Ep 9 Guest Andrew Colsky, Left Of Trust: How Clients Choose You Before The First Conversation

Episode 9 - Special Guest: Andrew Colsky of http://www.Be-Picked.com
Left Of Trust: How Clients Choose You Before The First Conversation, Plus Social Media & AI Stories Of The Week.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hello everyone and welcome to episode nine of the Link Through Social Podcast, your go-to source for everything social media, digital trends, and the rapidly evolving world of AI. I'm your host, Paul Wright. Later in the show, we have a special guest, Andrew Kolski from BEH-Pick.com. Andrew will be talking to us about Left of Trust, how clients choose before the first conversation. I think you're really going to enjoy that. But before we get started, we are totally overwhelmed by the response of last week's episode with nearly 6,000 views on YouTube. Thank you so much for watching and also listening through Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcast. We would really appreciate it, though, if you could click subscribe on our YouTube channel and of course like the post. By subscribing, it will obviously uh alert you to upcoming posts, but also will help get us out to more and more people. We're building this community together, and we really appreciate it. All the links can be found on link through social podcasts.com. So let's begin with some social media and AI stories. Instagram globally released a new feature called Instance. You might have seen that when you've gone on your Instagram app this week. Um instance is designed for sharing authentic disappearing photos. While the Meta-owned social network build instance has a new format to share real life moments as they're happening, many users are looking for a way to turn off the feature, especially who have ended up accidentally sending images to others not fully understanding how the feature works. When you open up Instagram's new instance section for the first time, by tapping the mini photo stack in the bottom right corner of your inbox, the app opens up a brief introduction about the feature that informs users that instance disappear, there's no viewer list, and that reactions and replies are private. The app then quickly takes you through the process of viewing and reacting to instance. Once you get to the camera, underneath it as a shutter button, and below that is a toggle that lets you choose friends, close friends by default. It is set to friends. What Meta doesn't immediately make users aware of is the fact that the moment you tap the shutter button, the photo uh that's captured is automatically sent to everyone on your friends list unless you manually manually switch the setting to close friends beforehand. Since the process of sending an image isn't clearly explained, many users have ended up accidentally sending a photo to others they didn't intend to. It's worth noting that Meta does offer an undo option once a photo has been sent, but it's easy to miss because the whole experience of accidentally exposing yourself to others can be quite jarring. Additionally, some people didn't even realize that a photo had been sent out. On an app like Instagram, where users are accustomed to reviewing and carefully curating their content before sharing it, the feature instant send design has understandably frustrated many people, considering their privacy is at stake. So please be careful. When you first open it, double check, triple check, and then enjoy it because it is a pretty cool feature. So that's Instagram and instance. Next, Canadians worried about online misinformation as it becomes increasingly harder to spot. A new survey reveals most Canadians regularly see misinformation online, and nearly half say they are finding it harder to decipher fact from fiction. According to Statistics Canada, 80% of Canadians say they have encountered news or information online they suspect to be misleading or false at least once a month, with 47% saying they are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish false information from genuine news. The Statistics Canada survey also found 61% of Canadians surveyed said they are concerned about online misinformation, yet experts argue the government and big tech companies have been very slow to act. Totally agree with that. Big tech companies really have to start stepping up as these as AI develops. It's at a rapid pace never seen since the launch of the internet. And it's even faster than that. So the the the big the big tech companies really have to get on board. Now, unfortunately, there's a lack of scrutiny on these big tech companies, said Ahmed Al Rawi, a communications professor at Simon Fraser University. Al Rawi says social media platforms have been effective, ineffective at controlling harmful content on their own, and wants the government to enact legislation to bring about stricter rules. The only language they understand is the language of financial penalties, he went on to say. Experts encourage people to fact-check information they find online, especially on social media, but acknowledge this is becoming harder to do. They also say people believe misinformation are less likely to check the accuracy of what's what they're reading. The survey also looked at where Canadians get their news or information from. 66% say they get it from news organizations, 62% from close contacts, 54% from social media platforms, and 52% from television programming. For young Canadians age 15 to 34, social media was the prevalent source of news or information at 78%. Next, OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance. It will let you connect bank accounts. On uh this past Friday, OpenAI launched a new set of personal finance tools in preview for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the United States, letting them connect their accounts and asking questions ranging from spending analysis to future financial planning. OpenAI has partnered with Financial Connection Service Plaid to manage the account connections. Users can connect to over 12,000 financial institutions in the U.S., including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, American Express, and Capital One. Once users connect these accounts, they will see a dashboard of their portfolio performance, spending, subscriptions, and upcoming payments. The new product comes just one month after OpenAI acquired the team behind personal finance startup Hero, which was backed by firms like Ribbit, General Catalyst, and Restive back in April. OpenAI said that Hero Team's expertise in finance was useful in launching this new product, but didn't specify if the entire feature was built by them. OpenAI users can access the tool by selecting Get Started in the finances option in the sidebar or typing at finances, connect my accounts in a ChatGPT conversation. Once users do that, the chatbot will guide them about linking accounts through Plaid, said the company earlier this week. According to OpenAI, more than 200 million users already ask financial questions to ChatGPT every month. 200 million. The company also noted that the new ChatGPT 5.5 model is stronger at reasoning with context, which is crucial for answering finance-related questions. The company said it would work with finance experts to create a benchmark for the model to improve on personal financial questions. With the new financial tool integration, users can get detailed answers to questions such as: I feel like I've been spending more recently. Has anything changed? Or help me build a plan to be ready to buy a house in my area, let's say in the next five years. So very interesting. Connecting up your financial um platforms with AI. I'd love to hear some feedback on this. So reach out to us on our social medias at Link Through Social. That's T H R U. And let us know what you think about this new uh innovation for Chat GPT. Now, the Link Through Social podcast will be back right after this message. Tired of stressing over what to post on social media? Meet SmartPost app. Your all-in-one solution to create, schedule, and grow your content effortlessly. In just a few tabs, you can generate engaging posts. Stay consistent and keep your audience coming back for more. No more guessing, no more burnout, just smarter content faster. Whether you're a business owner, creator, or entrepreneur, SmartPost helps you show up like a pro. Start posting smarter today at smartpostapp.com. SmartPostapp because your content should work for you. And welcome back to the Link Through Social Podcast. We're very excited to have uh another guest on our show today. His name is Andrew Kolski. Now, Andrew didn't set out to become a marketing expert. He became one out of necessity. He's a former trial attorney and mental health professional, but now is the founder of Be Picked and creator of the credibility generator. He's also the author of Left of Trust, where he explores how professionals can come become the trusted expert before the first conversation even happens. As a professional service provider himself, Andrew recognized a gap, how to use online marketing, not just to get found, but to be chosen. He built a system to solve that problem and automate the process, helping others turn visibility into credibility and clients. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Well, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Now tell me, Andrew, um, you uh I mentioned in my intro there that you're a former uh trial attorney and mental health professional. Why don't you uh go a little more detail about yourself and your background?

SPEAKER_00 11:55

Sure. So basically, I think the the relevant part for what I'm doing is that I've always been a professional service provider. And the professional services that I provided, if you think about trial law, what does that mean? It means standing in front of a jury, a group of people that can look at you and listen to you, but they can't ask you questions, they can't interact. So you have to know how to sell your message to them. Same thing from a mental health perspective. I was always interested in, you know, persuasion and what gets people to make decisions and what gets them to do what they do. So putting all that together, it was a natural when I was trying to market my own professional services, and I stopped one day and I looked back at how many hours and hours I was spending each week on just trying to do the basics. And I realized you can't, you can't run a professional service business and do all that was necessary to get yourself out there on the internet. So that's where I said, I gotta change this whole model here. And I developed what's called the credibility generator to solve all the problems that I had, and then I realized that other people might want it as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Wonderful, wonderful. So the credibility generator, uh, how does it help automate building trust and uh authority online?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Yeah, so that was a really, really important part for me. Not just putting stuff online, but putting things online that were intentionally designed that were going to bring you credibility and trust. And the way that that works, and this is all excuse me, this is all explained deeper in my book, Left of Trust. But the way it works is marketing in general is kind of like a shotgun approach. You have a product or a service, and you're just kind of hey, the more people that hear about it, the more possible chances that maybe somebody might be interested in me. Um, a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort spent for no real targeted anything. Credibility and trust is the opposite, and it's even stronger now with the new AI search. And it's there are particular people out there that have a particular pain point that need your services. Right. You got to make it so that they can find you and not just find you, because if they're looking for a bankruptcy attorney, you say, hi, I'm a bankruptcy attorney. Well, there's a thousand other bankruptcy attorneys that say the same thing. So you got to be found and you have to be chosen. And the way that works is you have to understand what are the problems that my potential clients have, what is my ideal client and what are the problems they have. Let me go out there and start putting things out on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on blogs, etc., across the internet, that acknowledge the questions they have and provide meaningful answers to the questions they have. So that when they're up at 3 a.m. laying in bed, searching on their cell phone about that problem that's nagging away at them, they're not searching for bankruptcy attorney. They're searching for can I keep my house if I don't have enough money? So you have to answer that question. And if you provide relevant material to answer that question, now they're starting to hone in on you. So by the time they read enough of your information, they've already decided this is the guy I need to help represent me. And the credibility generator takes all of that with all of that psychological background, and I've spent a lot of time putting it together in a package. So literally, it's almost point and click. You you click your way into automatically posting YouTube videos, automatically generating YouTube videos. You don't even need to be in front of the camera. Automatically posting blog posts, automatically posting LinkedIn. It's it's all automatic, but there's as much opportunity for human and loop as you choose. If you want to alter anything, if you want to add something, if you want to restate something, it's designed to have you do that. But if you don't have the time and you don't have the desire, it is ready to let you just sort of take several hours and turn it into several minutes and you're done.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Perfect. It's a it's a perfect setup that you've you've put together. Uh I'm uh really in awe, to be honest with you. And it's it's something that and I liked what you said there. Um, you can have things automated, you know, throw some of your own personal touch into it as well, because that's very important. Uh, I think a lot of business professionals out there um think that oh, ai can do everything and and and it can do a lot and it can really help us, but you also have to put that personal touch on the way to yourself online uh through social media and through blogs and all this. What are some of the the big mistakes that lawyers or other professionals, because we're not just talking about lawyers here, we're talking about business professionals in general. Um, what type of mistakes are they making when trying to market themselves online?

SPEAKER_00 17:13

Yeah, yeah. You know, I I've had to answer this question several times, and there are two specific mistakes that I see over and over and over. Number one, the biggest mistake they make is they are so overwhelmed with what to do and how to do it and how to go about it that they do nothing. So that's mistake number one. Doing nothing is the worst thing you could do. Mistake number two is they go online like all of us, and they start searching for hey, I need to get more clients and get myself out there. What do I do? How do I do it? How do you guys do it? And you can you can go look up the forums yourself if you're listening to this podcast, and you'll see what I'm saying. What they get is they get a lot of people who respond who say, Well, this is what I did. I I got a great website and I really focused on SEO, SEO, SEO. Everything is SEO. Okay. SEO is great, SEO is important. SEO is not going to get you picked. SEO may help get you found, along with a thousand other people that are paying people to do SEO for them, but it's not going to get you picked. So they miss out on the entire second half of the equation, the credibility and the trust factor. Those are the two biggest mistakes.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Now, most professionals build their marketing from the inside out, uh, you know, providing credentials, experience, results. You say that it exactly backwards. Uh, what should they be building from? And why does the direction matter so much?

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, as you can tell, I put a lot of psychology into the development of this whole process. Yes. And there's two types of trust out there there's cognitive trust and there's affective trust. Cognitive trust is trust based upon sort of logic and and and things, so that a lawyer who says, I went to a good school and I've had good success and I have these credentials, okay, that's that's nice, that's important at the right time, but that is not going to get you the client initially because they don't know anything about you or your skills or whether you can handle their particular problem. So affective trust is the the feeling, the part where people can feel comfortable knowing that, hey, this guy speaks my language. He understands what it's like to be laying here at 3 a.m. with this problem and not knowing if I have a solution. He's given me information online that shows that he's dealt with these problems before. He's talked a little bit about different ways I can get through it. He can shepherd me through the process and get me back to the thing that I and every single person on this planet are looking for constantly, which is comfort. We always want to return to a state of comfort. So when they focus on that, that's the thing that that sets people apart. That affective trust part, that's the first thing that starts to draw people in to eventually then evaluate your credentials.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Yes. No, it's um very good point. It it's you you you really have to think about as a business professional that there are there are hundreds or thousands that might be in your field, and and you have to stand out. And uh you bring up some amazing points, Andrew, and I I really appreciate you uh coming on the show uh today. Uh your website is B, that's B E-picked.com. And I encourage everyone to check out this website and to see the programs that Andrew has. Uh, where else can we find you uh on social media, Andrew?

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Yeah, so I tried really hard. Excuse me, I tried really hard to make it easy for people. So if you go to the website be ced.com, you can get access to our YouTube channel, you can get access to our um blog, you can have access to our podcasts, we're on LinkedIn, um, all all the places where professionals you know would be, because that's our market is professional service providers. So that's where we are. And and I'll just mention that if you are listening to this and this type of problem sounds like it might be something you have. We have a free tool on the home page of our website where you can uh answer 15 questions and then it will score it and give you a report on where your credibility gaps might be. It says you're doing well here, you need to look more over here. And then at least you know where to start and what to focus on, instead of again that shot. An approach of oh my god, it's so overwhelming, I'll just do nothing.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Wonderful, wonderful. So that's be hyphenpicked.com. And Andrew Kolski, appreciate you uh coming on the Link Through Social podcast today, and uh wish you all the best. And uh I encourage all of our listeners and viewers to check out behyphenpicked.com. Andrew Kolski, have a great day. Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Thank you, Paul.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

The Link Through Social Podcast will be right back after this brief message. To find out more about Link Through Social's social media management event promoting, also SEO, web design, and AI solutions, go to linkthruesocial.com. That's T H R U. Link Through Social is also on all social media platforms at Link Through Social. And you can visit all of our links to watch or listen to this podcast at LinkthruSocial Podcast.com. That does it for this edition of the Link Through Social podcast. Be sure to like and to subscribe. We appreciate all your support. Share all these links on your own social platforms and let's build this community together. Have a great week, everyone. Thanks for joining.