a manifestation of all of these best practices, so.

I mean, Adam’s been doing this longer than I’ve been doing it. I’ve been doing it a while and it’s just great to get validation from someone like yourself, from such an awesome worldwide organization that just gets it, right? Like content creation is here. There are these compliance and other pain points, but it’s possible. I mean, look what Adam and I were able to do. So it’s just really cool. It’s really neat to hear you say that. What do you think, Adam? Yeah, I think it’s great to hear the reiteration of content development. We know so many financial advisors are stymied by the kind of complexity of, oh boy, I can’t get this through compliance or I’ll do nothing.

And we’re seeing everything is further from the truth, right? Content doesn’t have to be writing a long form article. It can be authentic posting on what I care about. And so I think this real need and desire for human potential customers to connect with our subject matter experts, they can do it in lots of different ways. But I’m curious, what actions do you think financial advisors should take and what should they be rethinking about now? Yeah, well, I’ll share this framework. It’s kind of this forced initialism, ABCDE, that I share all the time. And you can almost use it as a checklist for thinking through content creation and distribution and all of that.

So A, and actually Adam, you just mentioned this is authenticity. That is just paramount. You have to remember that nobody else has your unique set of experiences and expertise. And so using your own voice to represent that will make your content stand out. B, a little bit forced, it’s bring something to the table, which is to say advance the conversation about that trend or that piece of news or whatever you’re sharing, rather than repeat the conversation. So drawing those insights from your unique set of experiences and expertise to bring something to the table. C, I think you just mentioned this as well, Adam, is consistency.

Consistency is really key when it comes to building a following around content. And it’s important to remember that consistency does not necessarily mean frequency. Consistency is just some form of consistent basis. So that when people click follow or subscribe or what have you, they can expect more insights to follow on a consistent basis. The D is a distribute on these social channels. If you thought just clicking publish was the end of the process, online, that can really just be the start. So tag people who you know may be interested in the topic, share links across your other social channels when you publish on one channel, use email or your email signature or your website for links to your social newsletters or your podcast or your profiles.

So just remember that to grow a following, by definition, you have to get in front of people who don’t already follow you, by definition. So you gotta be distributing your content. And then the E, the last one I’ll mention is engage. So again, when publishing, there’s more work to be done. Prompt people to join the conversation with their own take or experience or questions, reward them by reacting to their comments and answering their questions, ask them questions as well. So these are social platforms you have to remember to be social. I’m curious, one of the things that we always allow our interviewees to share is sometimes they have a unique perspective that just it needs to be rethought.

Some either controversy or other things they’re experiencing that they’re like, they want the world to hear and start thinking about. Is there anything that kind of just touches on your mind? Yeah, I mean, this isn’t groundbreaking. And it goes to a few things I’ve said, but I think for this, for the FA market, what I find myself always saying is take it to compliance. Take it to your compliance department. I think so many advisors see and hear the value in content creation or just sparking conversation online. They see and hear the demand from clients or from prospects, but then compliance is the blocker. And obviously compliance professionals have their specific duties and job.

It’s funny, my two parents are regulatory financial consultants in this industry. And as our dinner table debates when they’re visiting or I’m visiting them are all about this, but there is a way to get over these hurdles. You see so many, as I said, RIA shops or brokerage houses or advisors doing this so well so that there is a solution there and just doing it collaboratively with your compliance folks can get you over the line. So listen to their questions, find all the answers to all their questions, ask me if you need help and there’s a way to get it done. What happens when you get two compliance people together in finance, have a child who becomes a CFA and then decides to get into social media?

Like, are they gonna be able to talk about anything at dinner? I know, as you can imagine, their dream was for me to join their business and to take it over and to be a regulatory compliance professional in financial services. But obviously I went a different route, but it makes for interesting debate and conversation. See, now wasn’t that cool? At the very end, Derek, I don’t know if you heard that authenticity, which if you needed any indication, makes it real for who Devin is, right? That’s the kind of piece and we wanted to include that from our interview. That was our side conversation, by the way, that I wanted to include there so that people would get an idea of like, that’s the level of authenticity we’re talking about.

Being vulnerable, in a sense, talk about your parents and how they wanted him to be something else, but he used that and he turned it into something else and now look at his ascendancy within the organization and that’s really cool. It is really cool. It is super scary too, right? It’s one thing to open up to like one person at a cocktail party. It’s another thing to open up to potentially thousands, tens of thousands, whatever people online, but if you do it like the way he did it, it just works and all of a sudden you feel this affinity for a person and their content and you want to hear more from them because you’re like, you know what?

I’m like Devin, right? My parents are compliance officers too or whatever, right? You know? That’s right, right? I’d fight with compliance officers. Yeah, right. You know, I’ve got a compliance officer in my life. Yeah, I get it. I think that’s a great example. And when it’s funny, kind of funny. So what we wanted to do for everybody is we wanted to also ran this out for house. So we talked a little bit about why having followers makes sense and what you can do and Devin did a great job with his framework, the ABCDE framework, which I think is really strong to keep in mind. So when you’re doing posting and content and creation, these are the things that are going to have multiplicative effect on your content in getting interactions or impressions, other kind of words you’re going to need to be familiar with because they also dictate how many times your content’s interacted with so that will generate followers.

People will choose to follow you if they like your content after the third or fourth time. Not the first time usually, unless it’s really just aligned with them. Talk to me, Derek, about some of the most successful things you’ve done here. There are a lot of different ways and also there’s a lot of testing, right? And that’s what’s cool. I’m going to take a quick tangent here. So testing in the old world, whether it was print advertisement, like an ad in a magazine or the actual magazine itself, took a lot of time because you’d have to like get people to buy that magazine, what three, four times off a newsstand and maybe then they subscribe to it.

So the testing super long-term and the testing on social and digital is super fast. You’ll know within 24 hours if your content resonates or not, if it doesn’t just go, don’t do that anymore. So I think there’s some great examples. Authenticity really works well. I did an authentic post just today, which is already getting some really great traction. I think the one that we all can relate to is the Super Bowl ad for Coinbase that came out just a couple of weeks ago. And that was huge. I did a post on it. It did really well, but it captured the country’s attention really. But it was authentic.

It was different. They knew who they were talking to. It was just a really fascinating example, but there’s so many different ways. Like you and I also started, man, it’s been over a year, a kind of like a multiplication, like pod or group to help push each other’s content and share with other like-minded people. And even just seeing the growth or lack thereof, some people didn’t participate. They will remain nameless, but remain follower-less. Oh, that’s even better. It’s back down, right? Oh, that’s it. Yeah. And that’s the implication of not participating in an engagement pod is you don’t get engagement. Boy, that’s actually a really good point.

I’m glad I participated. You rocked it. Yeah, but let’s talk about an engagement pod because I think a lot of professionals don’t understand what that is. What is an engagement pod on social media? So you have to be careful here because you don’t want to create a situation where it’s spammy. But the way that we set up our pod is you and I and others like us, we came together as a group of like-minded individuals who knew who we were talking to, had similar experiences, backgrounds, and messages that we wanted to share. So it was almost like, instead of multiplication, I almost called more of a collaboration pod.

And in that process, we’re able to help amplify our messages. So we did that. I’ve done it for over a year. A lot of people fell off and their lack thereof followers show. And then people that stayed in actually did a really good job. But it was a way for us to get the credibility, the authenticity, the engagement, the conversation going on a social platform. That’s what Devin just said. Engage. Like just dropping a post, that’s the bare minimum. The content really works after the fact, after you start engaging with people and having dialogue and looking at the conversations and things happening. And so anyways, that’s what we did on LinkedIn.

It worked really well for some of us. Yeah. And just to kind of give more details of tell me what specifically to do. Imagine we got together 15-some subject matter experts with a similar audience. And we all said we would be promotive of each other’s posts if we agreed with them, that we would be aware of them and we would multiply them through what? We would like them. We would celebrate those posts. We would reshare those posts. We would actually write comments on those posts and tag others and so forth. So what we’re doing is we’re doing what Devin said was we’re multiplying the impact by distributing it intentionally amongst our respective communities.

It’s like sharing coupons amongst friends. And I share it with my food coupon. He gives his coupon to the next. And next thing you know, we all go to the same restaurant and we’ve now increased that restaurant’s following. And so in a sense, the idea is that if you could do this over time, you start lifting the communities cross engagement with each other. And several of us have increased our followings by thousands, others have not. And it’s because we committed to it on an ongoing basis. So the consistency he was talking about in his C bullet of ABC was you have to do this stuff consistently because I don’t know about you, if I see a single post from somebody and it’s the only post I ever notice, I don’t know if I get it, but if it’s memorable and I kind of hear their voice and I like their attitude, I’m gonna add them into my fake news media cycle, which is called following.

And then basically now I’m listening to their content. Big surprise I’m being influenced by them because I’m learning sort of news from them. And I say that lovingly because I joke that fake news is all kind of curated propaganda as I mentioned earlier. But at the same time, it’s the message that somebody wants to project. Are you open to hearing it? And I think that’s the key of marketing is putting your brand and your awareness and maybe your preeminence in front of somebody so that you are relevant and top of mind. When they have a problem, they think, boom, Derek Notman. They think, oh, I gotta call Adam Holt or I gotta reach out.

That’s who you should use. That’s what we’re effectively doing by creating a following with a credible voice. Yeah, staying top of mind. So how can, if you’re an advisor listening to this, how can you take this a little bit more granular? Like it’s a tactical step. Maybe go find other five financial advisors that actually market to the same type of client you do. Now that might sound backwards at first, like, well, that’s competition. I don’t want them to get my stuff. Or remember, this is the client’s choice, warm inbound. So why not be supportive and all market to the same type of people and let the consumer choose who they want.

Coke and Pepsi are both marketed in the same people. Right? Either you’re a Coke or a Pepsi or you don’t care. So I think that’s something really important to keep in mind. Like that’s a great quick way to get tactical with this. Also hashtags, do you use hashtags, Adam? I do. And it’s becoming more popular on LinkedIn, but obviously for Twitter is really strong. Yeah. But it’s an interesting thing, the hashtags. I tend to forget it more and I tend to tag other individuals whom I think would be relevant. So I might be inclined to say, this reminds me of a conversation I just had with link Derek Nauman, right?

So now Derek’s going to get a notification that I mentioned him in a post. He’s probably going to like it, which means his followers are going to see it if he has enough preeminence with them. And they’re going to see that Derek liked it. Next thing you know, Derek’s subscribers are reading my posts where I happened to mention Derek because they want to hear about their friend. And next, so there’s a habit, a cycle that we tend to do every posting is we tend to link certain individuals or communities that we think would be relevant for that audience. And that just, that makes sense. Recently, I had this situation where I was creating very intentional posts that I wanted my audience to hear.

It was really important for them to hear it. It was technical. I really wanted people to listen to it and it got 5,000 impressions. And I was really happy with that. And then I posted some silly photograph of me from 2018 because someone forwarded it to me and it got 15,000 impressions and hundreds and thousands of likes and reviews. And I’m thinking, why is that gonna go viral relative to this other really important information? And that’s why I tell you people are not consuming and are emotionally connected to data. They’re connected to things that make them feel good or make them laugh or really make them angry.

And that’s obviously evident in I think what people are consuming today. I say that to you because that’s when we talk about authenticity. That’s really what people are looking for engaging with too. I was surprised at how much that photograph making fun of myself was really gonna have that much more impact. That’s not necessarily the preeminence I wanted to create but it wasn’t negative, right? There was no bad, there’s no bad press, right? It was authentic. It was genuine. I was meeting the photo. Right, yeah, that was pretty authentic, right? Unless you’ve got a doppelganger out there. I’ve been told I do. Which is a scary thought.

That’s a scary thought. Yeah, yeah. I look like every other person. But think about it, like followers, right? If you had a lot of followers or enough to like engage with that, which you did, you probably grew your followers. You probably had more profile views. com with the hyphen. You gotta have the hyphen in there. That’s right, don’t forget that. Or whatever, right? So they go down that funnel a little bit. But if you don’t have enough followers, then there’s not enough people to go through that funnel because you’re gonna lose some people at each stage of the funnel. That’s true. Your example on Coinbase was so good because I’ve been saying this for hours.

I loved and I told everybody that I laughed that entire ad of the Super Bowl. I did snap on it and it took me to a page. And yeah, now I’m caught up in the whole lead gen and I think it was worth it just to see where it took me. I did post it. And it was a really great example of scrappy, scrappy memorabilia, memorabilia. Am I saying this right? Memorableness. What is that word? Is that a word? No, it’s not. It’s a word for right now. Oh my gosh, I literally forgot English there for a second. I almost started channeling my Ukrainians. I think we just lost some followers, dude.

We might’ve, you know. But right, mad respect for what’s going on in Ukraine. By the way, this is going on right now. So we’ve got a lot of friends and thoughts out there. So we can’t be remiss in talking about that, especially when we’re talking about memorability. And I think what was interesting about that advertisement is it just impacted so many people and got people thinking and talking good and bad. Some people were quite angry. Recently, I had this situation right when we interviewed Devin and he talked about his ABCDE protocol, which I thought was just fantastic, right? And I’m driving in the car with my daughter and here comes this song.

And they’re like, oh, A, B, C, D, E, F. What? And all of a sudden I’m thinking, where did that come from? And my daughter explained, I don’t know if you guys know what I’m talking about, but this is a song by Gail, a very popular pop artist now, which I have now learned her video alone, which we looked it up because Derek and I are old dads. We had to look it all up, this popper thing. We were like closing our ears the whole time, like, oh my gosh, laughing, because this song basically uses these characters. It has over a hundred million views, right?

Now, how does something like this, Scrappy, a song about ABCDE gain this much following? And if you watch the video on YouTube, it’s all about a home. It’s a home video that this girl and her girlfriends made about her anger with her ex-boyfriend, right? And because it’s so relatable to so many people and authentic, you can just see why it works. Now, I’m not going, I’m not saying that you should all go create like your own home video, but look at even the Holderness family. Have you ever seen what they’ve done? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, on Facebook, sure. They do the spooves on this thing.

It’s totally clean and they make it authentic. And then they end with these really kind of spoofy things where they were messing around their family. Why are we telling you this? What does that have anything to do with gaining followers? People are looking for authentic, real views into who you are as a person so that they want to connect with you. They want to follow you. They want to know you’re not just some robot, but some cool marketing materials, you know? Like that just, it’s not- Boring. It’s not gonna work anymore. Boring, yeah. Stop. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. We’ll outro this program with the ABCDE song for those of you that don’t know.

Yeah, and we’ll link to it. We’ll link to it. Oh, we’ll even link to it. We’re gonna get in real trouble now. Awesome. Let’s talk about our wrap ups, Derek. So what can advisors take away from this program today? Personality wins, man. Personality. And that’s like a combination of authenticity and all that stuff. But just as you said, people connect with you and your content. So that’s gotta come through. As I mentioned earlier, we’re an opt in, opt out like society. So give people a reason to opt in. Why should they take your news, even if it’s fake news, right? Why should they take your news over someone else’s news?

Why do they wanna do that? And what’s cool though, and keep this in mind is that you have a direct voice and interaction with your recipients, the people that are getting your content and vice versa. You can’t do that through a magazine ad. So it’s pretty cool what you can do if you do it right. Those are my big ones. Like, I think that’s, I don’t know. What do you have? What do you wanna add other than your song? Well, Devin said that everybody’s a subject matter expert here. That’s the expectation, right? If you’re publishing something publicly, you gotta stand behind it, right? So that means everybody’s got a higher standard.

Remember that. So here’s the question for you listening right now. What are you a subject matter expert about? What are you an expert about? Okay, now that you know what that is, or you’re gonna think about it overnight, that’s an important. Go with that, double down on that and do it authentically. And then of course, no, thanks. Compliance procedure for regardless of your broker dealer affiliation, whatever it might be, just get over your concerns that they’re not gonna accept it. So therefore you don’t have to start. You have to decide that you’re gonna create a digital presence. Part of this will have to be authentic.

Authentic is what people are connecting with. You don’t have to talk about guarantees to be authentic. You don’t have to talk about returns or performance to be authentic. So the more authentic you are and the less we’ll call it industry you are, the more likely compliance is gonna be supportive as long as you’re not offensive, right? And so that’s the real key to this. I hate to say it, it seems to be obvious. Derek, always a pleasure spending time with you. Yeah, do we wanna like kind of give a little cue up for the next episode here? We had an interesting question come in actually.

Oh, we did. I didn’t even missed it. What was the question? Well, this is from Johnny. I think, was this question to you? Yeah, this was to you. Well, I didn’t answer it. What was it? What did you wanna say? Well, so, and we’ve talked about this in a number of our episodes. So I think it’s kind of relevant and maybe he listened to all of our episodes. I don’t know. Johnny, if you did, thanks, man. That’s three listeners now. Three. That’s awesome. So he says this, he’s like, listen, there’s all this talk of tech integration and the value of human advice and good lead gen and all this stuff, but why?

He just says, why? Why should I focus on tech integration? How am I supposed to find the best clients to work with and what evidence do we have to support the value of human advice over robo? What do you think? Well, I mean, I love this topic. I can’t believe I missed it. And I wanna talk about it. That’s great. Maybe your doppelganger got it instead of you did. I don’t know. Wait, I actually have to read my emails? I thought they’d just come in. It’s a one way thing. 125,000 unread emails right now on my phone. It’s hilarious. So in other words, do not email Adam.

Don’t call Derek. Don’t call me. Don’t email me. Call me and email Derek, okay? There you go. Well, look, there’s lots to talk about here. I mean, the tech integrations, we’ve seen it literally going overboard now. So I have some opinions as a FinTech person and the amounts of demands we’re getting. Can you just avoid us by moving this one piece of data to here? Otherwise we can’t consider it. And we’re like, you’re missing the whole point. We’re trying to elevate the human experience. I don’t know if you realize this. The human value has to be magnified. Otherwise we are gonna wind up basically acting like a bunch of cyborg robots.

And I’ll tell you, robo-advisor can be cheaper than that, by the way. Robo-advisor direct is gonna be cheaper than a cyborg. So we keep talking about this hybrid human tech experience. The tech has to actually just lift the human to its highest, we’ll call it best use, which is with other humans. So we’ll just all stand on this technology together, not necessarily be taken over by it. And I think that’s gonna be a challenging thing with us going forward. Well, we’ve got a really cool guest that we’re gonna talk about this on our next episode. I’m gonna just leave it as like a mystery. Mystery Easter egg.

A mystery, mystery guest. But they are like, you all know them. They know FinTech inside and out. And it’s just, yeah, I think it’ll be a fun conversation and quick to the point saying, we’ll get to it. It’s all good. All right, Derek, my second outro attempt. Let’s hear Gale’s song, you ready? Get ready to rock everybody. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector.

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