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20th November, 2024 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Joe Glover - lessons and top tips from the founder of the UK's largest marketing community

Phil Bray 

Good morning, everybody and welcome to a chilly Nottingham. It was snowy yesterday, but just chilly today. I hope you’re well. Welcome to this morning’s Yardstick webinar, our penultimate webinar of the year. We are delighted that we are being joined today by Joe Glover, who is a co-founder of The Marketing Meetup, which has got a lovely strap line, “The positively lovely community for marketers.” I really love that. Before we get into this with Joe who will be talking about a whole range of things, we’ll do the usual start. Dan, please just tell anybody who’s new around here how we do things.

Dan Campbell 

Yeah, sure thing. Thanks, Phil. Welcome to today’s session, I hope we’re not all snowed in, but if you are, at least we’ve got an interesting webinar to help pass the time. So, what do we all need to know? As Phil alludes, if this is your first ever Yardstick webinar, first of all, welcome, but second of all, we encourage as much participation as possible. Though your microphones and cameras are not on, you can still talk to us. Send us a comment via the chat or use the Q&A box and have your say. Ask questions about the things Phil and Joe are discussing, tell us you agree, or, even better, tell us you disagree. It’s a safe space and we’re all here to learn, so let’s make the most of the hour. The format when we have a special guest is that Phil will lead with his own questions for Joe, but I’ll be sweeping up your comments and questions at regular intervals throughout. So, don’t worry, we will get to your questions. Before we start, I’ll answer a question now that we often get. We absolutely are recording today’s session, a video will be sent out along with a summary of any links or resources mentioned. We’ve got our very own Abi Robinson to thank for that, so a big thank you to her as ever for diligently working behind the scenes. Now, enough of me, let’s have some of Phil and Joe, shall we? Over to you guys.

Phil Bray 

Cheers Dan, thanks, mate. Right, so Joe, I thought we’d start by – we have the lovely Rory Sutherland on the screen, who was on our webinar earlier on in the year, and he says the Marketing Meetup is definitely one of the good guys, and I’ve watched your community build over the years to 51,387 marketers, and it just always strikes me as a really vibrant, kind, loving community. So, just tell us a bit more about the history. Why you started it, what your aims are, what your visions are for the community.

Joe Glover 

Sure, no worries. Hi everyone, thank you for taking the time to tune in today. My story starts eight years ago. The first thing that will become apparent about myself is that I’m a quieter individual, I’m more introverted than extroverted, and so when I was working as a solo marketing manager in a small business, I wanted to meet other marketers and learn about marketing, but the traditional answer of attending events felt like something that was a little bit inaccessible to me. Mainly because you walk into those spaces and people are stood in those circular formations, and they tend to judge your humanity not by the contents of your character, but by your job title or your budget, which, of course, are heuristics for whether the conversation is going to be one that people want to have but nonetheless, it felt like people were valuing the wrong thing. And so, in a canteen in Cambridge, I started a group. I called it “The Cambridge Marketing Meetup” and plonked it up on meetup.com not really expecting anything to happen. Lo and behold, for the first event, we had 100 people sign up, and it being a free event, 50 people turned up but it was still a good result. The Marketing Meetup at its core for our in-person events, is a speaker, a nice buffet, and this instruction to be positively lovely. It’s all about folks coming into the space and looking to value the human beings in front of them, to be kind, elevating, inclusive, and lovely. That was kind of mission achieved. When you said in your question there, Phil about “the vision”, I actually achieved the vision from day one, which was, just create this space that felt lovely. However, over the past eight years, this hobby has turned into a job, and this job is now running nearly 200 events across the world, from London to Tokyo. Our little community in Cambridge has turned into 50,000 folks across the world. Our social following is something like 250,000 people, and each week we reach thousands of people who are attending our events. It’s a wild journey, but the thing that I feel most proud of is that at the core of it, the values have stayed true; we come together to look after each other and to make things better. I think even though the scale is different, the values have stayed very much intact. Which is really lovely, and it’s good.

Phil Bray 

It sounds as though – I’ll take the screen sharing off so we can see each other a bit better – you know a thing or two, from Cambridge to Tokyo, about building communities. A lot of the people on this call are financial advisers, financial planners, and their clients don’t know each other, generally speaking. There might be one or two links, but generally speaking, their clients don’t know each other so they’re a fairly disparate group of people. What tips have you got…actually, let’s start in a different way. What are the benefits of creating community? And then, what tips have you got to help the people on this call create a community of their clients?

Joe Glover 

The benefits. I think the principal benefit that we can speak about is, the currency of community is opportunity. Which means you just don’t know what’s going to happen because community at its purest expression is a human experience, which is people coming together to be stronger than they would be alone, to elevate one another and make things generally better for one another. With these things in mind, you get these folks into a space to share an experience and you just don’t know what could happen. It could be that folks find new jobs, it could be that they find a new partner to go mountain biking with, it could be that someone decides to create a new business off the back of it. So, fundamentally, the currency of community is opportunity, and I think that, first and foremost, is the thing to bear in mind when looking to create a community. In terms of creating community, the thing that I tend to speak to is the commonalities of the emotion that we look for. If we’re creating a community for our clients we can look at the functional things, and I think it’s important to. With The Marketing Meetup, we are a bunch of marketers, that is a very functional thing. We come together to learn, meet, get better, etc. But the story that I just told you wasn’t one about getting together every month and learning about things, the story I told you was one about emotion. It’s about when I was scared and I wanted somewhere to go that was more kind. I think that’s really the spirit which holds these things together. To give an example of why that’s important, I’ve been running The Marketing Meetup for three years in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, traveling around the country, running these events and hopefully having a nice time most of the time, but not always, it’s hard graft too. That was between 2016 and 2019. In April 2019, The Marketing Meetup (TMM) revenue matched my salary, and so I decided to go full time with TMM. But everyone knows what happens in March 2020, COVID, and all of a sudden, the 130 events that we had planned for that year disappeared in a flash. Had we not had the commonality of the emotion, but rather, instead, we chose to focus on the function of events, my events business would have died in that moment. Instead, there’s a community which exists around these emotions, common storytelling, and ideas which are very, very human. And all of a sudden, instead of doing in person events, we started doing things online and the transition was seamless. So, in answer to your question, always focus on the emotion. This is a human experience and humans have emotions, so finding those is always the most useful thing, in my opinion.

Phil Bray 

That’s interesting. You went through some challenges in March 2020, clearly, like anybody who ran face-to-face events. There’s a chap called Brad Burton who runs 4Networking and Brad had challenges at that time as well, as anybody did who runs those physical events. Our audience today is largely financial advisers, financial planners, mortgage brokers and representatives from organisations who support those businesses. If you are attending today and you’re thinking about running events next year to try and create community amongst your clients, what are the pros and cons for you of face-to-face events versus online events, Joe?

Joe Glover 

We think about them in two slightly different ways. So, it’s really good to point out the distinction between the two, Phil. The first is, for the online events, we tend to take more of an educational perspective on things. We run weekly webinars every Tuesday at two o’clock and we get a guest speaker, similar to this format. The intention behind that event is education, because it suits people sat at home and taking notes. There is a lot of chat in the chat function, so people are learning together and sharing experiences, but the primary thing we’re looking to do in that situation is learn. There is the additional benefit to online events, which is the reach being so much bigger. For example, we ran a webinar yesterday and 1000 people signed up for it. We wouldn’t be able to get 1000 people into a physical space, but online we’re able to bring people in from Switzerland, Cape Town, and so on, and we had that reach. So, that’s a real pro, and a reason to do the online stuff. For the in-person stuff, we still have a talk at our events, but really, that’s a hook. It’s a way to get folks in the room and give them something, a point of conversation, which they could have a chat with a stranger about. If it’s about social media strategy, they may ask a question about social media strategy and how you find it, but really, the point in those situations is to create those serendipity moments, those things and opportunities that we’ve already discussed. The focus there really is on human connection. The ways that we facilitate that, and it’s very Lo-Fi, I’m not saying that we do anything particularly special, are through pizza, beer, a nice space, but the fourth most important principle, and one that I think can easily be missed, is that in the environment of our in-person events the thing that we work on is culture. It’s through that instruction of being positively lovely, “Come into this space to look to benefit each other and make things better.” Because anyone can do events. Anyone can do events, and they are what they are, but for an event to feel like our event, we want it to be positively lovely. There’ll be different versions of that, I don’t think that everyone should run positively lovely events, I think some people should run aggressively salesy events, if that’s what they want to do, or negatively nasty, you know, whatever it is that you want to do. But have some thought about the culture that you want to create. This is the magic bit, my experience is that if you ask people to be positively lovely, they generally will be, and I think the same goes for whatever cultural expectation you set for your community.

Phil Bray 

It sounds like what you’re saying is to create successful events, you need a thing, a hook. Yours is “positively lovely”, but it could be something else.

Joe Glover 

Yes, partially. In two different ways. I view a successful community as – the implementation and creation of a community and a community organiser, the thing they should be focused on more than any other thing is that culture. I think that goes such a long way. In terms of getting bums on seats at events, there is a far more functional task as well. So, there are some topics we know will fill a room a lot more, i.e. stuff around AI, social media, marketing, etc., and so, I am obsessed with the culture bit, but I am also aware that there’s a very functional reason that people attend our events, and you do need both.

Phil Bray 

We’ll look at the online world for a moment because I think in our community there are more advisers and planners who are considering running online events than they are physical face-to-face events. The barrier to entry is just lower. From a functional side, what top-tips could you share with our audience today about getting people to sign up and show up?

Joe Glover 

Nice. We all look at the world through our eyes, right? My most recent experience is that the greatest thing that we’ve done in terms of bringing people to our events every week has been growing our newsletter. This isn’t a direct answer to your question because when you’re starting from zero, you may not have a newsletter list necessarily, but I would encourage you to do so because having the benefit of a prompt to go out to folks to attend an event is really useful. In that spirit actually, one of the things that is well worth knowing is that we get about half of our sign-ups on the day of the events that we run. So, we consciously schedule our events for 2 O’clock in the afternoon, because we’ll send an email reminder at 8:30 in the morning of the day of the event to say, “We’re running this event on this day”. My guess would be that the majority of the folks who actually show up for the event subsequently, are within that sort of 50% of people who sign up. There is an expectation thing. On webinar sign-ups, even if you get 1000 people sign up, you’re probably going to run at a 30% – 40% attendance rate, so, at that point, it’s about making the content available afterwards. You said it at the beginning, Dan, about making the recording for this webinar available. We make ours available via our podcast and our YouTube which have been growing steadily in the background. Now, The Marketing Meetup Podcast is in the UK’s top 10 marketing podcasts which is wild. What it speaks to is meeting people where they are, and some people love to attend an event like this. We’ve got people like Paul in the chat here who’s brilliant, he’s contributing in the chat and sort of making the event what it is. Then you’ve got folks who want to engage on the podcast, on YouTube, or whatever it may be, and we’re providing those opportunities. That provides a really lovely content flow as well, because you’ve got some great content for your site. In terms of showing up, there is an additional thing, which is being bold, to a certain extent, in reminders is okay. We will generally send two automated reminders through Zoom: one a week before, one a day before. In fact, three! Because we send one an hour before as well. We’ll also do a customised template through The Marketing Meetup’s CRM, HubSpot, so, there are a lot of reminders for folks who have signed up as well. The messaging in that place is not one of aggression like, “See you there; or else”, it’s just, “We’re really looking forward to seeing you there, we’ve created this for you, and we hope you have a lovely time.” So, those reminders are okay to do, and I wouldn’t step off the gas, so to speak, with them. I’ve been doing this for four years with the online events, and we’ve never had a complaint from someone saying, “You’re reminding me too often about your event once I’ve signed up for it”, etc. What we’ve spoken about so far is getting people to your event; then there was some encouragement about getting around the newsletter. For before the event, we spoke about regular reminders, and then after the event, turning that content into something that can be digested afterwards in whichever way people would like. Of course, it’s slightly different at the very beginning. This will be my final point, probably. If you’re starting from point zero and you haven’t run an online event before, then I’m afraid there is almost no escaping elbow grease. Getting in touch with every person you know, finding groups that are similar to the folks that you would like to come along, building partnerships with organisations who have access to lots of folks that you would like to speak to, using the speaker’s network to get them to advertise the event for you. All of these things, unfortunately, take time, and they take a bit of thought, but at the end of the day, this is how you start to get going in the beginning. Of course, there is a very functional thing as well, which is making the content compelling for people to come along. And I don’t think it’s a trivial point to be making sure you’re listening to what the audience wants, and not just running the event that you want to put on, because if it’s dry, if it’s boring, if it’s not what people want, they’re not going to show up, because they don’t have to.

Phil Bray 

That’s about meeting people where they are linking back to what you said earlier.

Joe Glover 

Exactly.

Phil Bray 

I think some of the advisers and planners who I’ve admired most of this year are the ones who have put on online events. They take themselves out of their comfort zone and run webinars. One of the things we’ve noticed is once they’ve done one, they get a bit of a buzz from it and really enjoy it. They really enjoy presenting, and they do another one, and another one, and another one. But there is a lot of elbow grease in getting people to sign up and show up, unless you’ve already got a relatively large and engaged audience. You clearly have both of those things. So, if we’ve got people on this call with no audience, or people on this call with an ambition to grow a larger audience, just get really practical for us with hints and tips for doing those two things and growing the audience.

Joe Glover 

Sure. Well, the first thing to say is one can only speak from one’s experience, right? And so, I’ve been running The Marketing Meetup now for eight years, and so we have got to the place that we have got to, because we have shown up week after week, day after day. We’ve shown up for a very long time (I had hair at the beginning of this process) to help people have a genuine sense that we want to benefit their lives. The first bit of advice that I can give, which is philosophical but hopefully also very practical, is that you can give yourself forgiveness that you’re not going to see results after day one. It just doesn’t work that way. There are some people who could maybe throw millions of pounds at these things and land with a real splash, but I’m going to assume that’s the 1% rather than the 99%. Speaking to the 99%, the avenues that have helped me have been through the generosity of in-person events. Our in-person events are generally free, and the way that I initially got folks to those events was messaging through LinkedIn, and also doing sponsorship relationships with other organisations who wanted to speak to a lot of marketers. We did contra deals where no money is exchanged and instead, as an example, a local recruiter who wanted to get in front of lots of marketers, I would ask them to email their database about our event, and in turn, we treated them as sponsors of that event. It was a £0 exchange, but we got some exposure to the local community, and they got a sponsorship slot. LinkedIn outreach. One of the first things that I did in every location, whenever we started them, was go through LinkedIn and craft a message which was non-salesy and hopefully warm, usually, in the spirit of, “Hey Phil, I’m looking to start a new networking group in Nottingham for marketers, I wondered if I could invite you along.” That would be it. I think a lot of folks make the mistake of trying to do the world’s longest thing and tell everyone everything that they need to know about it but, it’s just getting that permission in the first instance to tell someone about the thing that you’re doing, whether that’s a networking group or a webinar. I think, so long as it’s targeted appropriately and is respectful of people’s time, they can say yes or no, they can ignore you, and it’s all fine. So, they are some tips. An additional thing that has served The Marketing Meetup very well over the years is my own personal brand. It feels completely icky to say the words “personal brand” out loud, or even to acknowledge that that’s a thing. Nonetheless, through showing up on LinkedIn where my people are, so to speak, it’s now turned into a fabulous source of friendship, kinship, and conversation, and when the the business needs it, it’s also an opportunity to speak about the events that we’ve got, sponsorship opportunities or whatever it may be. Perhaps we can talk about slightly more tactical things on personal branding later, if that’s useful; it may or may not be. Those are probably the three things that I do up front. The last thing which I think is really important, is the point of momentum. I think it references what you mentioned earlier, Phil, which was, “People get the bug” and they want to do it again. This relates to my first point about time as well, which is, you need to show up in the first instance and once you do, you can start to build that momentum over the course of time. One way that I think you can supercharge or fast track, I don’t know why I just said “supercharge”, that’s the most corporate thing I’ve ever said in my life. One way you can fast track this process is simply by asking people to ask their friends to come to. What you’ll find is that, well, in our case, if we’ve got a positively lovely group of people coming to our events, then why would their friends not be positively lovely too? Why would their colleagues not be positively lovely? And there is a profound difference in asking, “Would you mind telling your friends?” versus not asking that, in terms of the amount of advocacy that you gain from your community. So, a very practical tip is making sure you’re asking the people who show up to recommend is absolute gold dust. It’s so simple, but if you miss it, then it’s one of those things that is a real missed opportunity to build momentum going forward.

Phil Bray 

What you said a few minutes ago about the contra deals is something that a lot of the advisers and planners on this call could do because they will have links to local accountants and solicitors. They could go to their next webinar, they could go to the local accountant and do that contra deal of, “I’ll give you free sponsorship of this and you’ll get X, Y, or Z, if you mail it out to your database”.  That’s a fabulous idea, Joe, that a lot of people could take forward.

Joe Glover 

It’s super easy. The only appendix on that is that lots of people speak about partnerships. Again, I live my world in my context, as every person does, and I probably get four or five messages per week about some form of partnership, someone asking me to promote something, someone asking me to like something, whatever it may be. So, there has to be a clear value exchange. That’s why the idea of “You will be a sponsor at this event” is a clear value exchange, rather than just saying, “Hey, I’m looking to do this thing. Do you mind messaging?”. It feels like that should be a moot point, but I don’t think it is because a lot of people, with the asks that I see, at the very least, say, “Hey, do you mind just promoting this to your database”, which is a lovely thing, and you want to help as many people as you can. That’s why we exist but by the same token, if we said yes to everyone who asked us to promote something, then the audience would get so tired, the community would get so tired of seeing messages from anyone, so it’s got to work both ways.

Phil Bray 

You get those messages because of your personal brand. If nobody knew you, you wouldn’t get those messages. So, let’s talk a bit about personal brand and the importance of that.

Joe Glover 

Yes. It makes me feel… not your question. I’ve teed up this conversation, so this is entirely my fault, but even the idea of personal branding makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable because I just want to show up as myself and generally, I think I do. So to acknowledge that people think that there has to be a take is uncomfortable for me but let’s speak about it because it is a truthful thing. The way that I express my “personal brand” is through LinkedIn. The reason I do that is because I find myself more comfortable expressing myself through written words than I do spoken word. I’ll lie in a dark room after this hour and have to recover of conversation, but written word is something I feel quite comfortable doing. So, for me, when I speak about my personal brand, what I mean is I am showing up on LinkedIn, posting content regularly, which is true to myself. But let’s unpack that, because I’m eight years into this journey, so saying I post content true to myself is not particularly instructive for someone who’s just starting their journey. The things that I would like to be known for are conversations around marketing, conversations around introversion and quietness because that is something that is core to who I am as a person, and more recently, I have conversations around mental health and parenthood. These are the things that are quite core to my personality. So, they are things which I will speak about regularly and therefore are the components of my personal brand. If I was to try and translate these things into something which is useful for the folks watching today, that they could do something with, then I’d start creating a table. At the top of my table sits these four things: marketing, mental health, quietness and being a dad. Those things would sit at the top of my table, and then underneath, there are a series of points that I will quite regularly make about each of them. So, from a marketing perspective, I choose to take the time to elevate great examples of marketing efforts. I will take the time to speak about people in the industry I like. I’ll showcase and discuss ideas and examples that are interesting to me. In the second column, say, for example, mental health, I may speak about my past with anxiety or whatever it may be. With each of these points are for when you sit down at the beginning of your day and you think, “Cor, I don’t know what to write today” so you can go to your table and see that you’ve got these four columns with a series of things that you’re willing to speak about within those columns. Then, you show up. You show up every day, or as often as you’re comfortable with and there is no prescribed number of times that you should be posting, but you show up consistently with these themes that express you and your humanity. And that’s all I’ve done. That’s all I’ve done for a very long time. The nice thing is that, because they are things true to myself, it’s not work, and it’s relatively easy for me to write because I enjoy it and I’m able to show up day after day with these ideas and so on and so forth. Over the course of time a personal brand builds, and people gravitate to you or they don’t. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who see me as being way too twee, and that’s fine. I’m okay with that, because I’ve got a great group of people who feel as I feel, or recognise the world as I recognise it, and want to be part of my worldview for whatever reason it may be. So, the point of encouragement here if you’re starting at point zero on your personal branding stuff, is A) To acknowledge that it’s valuable. B) To take the pressure off your shoulders and enjoy the process rather than feeling like you need to get something out of it straight away. And then C) Think about those pillars, whatever they may be for you, that can inform how you post, how you show up, in this case on LinkedIn, but it could be wherever feels relevant for for you and your personal brand.

Phil Bray

Have you got any negative pillars? Places you won’t go, things you avoid.

Joe Glover 

I guess, by virtue of the ones which I’ve listed, yes, but I don’t write down the negative things. A really important value that I hold is that I want to be elevating in our industry, which specifically means that, and I don’t know whether this exists for you in the same way, but whenever I go on LinkedIn, I just see people trashing other people’s work or saying horrible things about the industry. For example, yesterday, Jaguar released the rebrand and the vitriol around that was horrible. I thought, this is someone or a group of people who are clearly trying to do a thing, whether or not it’s been successful, I’d rather spend my time speaking about a really good example that I really love, rather than shouting down something that I really hate. Without me getting too woo woo, that’s the energy that I want to put out into the world. I want to be putting out a positive energy, rather than a negative energy. So, the short answer to your question is yes, but that’s more based on values and the things that I’ve spoken about, rather than a declared thing where I say, “I’m not going to speak about this” or whatever.

Phil Bray 

Yes, that happened recently. I’m in Nottingham and the Nottingham Building Society launched a rebrand recently, and that got panned in many ways, and I actually really liked it. I’m going to come to Dan in a minute to take a look at the questions. But Joe, did you talk about password anxiety a minute ago? Did I hear that correctly?

Joe Glover 

No, not password anxiety, a history of anxiety.

Phil Bray

Ah a history of anxiety. Sorry, I misheard that completely! Right, let’s gloss over that. Dan, questions in the chat.

Dan Campbell

Yes, sure thing, we’ve got a few. The first I’ll ask is a friend of the webinar, Paul. Going back to promoting people, Paul says, “Presumably you have other filters on who you might promote, for example, quality of offer slash integrity of supplier.” So, talk to us a little bit about how you filter/vet, people who you might promote.

Joe Glover 

The nice thing for us is that this term, “positively lovely”, has become an instruction at our events, it’s become a cultural value, and has become a question. We ask ourselves the question, “Is this positively lovely?” And if it’s a no, then we don’t do it, if it’s a yes, then we do. So, Paul is absolutely right that there are additional filters that sit within that, but it comes down to values and it comes down to the things that we hold true. I’ve chosen to build my community, my business, in such a way which holds us true to those values. Money is cool and all that, but if you want to build a business which has longevity, meaning, and enjoyment to it, then I don’t think you spend a lot of time doing the things that you really despise doing, or doing it with people you don’t want to do it with. So, for us, “positively lovely” is the benchmark not only of the behaviors we choose to exhibit, but also with whom we choose to do it.

Dan Campbell 

And of course, you said the opposite of “positively lovely” is “negatively nasty”. So, whether it’s just avoiding that “negatively nasty”, isn’t it I suspect? Brilliant. Okay, Rishabh asked a question too. Their question is all about how LinkedIn can help with marketing, especially for financial services, given our audience. But just in general, what’s your take on the role of LinkedIn for marketing?

Joe Glover

I think you find your people on LinkedIn. I have found myself very much in a marketing bubble because that is where I’ve spent my time, and I think you can do the same for financial services. To give an example of a third industry, there is a chap I know who has established a lot of credibility very quickly in the bio-pharma space because he has embraced the principles that we’re speaking about, consistency and showing up in certain ways. If anything, it could or should be slightly easier because I would suggest that the marketing space, while there are some advantages, marketers speak about things but we’re also very keen to have our say, and so, it’s quite a saturated space. And, based on my experience, and I could be wrong about this, in the case of the financial services profession, if this is a skill set or something which isn’t seen as immediately beneficial, then there could be a real opportunity to quite quickly build some credibility as the person who posts on LinkedIn, and create that space for yourself. Now, that bit might be a complete stereotype; I don’t know, because I don’t live and breathe in your world so I need to acknowledge that I know nothing about it, but I would certainly say that there is space for folks, regardless of sector or industry.

Phil Bray 

Joe, could you talk a little bit about how often you undertake certain activities on LinkedIn? Posting, engaging, audience building, and how you remain consistent with those things.

Joe Glover 

In many ways, I am a terrible case study because I don’t think I post on LinkedIn with the same pressure that some other folks do. I choose to express myself and my thoughts through that social platform, and I do so with fairly little expectation that anything will come off the back of it. There is an irony there, which is, I think in doing so, I’m probably doing it closer to the right way than someone who is spending all of their time trying to get something out of it. That is why I find myself comfortable speaking about topics such as mental health and being a parent and stuff like that, because I’m not expecting a direct result from it every day. To the point of your question, therefore, most days I’ll sit at this desk or go for a dog walk or whatever it may be, I’ll have a thought and post it out to the world. That’s probably once a day. Not weekends because I don’t want to be checking my phone when my family’s around and stuff like that. So, I’ll do that once a day, and I’ll probably spend around 45 minutes to an hour on the platform per day. Not because I think that’s the optimum amount of time to be spending on the platform, but just because I enjoy it, and I like that interaction with other people. I think there’s something that is probably quite important to note, which is that I don’t really do Instagram or TikTok. I can acknowledge the opportunities on those platforms, but I don’t tend to engage in them because I don’t really want to. When it comes to this idea of consistency and showing up, I think you need to have a sense of internal motivation, that it’s something you actually want to be doing. So, I don’t benchmark myself against numbers, and I don’t recommend that people do. In my experience, showing up as often as you would like to, in the shape that you would like to with the acknowledgement that you will attract the people who feel as you do. That feels really important. There is an important element to this, however, which is, I see so many folks head to LinkedIn, and I feel we’ve all seen a lot of it recently, in a time of like redundancy or when they need something. And it reminds me of this quote that someone lent me a long time ago, “Build your community before you need it.” Which means to say, if you’re showing up and there’s that sense of needing something from the community before you’ve taken the time to give to it, then one can expect less back from that interaction. So, if this is something that you wish to engage in, then I would suggest that you do, because there are a lot of benefits that come off the back of it. Take that in whatever shape you would like to, in the shape that motivates you, but before you need to because I think that creates opportunities. Similarly to the currency of community, is opportunity and I think the same applies to these social media channels.

Phil Bray 

It sounds like a very organic approach that you’ve adopted there, Joe. Does AI play any part in what you do on LinkedIn? Whether it’s, God forbid, commenting, but writing posts and audience building, etc.? Because I’ve had a lot of people – and you can see it, you can spot an AI generated image, post and comment these days. Does AI play any role in it for you?

Joe Glover 

I use AI periodically, probably more regularly, to generate imagery for social media. In that case, I’m not trying to present it as a drawing that I’ve done, and so in that instance I think it’s fine to create imagery using AI. When it comes to AI, trying to impersonate you through your words, through commenting or posting isn’t it rubbish? (Laughter). I personally would not like to be represented in that fashion and through those systems. because it’s – why are you doing it? I mean the AI commenting and stuff like that is just so thin, and as you rightly point out, people can recognise it. So, you’re not really gaining anything, you’re just commenting in theory and the same with the post. We started today’s session with an acknowledgement that the commonality in creating community exists somewhere in the magic of identifying emotions and in doing so, if one is to look at AI applications to comment and post, I think they’re stripping out a lot of the things that people would actually really love to engage with one on.

Phil Bray 

If AI doesn’t have a role to play in terms of commenting and writing posts for you, and you’ve done some fabulous educational online sessions about AI, where do you think AI has the biggest wins for marketers right now?

Joe Glover

I use AI every day in so many ways. In fact, on iPhones you can set the little button on the side here to give you quick access to something. I’ve set that to have quick access to Chat GPT voice function, to enable me to have conversations with Chat GPT and hash through things. To give an example, this morning I was writing a brief because we’re running a conference next year in March. I was writing a brief for our design agency about our visual identity and the things that we would like to be created off the back of this, so, I had a conversation with Chat GPT. I said, “These are the things that I would like to get from this brief.” And then it helped me, with a back and forth, narrow down the things that I should be briefing on and I then created a brief off the back of it. I use Chat GPT every day, sometimes in place of a human to work through thoughts that I may have. And indeed, I feel the physicality of writing on the keyboard is ageing. I think we’ll look back on that in 50 or 60 years, something like that, and think, “What the hell were we doing sat down at a desk typing into a keyboard all this time”. Having those conversations with the computer which can spit out something which feels sometimes better than I can write myself, is a great opportunity. To directly answer your question, A) To work through thoughts is a wonderful thing. There are other applications, and I think it depends on the source material. For example, when we’re writing up our webinars, we will take the transcript from the webinar, put it into Chat GPT and ask it to pull out some of the key summaries. So, we have a very human input, but then we also ask Chat GPT to expedite the process, in terms of getting an output. In terms of some content writing, which is then subsequently edited by a human and checked by a human. There is some use there, but that’s more for run-of-the-mill content, not the hero content that will be seen by every person who would judge The Marketing Meetup by that content; that definitely needs to be written by a human. There are opportunities everywhere, I think is probably what I’m getting to. But I think the whole AI conversation, like this conversation around AI currently, in 10 or 15 years, it will be like someone asking what to use the internet for. It will just become a background function of the tools that we use on a day-to-day basis that may or may not change our working habits and stuff like that, and in a different way to NFTs (non-fungible tokens). The NFTs that came out last year were quite clearly a bad idea but the AI stuff will augment how we work. I don’t think it’s for us to fear or discount, or anything like that, because the cat’s out the bag with it. But it’s for us to use and acknowledge that sometimes it’s a little bit like the turkey is voting for Christmas because I think there are some people who are celebrating some things about AI, which, I think, are terrible things to celebrate, but then there’s also a lot of stuff that we can use to speed up some processes. So a very general answer, I’m afraid, Phil because AI, by its very nature, is a very general thing. The last thing I would say, therefore, is about the strength of the prompts. With the conversation element of things, in the first prompt that I’m giving to any AI, I probably write four to five paragraphs of detail to get the best outcome that I possibly can from it, whether that’s through spoken word or written word, I’m doing those things and being very clear with what I want from the output. If you’re treating it like a Google search or you’re writing, “Write me a blog post about financial services”, of course you’re going to get a load of rubbish off the back of it. So, it’s how you use it, when you use it, valuing the tool for the brilliance that it brings and also the terrible things that it brings.

Phil Bray 

I love the idea of Chat GPT being like a human in the room and bouncing off it. It can help you at all times of day when there is no human interaction around or available.

Joe Glover 

Yes. With the example of the brief writing this morning, I ended up with a pretty decent brief written in three minutes that would have taken me an hour in normal cases. Of course, it’s for me to then edit and make better, but as a starting point, it’s pretty fantastic.

Phil Bray 

Let’s go back to where we started, The Marketing Meetup. When I put the slide back up, I hope everyone can see The Marketing Meetup slide now, we have the wonderful Rory Sutherland giving you a lovely testimonial. Not only have you got the lovely testimonial there, but you’ve also got the halo effect of having somebody very well known, very closely aligned on the screen with your brand. That’s cracking social proof. In our world when dealing with dealing with financial advisers and planners, one of the things we talk about is that showing potential clients the benefits of working with you is far more important than telling. So, I want to finish off today around social proof and the importance of financial advisers and planners having more of that social proof online. How important has it been for you guys at The Marketing Meetup? And how important is it generally, in your view?

Joe Glover 

I think it comes in in lots of forms. Social proof could be – I know that you had Rory speak a recent webinar, for example, and there is a social proof in Rory, deciding that you are worthy of him spending his time with you in the same way as he has deemed us worthy of spending his time with. There is a social proof there because he carries cache associated with his role and associated with his TED talks, etc. So that’s the first thing. And a lot of The Marketing Meetup’s momentum over the past four years has been built off the back of social proof. Rory Sutherland, Mark Ritson, Seth Godin, and April Dunford, are incredible human beings who each carry their own personal brand, which they lend to The Marketing Meetup because by simply showing up, they can be associated with you. You did it before we went live today, Phil, you asked, “How was (a specific person)? “How were they?” You acknowledged that and probably associated them with TMM and in a way it probably elevated our community in your mind. So, there is that. There are also more overt ways, such as what we’ve done with The Marketing Meetup, which is placing quotes and testimonials on our website, which reinforces that idea. The logic behind that, for us, is that if someone lands on our site for the first time, they immediately see someone they recognise and they see something which says, “This is good.” And even if it’s a split-second decision, they think, “Cool, I’m going to keep on scrolling.” That’s all we’re trying to do with social proof here. If we’re not getting the direct benefit of someone else’s audience coming along to our events, what we’re trying to do is provide some legitimacy and some trust in our organisation. With TMM, this manifests itself in more scrolling. This is the first thing you see but then down below, you’ll see our events, conferences, recordings and more stuff like that. By having that initial hit of, “Okay, these guys are legit “, they take it a little bit more seriously. That’s kind of the long and short of it really. Folks have lent their brand to us in one way or another, and we have asked permission to display their words and their ideas on our site to encourage scrolling and to get that legitimacy.

Phil Bray 

And if people on this call want to get involved, going back to one of the comments Paul made earlier on, actually, right at the start the webinar.

Joe Glover 

Lovely.

Phil Bray 

It was a positively lovely comment, wasn’t it? Cheers for that.

Joe Glover 

Paul’s a legend.

Phil Bray 

How does someone get involved with The Marketing Meetup?

Joe Glover 

They can come to our online events, which are free to attend. Go to one of our local in-person events which happen in nearly 30 locations across the UK, and about five or six locations across the world. They’re just a donation ticket, so you pay what you’d like to pay to attend those. They can get the newsletter, which, again, is free to get, and you would be informed about both the webinars and the in-person events on those. Or they could come to our first ever conference next year, which is happening on March 20. That was a big scary thing to do, but it’s very, very, very exciting to be able to do it.

Phil Bray 

We’ll put some details about the conference in the follow-up to email, if you’re happy with that Joe.

Joe Glover 

Absolutely. Thank you.

Phil Bray 

The donation for the events; pay what you think they’re worth. That’s an interesting concept. Could you talk a bit more about that? Do people pay before the event or after the event?

Joe Glover 

Before the event. Our events were free to attend for a long time, but post COVID, we made the decision to adopt this model: pay what you would like to pay. We suggest between £3 and £30, so it usually averages out about £5 – £10 roughly. That was there, rather than to solve a revenue problem, it was there to solve a respect problem and an attendance problem because when you’re running free events, folks can very easily sign up and can also very easily not show up. What we’ve noticed with this, and it’s a pretty profound thing, if people pay, I think it was £3.50, the attendance rate shoots up from something like 50% to over 70%. Which, for a relatively small amount of money – granted, not every person has £3.50, so folks can show up for free or get in touch with us and we would always let them in. With that small psychological thing, we’re showing respect to our audience, we’re giving value to the event. As I say, we run a relatively lean business in terms of overheads so we’re not there to solve the revenue problem, but we’re just there to solve the respect problem, more than anything else.

Phil Bray 

That’s a great tip. That’s a great tip, and a great way to finish. I spend a lot of time on The Marketing Meetup website, particularly the talk recordings tab. There are some fabulous talks on there. There was a great one from the middle of this year, maybe a bit earlier on, about AI. It shared really practical stuff about how to use AI, how to write prompts, how to give it a persona, that sort of stuff. I’d encourage everybody to spend time on The Marketing Meetup website, because there’s huge value there, Joe and the stuff you give back to the community is fabulous. So, I want to say thank you for that, and thank you for coming on today. I could have carried on for a bit longer. In fact, I could have carried on for a lot longer. Abi, before we go, and to have a final wrap up, could you just talk about next month’s webinar, if that’s okay?

Abi Robinson 

Yes, of course. Thank you so much, Joe, that was wonderful. I think the currency of community is opportunity is an absolute pin-on-the-wall quote that’s wonderful. In the spirit of advocacy, if everybody has enjoyed today’s session, please do take Phil’s advice and have a look at The Marketing Meetup’s resources, because they are bloody fantastic. In terms of next month’s webinar, we are being joined by Chris Budd, who I’m sure most people in the room will be familiar with, and that’s to talk about The Financial Wellbeing Pulse which helps you measure the relationship between money and happiness. Until now, it’s been scientifically impossible to demonstrate it, but it’s really important that you understand your client’s relationship between money and wellbeing. Then, you can use the results in your marketing and in your business to help clients more. With it being such a new proposition, we’ve invited Chris. I did consider calling it in conversation with Chris-tmas Budd, but I think Phil vetoed that, I was going to put a Santa hat on Chris, but I didn’t ask him first, so you’ll just have to pretend it’s there. He’ll be joining us on 11 December at 10am for an hour. You can find out a bit more about the financial wellbeing pulse tool and how it can help you. I’ll put the link in the chat now, but I’ll also put it in the follow-up, which will be out later today with the recording of this session, more information about The Marketing Meetup and more information about the conference next March.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Abi. I think my favorite quote from you earlier on, Joe, was when we were talking earlier, “Clarity is kindness.” I thought that was fabulous. Loads of little picky notes to write up after this webinar. If you want to catch up with Joe, there’s The Marketing Meetup website address there and Joe’s LinkedIn profile, so you can go and see the value that Joe’s adding in those places. Joe, I just want to say a huge thank you for everything you do for the marketing community with The Marketing Meetup, for the LinkedIn stuff you do, and for sparing an hour to spend with us today. It’s been absolutely fabulous, and I can see from the comments that have come in on the chat that everybody else has thought the same thing as well.

Joe Glover 

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for your lovely words.

Phil Bray 

No problem. Thank you, Joe. Go and enjoy the rest of your day.

Joe Glover 

Will do, take care.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, everybody. Bye, bye.

Dan Campbell 

Take care, guys. Bye.