Entrepreneur Files with Andrew Ellenberg
Entrepreneur Files with Andrew Ellenberg
A 30 Minute Tour Of The Building Blocks Leading Up To The Imminent Arrival of Web3
As we race ahead toward the next radical transformation of the internet, digital marketing expert Gina Sifers speeds us through the evolution starting with her entry into the business in its infancy. Follow her as she guides us through the key pivot points that paved the way for the immersive, intensely personalized experience coming to a screen near you in Web3.
Andrew Ellenberg is President & Managing Partner Of Rise Integrated, an innovative studio that creates, produces, and distributes original multimedia content across digital touchpoints. Email andrewe@riseintegrated.com or call 816-506-1257.
Well, we're back. The first conversation with Gina Sifers at Bella Media Services was only a half hour, which we thought was just the right amount of time to keep your attention with your short attention spans. But then we realized that there was more to talk about. We were very strategic in that conversation. But one of the recurring themes on Entrepreneur Files with business owners is their ability to adapt and evolve to paradigm shifts and to technology changes. And that brings me to where you started. Gina? Web 1.0. Yes, the user read only user generated content. You know, we really could only read what was on the internet so very exciting that we have expanded our capabilities to the new web 2.0 and web 3.0. Absolutely. We'll talk about that evolution. I think it's really interesting all the pivot points. But in the world of 1.0 You were early, you were early to market Yes, you had that advantage of being a pioneer, if you will, and carving out your own lane. But you were also in a space that didn't offer many creative options. So how did you differentiate yourself when everybody could do static images? Well, you know, it was it was a challenging time. I used a program called Dreamweaver to create websites and used the FTP protocol to transfer files. Stop. Jargon alert! Okay, we're gonna learn what is FTP and why should we care? Yes, File Transfer Protocol. That was the magic of being able to transfer files as quickly and efficiently as you could at the time. Without broadband, it was very, very slow. I would go to bed and wait for all my files to transfer and they would finally be done by the morning. So this was a very archaic way of developing websites at the time. It reminds me of when video and audio post production involved razor blades and actual long strands of tape. No doubt. I can't imagine how those people did that in those days. I know what you mean. It was just very time consuming. And you know, with the new speed of internet today, we can do all of those things in a fraction of the time. So were you there when you were actually having to listen to all those funny noises on the dial up system? Oh, definitely. I mean, it was annoying. To be quite honest. I can't even describe the sound. Nails on a chalkboard? There you go. Fair enough. That's really fair. And another thing that was really difficult was to get listed, so to speak, you know, you with business listings, you had to manually upload every piece of data about your business into these "plat" based search and your platforms individually. It was very slow and daunting. And it would take sometimes, you know, a long time. And now you know we have applications where we can upload all of our business data to you know, 100 search engines at once. So that was an exciting part and development of web 2.0 is to be able to do more in less time and do it more efficiently. Absolutely. And, and I don't know if it's just about efficiency and scalability and automation. So much as there's a real shift in what resonates with people now. Yes, definitely. And I noticed on social media, that static images don't have nearly as much impact as moving images. And audio and podcasts and short form video. It's rich media now. It really is. It truly is very interactive. We need that interactive element in our lives more than ever, and that's gonna continue to grow as we you know, envelop 3.0 So when we skipped we're not going to skip that fast. Baby steps. Yeah. So, so 2.0 came in, yes, it had that impact your business and your strategic thinking and your offerings. Certainly that's a loaded question, but all of them are Yes. That's why we do this on Entrepreneur Files, to ask uncomfortable, awkward loaded questions. You know, I think it opened up a new world of collaboration, and community user generated information that we can love and use to our advantage. The social aspect was huge. And is huge still today. And I think I've learned a lot from social media being able to look what other content creators have put on the web. It's just helped and opened up a whole new world of communication that we never had before. With the read only 1.0 Web world. So Web 2.0 has really helped us be more interactive and our communication, our learning process, and as business owners, it's a wonderful platform to be able if you're up at 11 o'clock at night and you know like you Andrew you I know you stay up late, a lot of nights more than I do. But I could hop on, you know, any kind of platform that we both share and say, Hey, Andrew, are you awake? I have this great idea. I want to run it by you or do you think you know or that was something we could never do with 1.0 because we didn't have that interactive component. So I think that's really raised the bar. I'm amazed by the responses I get at two or three o'clock in the morning. I don't know that I'm up late or I'm up early. It all depends on your point of view. Yes. Also, you know, it's always five o'clock in the morning somewhere working across 24 time zones. This is a global operation. So indeed, I couldn't agree more wonderful that we can communicate with other people in other countries at any point and they'll get back to you if they can't talk to you at that very moment. You know, that two way communication line is incredible. So you were talking about that they removed some of the friction in distributing information to all the different search engines so that you didn't have to manually do it one by one. When do you think that'll be the case on social media? Because right now, I'm finding that I need to optimize everything for each platform differently. It needs to be customized for the channel and the audience. Yes, you know, optimizing as search. Optimization is so important, especially on social platforms. And we've talked about this where hashtags are so important now to put into your social posts that slipped some more people find that information that you're wanting to distribute to the world. And I know a lot of people don't use hashtags now. I'm guilty as charged. Yes. When I when I first started working with Gina, one of her pet peeves with me was that I was being lazy on hashtags. I would do like two or three of them. I didn't even really see how important it was. It just seemed like a chore. But then I noticed that I listened to her and started doing three or four lines of hashtags, really relevant ones that are highly trafficked, with high intent searches, that I would get three to four fold the response. Yes, so there must be something to it. It's not just hype, and a myth. It's right. And you know, another thing I love about the platform's how they've upgraded this last year more, was actually letting you allow you to save your hashtags, you know, and they, you can search your hashtags. Really, yes, you can bookmark your hashtags. Okay. Well, you gotta tell me how to do that. Okay, I'm learning as I go. Everybody is absolutely so you know, every platform if you go to start searching for it, hashtag in your post, it should pop up. It's through the metaverse. Now, Facebook and Instagram is through the metaverse platform. If you're not familiar with that, you need to get on the metaverse with your business it's free to everybody you know that is a participant in Facebook because it gives everyone a headache. I another thing I have to learn it is another new platform another new technology a learning curve. It's a new platform we have to learn for Christ's sake, you it's never going to stop changing. I have to keep learning every day of my life as part of my business process. So the metaverse has really opened up the way you can schedule your posts and it now has machine learning that allows it to understand when the most people visit your page your business page and this is all business by the way. That's just Facebook and Instagram right? That's correct! LinkedIn doesn't have it yet and I'm hoping that they open up that awesome technology for LinkedIn as well. It's so important. What's the incentive for them to do it though they don't have any competition. In the B2B space they own it. Well, that's true, but it's just offering more value to your your customer base. If you just have offering more value to your users, is it possible that they are hesitant to do that because they they are not fond of automation? They want it to be one on one. They don't want to make it easy to interact with people. Do you think that's possibly what's holding them back from rolling out that initiative? You know, that's a great question. That would be something we need to ask at LinkedIn. CEO or senior executive but I really I'm not really sure about that. I don't know why they would not want to upgrade the platform to be of more value to their users. And it's a relatively easy upgrade. Especially for the scheduling aspect and knowing when you're most of your audiences online at any given time. Through the LinkedIn platform I've noticed I've been getting a lot more reach because of that tiny little scheduling option. If you're not familiar with it, go to the Metaverse channel on Facebook and start posting, you'll see that it will give you an option to find optimal times is the button isn't the way that it reads you might get confused because they have like three different times at the top of that little module interface. Right if you Yeah, just look down and see optimal times click that button and then you'll see the actual times that they've decided Wow, so the the only way Yes, Googling when's the best time to post on LinkedIn is now obsolete. Exactly. Cross both fingers. It happens quick. So you learn all this new stuff. And then you just don't need it anymore because it's obsolete. And then you have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff. Yes, it's just a constant learning curve. Let me ask you this. Because you you have been quietly operating under the radar. I would say for 10 years. Yes. A lot of people know you but it's all organic. It's word of mouth. It's referrals, buzz, you really just started to step into the spotlight recently. That is true. And I know that that was not an easy transition for you to make because you're just a soft spoken kind of humble person. Indeed I am Andrew, you know me well. So for you, I see how easy this comes. You know, I remember seeing some of your posts over the last few weeks trying to encourage people to come out of their little shell and and you know make their debut on your awesome Entrepreneur Files. And I think, you know, people are just timid, they're used to hiding behind their computer screens and doing all of their work and there's nobody around and it's private and it's safe. So getting out of your safe zone. So you know, your safe place is really hard for a lot of people. We talked about how some people have this talent where they can just hop on video and do amazing things and show all the exuberance in the world and make it so easy and make it look so easy, but it's not like that for everybody. Unfortunately, you know, it's just not and I think some of the things that they can do to make themselves feel more comfortable in this new environment of blogging and podcasts and, and video debuts is, you know, look at what other people are doing. You know, check out your YouTube channel. See how some of the tips and tricks from your actions on video perform and how you perform and many other brilliant, talented industry leaders. Yes, exactly. Follow all of them. Excellent. I interact with them. And sometimes we have uncomfortable conversations about why should we cooperate with you. You're a competitor you're in my space. And there's always a way to find a common ground because we're all dealing with challenges and I'm an I'm a specialist I'm in content as a service. I'm in journalism is content marketing, so I don't do what everybody else does. I'm reaching out to somebody, a multi million dollar business, really well established high tech is high value customers. And all they do is industrial stuff. That's it. He's not just B2B, right, which I tend to lean toward but specifically in a clearly defined segment of B2B and because that's all he does all day long. He knows all the ins and outs. So I said, you know, let's just talk about some of the challenges and solutions and strategies and tactics that we're using to embrace this digital transformation of business communications. And he thought that was a great idea. Shoot! That's okay. I think that's hilarious. So Gina's favorite song. That's a theme song on her phone is what is it? This is great. This is on fire. I am on fire. I can get my phone to quit ringing she really is he she's so busy. so popular. I think that's phenomenal. You know that's a cardinal sin in broadcasting. But when you can hang up that's even more cheesy. See, you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be real. That's the truth. And now I'm going to turn down the phones. I'm not even going to edit this out. Well I might. It might be a good idea. Okay, sorry about that. Okay, so we're already okay. We were talking about looking at different video podcasts, different people on the net. People that are rulers of the universe when it comes to the business that they love to do so I think that's a great way to point people to be more comfortable about it. You know, your business like the back of your hand. So feel comfortable. Discuss what you know, that what you know, what you feel, what inspires you what drives you what gets you out of the bed in the morning, what keeps you up at night? What makes you feel like thrown in the towel, what you do to keep going and find inspiration to power through the daily grind of being an entrepreneur. That's what it's all about here is so we are rapidly coming up on web 3.0 abbreviated as web three because everybody's so busy. We don't have time to say the whole thing. Yes. And then Web3 is part of the metaverse or it's not a part of the metaverse. It's so murky. It's such an undefined gray zone right now that I think there's a huge historic opportunity for creative people and strategic people to help define what it is. Yes, it there definitely is a huge group of people that are trying to come up with the perfect concept. I mean, it is a concept right now. It's a huge idea and we're starting to see some of those elements of what people envision coming to pass. You know, I I love the open source software that is already available, but jargon alert again. Okay, what's open source software and why should we care? Yes, open source software. It's basically a platform that can be built by the community. And you can share this open source platform and interact with people about projects. So it's really an opportunity for us to work on a content platform that's shared. That's basically it's just that simple. And a lot of it's free. Right now you can Google Open Source software and find out that there are a lot of free programs out there for instance, video production, video editing. Software is now an open source platform. And you can always upgrade of course there's always an upgrade factor but the open source basics are becoming quite, quite intelligent and exciting. No doubt. That being said, the Lamborghini doesn't drive itself No. And it always takes longer than you think it's going to take because of all the little speed bumps we run into in processing the giant files we're dealing with rendering the editing that we did and then customizing it for the channel. And all of those steps have the potential for delay. Am I right is there's always going to be delays. That's why you have to you know, prepare for that in your deadlines. Try to push those deadlines out a little bit. Because inevitably You know, I think it's going to open up more opportunities for something is always going to happen it seems within the technology field to slow you down is that part of the secret to your 85% to 90% retention rate over the last few years? Absolutely is managing expectations and telling people under promising and over delivering them. Yes, exactly. I mean, that's the wonder of, you know, pushing out those those deadlines that you're telling the customer because you're allowing for that cushion time for any hiccups in the process of completing your work for the customer. Absolutely. So what role do you see playing in the web free world? In multimedia in the personalization of business communications? Clearly you you saw an opportunity there and joining forces with Rise integrated and me and my team. Absolutely. You're joining the board of advisors. You're gonna be joining our roundtable I'm so people to create amazing content on shared platforms like we're excited about this. Yes. And we're inviting CEOs and founders and all kinds of top level entrepreneurs to weigh in on the challenges of this digital transformation. The phone is dead. Things that we did in the past are no longer effective. I do and we have to literally reinvent from the front office to the back office, how we interact with people. And I think that all of your experience and seasoning through all of these pivot points and these major evolutions is going to position you very well to be a leader in that space. Thank talking about. you and I I agree with you and I think it's going to be the same I think it's going to open up opportunities that we will not story for you and so many other entrepreneurs out there wanting to embrace this new concept of technology. have Big Brother looking over everything we do all the time. Are you sure about that? I that's a stretch for me. Yeah. I'm kind of jaded and cynical. I see. Well, you know, the decentralization concept. And that's what radically changing. Yes, right? Web 3.0 is going to be, you know, the DAO, the de centralized autonomous let me say I'm still learning all of this organization meeting. It's user generated, it's it's actually run by an owned by the users in the community. So that's, that's kind of exciting that we're going to kind of get away from somebody, you know, people that want to look over every single thing. We do, you know, even banking is changing. Now, this 3.0 is really already happening. You know, really, how is banking? Oh, well, that's that's a whole different topic that I'm not here to talk about. But you know, there's all these online banks now that there's the their development is so much different. than what we're used to doing as far as banking, interactive banking, my bank now you can't even you can't even use a drive thru. It's it's artificial intelligence. It's machine learning. So now I talked to I just push buttons on the screen to get my money, you know, and the next level is you don't need to push anything. You just go high, and it has a conversation with you. I think all the tabs and everything on Chrome and all that has to go away. That's gonna be a dinosaur. It just doesn't work. It's not good navigation. I can never find what I'm looking for. I have a million tabs open. I just want to say, what was that document about such and such a topic from six months ago? Can you pull up all those documents? And it pulls it up? Oh, there was a graphic associated with Can I see all my social media posts? I know it's exciting. I mean, Web 3.0 is going to be machine learning and artificial intelligence. I love it. Some people don't want Google tracking us. They don't want Facebook tracking us. But isn't it nice when you're looking for something and it just pops up on your screen and there it is a day later? You know, maybe you got busy in your search and you couldn't really nailed down what you were needing to find or that present you were looking for for your boss. You know, it actually helped you in helping you find what you need faster today, right? We're gonna see more of that artificial intelligence. And machine learning, evolving through Web 3.0. So that it makes our lives a little bit easier, a little more efficient and functional. And, and again, that's very, what's the word I'm looking for controversial. It's very controversial. Some people don't want to be tracked at all. Well, that that data is is is helping grow that artificial intelligence. It's just going to keep becoming more and more intelligent from that user generated data is become smarter than us, Gina. Well, that is scary. That is Orwellian. It's most likely to happen. We are AI will be the most intelligent source on the earth. Because it's going to continue to learn more and more. And we may have to accept that. Wow, no, amazing huh? So what would be your takeaway from this and advice to entrepreneurs listening about what little baby steps they can take to start moving in the right direction in their business communications now? Well, I think doing what we're doing now, you know, getting the word out about your business, getting the word out about you know, opportunities and tips and tricks, communicate with your audience, try to meet them at their needs. And whatever that may be, you know, whatever your industry is, and what you see is a need. Get out there and start talking about it. You know, create videos like you're doing I love what you're doing on the communication trying to get new leads by sending short video snippets instead of an email that we see every single day. I have probably 100 emails that come through my inbox every day, and most of it has nothing that I'm really interested in, or that has to do with my business. So I'm overwhelmed with it. And I love how you are in I'm starting to put that out there for people a quick video snippet that they can just click on a link and say, Hey, there's Andrew liquid he has for me today. Just like being in the office, almost almost as good as up close and personal. It is in their environment. But you can't always be face to face in someone's environment. So you want to be as personable as possible using the technology. Yes, because we're seeing that phone that we talked about this if the phone calling people cold calling people it's like a thing of the past. And you said something the other day about never leave a message. Don't leave a phone message. They won't answer you. You know when you're prospecting, they will not answer you and I learned this many years ago. 15 to 20 years ago. It wasn't very common that I would leave a message because I realized that people are so busy with their lives, that they're probably not going to take time to call you back. Keep trying to call them instead. You're know how I know that you're right? Because all the people that cold call me every day. They don't leave a voicemail. It's a common known thing that they will not reply. So it makes sense. And then you know, we were also talking about other ways to generate leads. Today we're talking about networking, and how important that is and where you can tell me what you said about some CEOs. Now the thing that's a lot of CEOs are very frustrated with the networking process. They feel like it's speed dating, you just pass out a bunch of business cards, you do your elevator pitch, everybody's trying to position themselves as a genius and an expert in the industry and it becomes a blur and you can't separate one face from another and there's just no quality time to connect. So they're looking for deeper ways to connect with people that are much less surface than that. More intimate smaller environments, peer groups, mastermind groups, roundtables. And so I think you were saying that that is the next iteration of networking is roundtables and peer groups and masterminds. Yes. And we also talked about how you can bring that all to the online world, on a Metaverse type platform, 3D virtual where virtual people, that's possible too, but I really love the roundtables. I still love networking, I still get more business from a networking opportunity. But it's not just that that one networking opportunity. You know, you could have 10 leads sometimes it's the person dropping the ball, you know, they go to these networking events they have like maybe five people they met you only have so much time at a networking event to meet so many people. And then the follow up is so important, you know, and then booking a one on one instead of calling it an appointment, which is like I can't do another appointment this week. But I can do. That's a chunk of my life I'll never get back. How about a one on one, you know, where we just it's real casual, we get to know each other. So you have to do the follow up after the networking. You can't expect to seal a deal in one networking or you know, find prospects from one networking group immediately. You're going to have to do your your your work online and offline. Correct. I've been talking about the fact that we used to use a hook. It was all about the hook and catching people and reeling them in and everything and strip lining we learned in sales training or whatever, and now they're not biting on that hook. It's not about using a hook. It's about using a magnet, it's about having a gravitational pull in your orbit, the law of attraction. And that applies regardless of where you meet that person. It doesn't matter whether you met them in person or you met them online. They're not ready to talk about buying something now don't start at the end of the sales cycle. Start at the top of the funnel where belongs. Yes, getting to know each other. You know, you can take that all back all the way back to just general dating you know, get to know each other don't tell your whole life story in one date. Timing is everything. I really believe in listening before somebody's ready to hear it. You start pushing a solution before somebody has even identified the problem or accepted the fact or agreed with you that that is an issue for them or a challenge. You're just you're just talking until you're blue in the face. It's pointless to turn them off. I did a post today but you know, the old way of selling is pushing. Well, okay, you're pushing a boulder up a mountain. Good luck with that! Very true. So yeah, fantastic. That was a great follow up a little more tactical today, like we said, some actionable insights that you can jump on immediately to start moving your business in the right direction. Obviously both of us are available to talk on LinkedIn or whatever works for you. Continue the conversation there and make it a newsworthy day. Yes, indeed. Thank you Andrew. Thank you Gina Sifer, Bella Media Services co-founder, CEO.
