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Audio digitally transcribed by Otter.ai

Introduction 0:01
Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast™, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns 0:18
It's a great day for a #PirateBroadcast™. I'm just saying. So I have RJ in the house, RJ Redden. She is someone that I'm super excited to connect with, because we go way back on the blab days, podcasting, and she is in some serious relationship building chat bot activities and we've started talking before the show, and we said, we should probably start on the show. RJ, thank you so much for being here. It's wonderful to see you again and hang out and enjoy and share a few nuggets of knowledge with the Pirate community. Thank you so much. How are you doing today?

RJ Redden 1:05
Well, I'm gonna start with a good Ahoy, pirate community. Hello. It is absolutely lovely to meet you. This man has been my friend for a long time, back in the blab days, so about five years now, Russ. Gosh, I'm so excited to be here and talk about cool stuff that's going on in the world. And just lovely to meet your community, Russ.

Russ Johns 1:32
Well, thank you so much for being here. And I know that you're you're going to add a lot of value that people can recognize as something they can actually take and do and think about and reflect on immediately. And one of the things we were talking about before the show is making real connections versus making a broadcast to everyone to do everything and you know, call to action, call to action, call to action, call to action. You know, and in traditional marketing, I think is evolving. And with digital age, we have to start thinking about something a little different. And I think you said it best with, I think we got this email list process all wrong. So I wanted you to expand on that idea, that concept a little bit.

RJ Redden 2:24
Absolutely well, so traditionally, if you are starting a business on the couch, if you are an entrepreneur with an idea, and you want to set the world on fire, people will go out there and look, you know, they develop their product, but they need to know how to market it. So they'll go and search all of the popular advice that's out there. And if you do that, you'll notice that there's one message and that is build your list, build your list, build your list. And then that goes into of course, you know that you've got to, you need to market to that list. And you need to send five emails, when they sign up. You need one every day and you need all these tactics, all of these strategies, right? What is really, I would say a dichotomy, there for me is, I absolutely hate getting those types of emails. I know that it's a blast, Russ, I know that it doesn't necessarily have any....

Russ Johns 3:35
You are part of the sequence, period. End.

RJ Redden 3:39
Period. End. And Holy moly, there's no, with email in particular, there's no interactivity there, there's a choice. There's a choice of whether I'm going to click the CTA. And there's a choice on whether I'm going to unsubscribe, but those are the only choices that I have. I don't really get to know what I might want to know about this new person in my life. Yeah. I don't get to know any of that. And so the other day, I actually did a little show what's in your email, and it was Cyber Monday. So I went through my email inbox and gave the emails in there a rating. It was a super fun show, because we forget that I am not marketing to a screen. I am not trying to get a click. I am trying to develop a relationship with people. I don't need a million customers. I need 20 awesome ones. That's what I need. And how am I going to create engaging marketing that gets them the value that they need that identifies for Me, who would be super fun to work with? Because I don't know about you, Russ, but I'm only getting older here.

Russ Johns 5:07
We don't have a lot of time, RJ. We gotta #makeitmatter right now.

RJ Redden 5:15
#Makeitmatter, baby.

Russ Johns 5:17
#makeitmatter. I want to have fun with my clients, I don't want to be going through painful transitions every day.

RJ Redden 5:24
Yeah, that's the thing, I don't want to mislead anyone. I don't want to misrepresent myself, I want to provide them value. If I don't provide them value, if I know a friend of mine, who could guess who gets a reference, because I mean, that's the heart of it. That's the heart of it. Every human being that shows up on my stuff is a candidate for a great relationship. Whether that includes a transaction for me or not, doesn't matter, because it all comes back.

Russ Johns 6:01
Well, and sometimes the transaction is allowing you to say, hey, beautiful people, I want to introduce you to these other beautiful people, and then sit back and watch it happen. Because, you know, eventually, at some point in time, they're gonna say, hey, you know, we should actually introduce RJ into somebody else's environment, and allow her to bring some value to the table. And because she's pretty sharp in that area, and we need to fill that area up. So it's just like the pirate community. We got some amazing, beautiful people here today. silverfox talks. So morning, Russ, and then seniors here. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Love you a whole he says. Angie is in the house. Hello, and good morning. She hates the spam. It's not spam. We signed up for it. We asked for it. We wanted the information. It's just the delivery process that we're going through. Hiett is in the room. Thank you, Hiett, for being here. Silver Fox says, love RJ's energy. Already so knowledgeable. Recognition. As Angie says, I hate those emails too. So impersonal. And she and silver foxes. Yes. Love this. Have fun with everyone. Approaching it that way is so rewarding. Have fun with everyone. I love that. RJ I want to ask you, because you've been in chat bots and not everybody is actually familiar. You know, they probably have experienced chat bots. But they may not necessarily have really understood the whole range of what that means. And how that impacts what we're talking about. Because that's a piece of the puzzle that can be a really great tool to actually start a conversation up. So I know that's been something you've been focused on for a little while. So how does that fit into the equation now for you?

RJ Redden 8:19
For me, it's all about engaging that other person. So we were talking about email before, when I send an email, ie a regular type email, which I never send, by the way, I can't do regular email, I do all kinds of other stuff. But when I send something like that, the only information that I'm getting back on the person that I'm sending it to is whether they clicked or not, or whether they opened or not. I get those two pieces of information. What does that tell me about the human on the other end? Nada, it tells me so very little. So when I ran into chatbots, it was three years ago, I popped in there because I had this client, I was a technology coach at the time. So I kind of taught people how to run their marketing and entrepreneurs and all that kind of stuff. And I had been frustrated for a long time. Because you know as well as I do, see in the frame here, all of your icons for social, I would teach them how to run a social campaign. And then six months later, they called me and they say it stopped working well, because the algorithm changed. And unless you have somebody spending full time watching that for you, and adjusting that, which costs a lot of money, you're gonna I mean, every once in a while you're going to have to completely change what you're doing, because that's their platform. So I got frustrated because my people were experiencing success and then boom, that would just fall off a cliff. And they'd be like, What do I do? Yeah, um, and so it was like, man, if there was some way to connect with people, where we could actually have a back and forth just like you and I are doing right now. Yeah, if there was a way that I could touch people and connect with them and learn about them and have them learn about me at the same time, then wouldn't that be fabulous? And then, so I had this client. I don't know if you've had these clients, Russ, but she was just a sweet human being, and had made me a lot of promises about some stuff that she needed to get to me so that I can help her with her website. And, um, she wasn't getting it to me. You know, I mean, promise after promise. And I was I was like,well, I'm a tech geek. I don't know if you can tell how geeky I am just by looking at me, but I am a geek. And I built her an accountability thing where you go on every morning to this Google Form, and then that feeds into this air table, and you can look at your progress over time. It was beautiful. I was so proud of myself. And I gave it to her. She's like, Oh, this is great. And then a week goes by...nothing, no progress at all. So I call her and I say, hey, you're not using that thing. And she says RJ, the reality is I have five children and they need to get out the door to school, clothes on, lunch packed, correct. Homework in the correct bag. I'm not getting on a spreadsheet and booping around in the morning. If you could make it so that I didn't have to leave my phone. Then that would be golden. And I had run into bots. And I said, I'll bet ya I can make you something. And accountabilibot was born. I made her a little accountability bot that got in her messenger in the morning and said, what are the three things you're going to do today? And then it flies in at night and says, All right, what did you get done? How can we make tomorrow a better day? Yeah, it was that simple. And it was so profound. For me, it was my first experience building a bot. So here's what happened. I gave it to her. She loved it. She gave it to a few friends who loved it and put it on their walls. And I had 70 people in a bot overnight. I got four clients out of the experience.

Russ Johns 12:39
Wow. Wow. Angie asks a good question, I think it's apropos for this this moment, is can you use chat bots on platforms other than Facebook Messenger? Because she keeps getting kicked off Facebook.

RJ Redden 12:56
Ah, Angie, yes. I'm so proud to report...the getting kicked off Facebook and Facebook changing their rules constantly for how you should connect with people. Yeah, I find that to be heresy. Heresy, Russ. That's not right. Marky Mark should not be able to tell me who and how I should connect with my own audience.

Russ Johns 13:26
Or it changes in the middle of the conversation.

RJ Redden 13:28
Oh, darlings. Um, yes. So, absolutely. I build bots on people's websites, where they have complete control over who and how they connect. There's no rules on that. You know, I mean, there are certain ways that we broadcast, we don't broadcast into messenger inbox in that case, we broadcast through text, we broadcast through email. And we do it in a way that people smile when they see us in their inbox.

Russ Johns 14:10
I've seen some amazing chat bots over the time and the interaction. And the reason why I wanted to jump into chat bots from email is because I think that there's a thread here that you and I kind of agree with. And there's this idea that if you can communicate in a new and unique way that is humanized to the degree, I mean, even if automation is in place, you can actually put a human touch on it, and actually interact when it's necessary to interact and as much it's a much deeper connection than just a simple email stream going out. And I think a lot of people need to understand that you can build a better relationship. With more conversations, and it's challenging too. I think Howard brought it up is the power of personalization, personalizing a note with a product shipment, or a phone call. It's tough to scale, but so impactful when you have customer relationships. Absolutely, positively true. And I wanted to tie this together before we talked about one more piece of the puzzle that we both love and adore. And, so talk about how the evolution of chat bots has taken place over the last three years for you personally, and what it's done for your business. Because people frame that in a way that is meaningful.

RJ Redden 15:50
Yeah. So I got into this about three, three and a half years ago, with that very first bot, it took me two weeks to say, honey, I need to change everything to bots. And she rolled her eyes and she said, okay, um, and so I'm like, it'll work this time, I promise. And so I changed everything over to bots. I began by being everybody's livestream announcement queen. It was a hey, you know, send people out everybody, you know, on the list, send people out an announcement that they're going live or whatever. And that was all right. But there's so much more possibility to actually have a conversation. I think that a lot of people who got into bots, at first, we're really excited about the fact that there was a 90% open rate and a 40% click through rate, and they just took emails, I would see people do this, they would take entire emails and paste them into the bot and hit send. And go Yes. 90% open rate. What did you just gain there, brother? What did you just gain there? You know what I'm saying? In a bot I can be informal. I can be personal. I can be fun. And here's the first tip. The first one that I want to give you today, everybody, this is something you can do for free. This is something you can do today. It'll take you a little bit of your time. But when you and I are getting to know each other, Russ, what is the first thing that we do when we're trying to get to know somebody and you've done it several times to me during this interview. In fact, it's what an interview is made of? You can...

Russ Johns 17:52
You can ask questions.

RJ Redden 17:54
There you go. Okay. Sure.

Russ Johns 17:58
Show up curious and ask a few questions.

RJ Redden 18:02
Exactly. In our marketing, we never do this.

Russ Johns 18:10
Blab about me.

RJ Redden 18:12
Hi, Russ, do you want to learn a little bit more about me? Back to me, Russ. That is...

Russ Johns 18:21
Enough about me. What about you?

RJ Redden 18:28
Oh, wow. Like when I realized this, it was game changing when I realized this that I could ask a question and get an answer. In a bot, I could process that answer into, hey, what is this person really going to value? And I could categorize folks into these people are really going to be interested in this topic. These people interested in this topic. I don't have to spam them every two days to remain top of mind. But I can just send them a valuable message when something is going on with the topic that they love. All through asking a question.

Russ Johns 19:13
Years ago, before I was, you know, the internet was really taken off, I used to just text people and say hello, how you doing? How's your day? You know, simple questions. And it just something to let people know that you're still there. So is there anyone that is doing as an example for the audience because Darleen said, I'm trying to grasp the true purpose and need for the bot. And Angie, yeah, I love this. We all need the human touch, Rick Springfield.

RJ Redden 19:52
I remember that.

Russ Johns 19:55
Yes. Is there an example of something you admire in a bot? Somebody that's done a bot well, that Darlene could go look at and see examples of how this this whole process works? And why it's impactful?

RJ Redden 20:15
Yeah, let's see. Yeah, I would say, there is one, there is a bot out there that I built for a client, it's called M power bot. And just the M power bot. And it's by Jane M Powers, she's my client. And we wrote her a bot that really takes getting to know you to a new level. So there's a lot of, and I'm gonna back up a little bit. So questions, because I don't think I finished this thought on the questions. Here's what you can do today, in your marketing, I want you to go through everything that you're going to send out for the next couple of days, or week or whatever, it depends on how much you send out. And I want you to look through it for questions, look through it for interaction opportunities, you do have them in email, you do have them, they're not as prevalent. But you can totally do it, you can do it in email, you can do it in your social posting, you can do it right here in the live stream, you can do it anywhere that you are posting or sending people information, look through it for questions. Questions are that first get to know you thing that tells people you're interested. And ou might value their answer on an email, you can ask a question, and then say, hit reply, because I'm personally replying to every single one of these, you can do that. What this will do is start to show you the value of of interaction, you can do it for free, you do not need a chat bot to do this, you can just do it for free now. And I encourage you to do that. Because that opens people's eyes a lot to the possibilities of what are we doing? Like, okay, if I were an email blast, and I walked into a party, Russ, and you said hi to me, and I said, hi, do you want to subscribe? You would be like, I've got to go get a drink. And if I kept following you around the party, also known as retargeting, if I get following you around the party, and said, you know what, I've got these blue shoes for sale, they are so cool. You're gonna save so much money if you buy these blue shoes. Um, you're full up on shoes, by the way, you don't really care about...

Russ Johns 22:53
What about camping gear? you need camping gear.

RJ Redden 22:59
if I followed you around that party, you would fake a heart attack to get away from me. You would do that and that is what we're trained to do in traditional marketing. Follow them around until they just say yes. And that's the you are a number. Your list, the people on it become a number and they become the number of possible money you could make from them. No one listening to me right now feels that we should do that that way. No one. Because we've all been alienated by that. And asking questions, giving people choices in your marketing, and gamifying things just a little bit. Those are my three big tips for people. I can't cover them all in this, we have a short amount of time. I realized we don't have eight hours for this broadcast.

Russ Johns 23:50
We could talk on this subject for eight hours.

RJ Redden 23:53
We could. For me, it is all about an exchange. Engagement is an invitation to play. When you and I start playing together, I start to know things about restaurants, I start to know things about #kindnessesiscool. I know things about who you are and what you want in your life. I can figure out can I bring Russ more of what he wants in his life? And if the answer is no, I got a friend baby. I got a friend that I can refer you to because I care about you, care about the people on my list. So we can create these thing.

Russ Johns 24:35
So we cannot leave this discussion RJ without talking about the the one product we both love dearly and that is Dubb.

RJ Redden 24:48
Dubb!!!

Russ Johns 24:49
So it brings it home, it brings it together and I just really think that it's something that I've been training people on and teaching people on and it just pulls everything together and that community and that contact and that outreach is much more personal when I'm a video guy, I'm hands down, you know, I'm gonna jump on a video and if I could deliver a video for someone, and it's just hey, RJ, thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate it. Here's the link to the episode, boom. It's much easier for me. And it's much more personalized than just a an email going out. So what are your thoughts about that, tying it in with the personalization and the relationship building and everything that goes along with that.

RJ Redden 25:41
Dubb is so beautiful. When I saw it, it was love at first sight, just like the bots. And at that point, okay, I had been doing...I mean, I've been doing bots and it's still absolutely the main thing that I do. But when I saw Dubb, I saw that another piece of technology was adding some this bit of engagement and actually Dubb adds choice. It adds choice. You got a choice, those little buttons down there? That is amazing. Like, mind blowing. I've never...I mean, I've always been very familiar with one call to action, right? Ah, here's what I want you to do. Um, you know what? giving people a choice says to that person, I value what your choice is. And if I keep track of their choice on the back end, I of course can do something with that information. And you know, some of the stuff we were talking about before. When I saw Dubb, it was like, look, this chatbot technology, what do I really love about it? That is mirrored in this other piece of technology? Because it was the first time I'd seen that. And the power of choice? Absolutely. It's right there. And gamification. If you hit the little hands, it does a little thing for you. Like it gamification. It is, I mean, I'm so on this topic, because there's a reason why that's a billion and billion and billion dollars of industry. Yeah, there's a reason why...you remember when the pandemic started, and everybody was playing Animal Crossing, people would reference it, just like, well, isn't everyone doing this? Animal Crossing, my friends, if you haven't played this thing, it's a very simple thing, where you basically collect things and you get stuff for that and you buy stuff with it in game. Um, people were obsessed with this thing. Now they're obsessed with Among Ss. But there's a reason why this pulls us in. There's a reason why all of a sudden, we're immersed in another world. And we get to make choices, those choices are rewarded. Sometimes those choices are not rewarded, we get kicked out if we're too sus. That's the word, they tell me. That's the word. But it's a journey in which people get to choose their own adventure. Our marketing is also a journey, where people should be able to choose their own adventure, and get immersed in a world.

Russ Johns 28:27
Well, I think I shared that information is he goes, get the reader to qualify themselves or disqualify themselves. I will tell you this. I was on dealing with yesterday on the podcast on the episode and we were talking about, make the ad crystal clear about who it's for, and put the price on there. Because putting the price on your ad will actually positively reduce the click rates, and the click throughs of the looky loos that will never buy anything. So because saves a lot of money. And I just really love the idea of this coming together in a personalized way and in building relationships and putting putting all this in place. So RJ how do people get ahold of you? How do they track you down or you got a pod? Angie says, I could listen to RJ for eight hours. Is there an RJ podcast?

RJ Redden 29:27
There is an RJ live stream at 10 o'clock central every weekday. I am going to be getting the podcast back together again. That will be happening around the first of the year. But, yeah, the bot signal, search out the bot signal on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, Periscope and a lot of old episodes are up there.

Russ Johns 30:02
Where all fine live streams live, right?

RJ Redden 30:07
Yeah, exactly. Come and check it out, I've got a ton of backlog you can absolutely watch. And, hey, if you really, really want to connect with me for six hours, I've got an event coming. It's a free event. It's a free event, it's coming up on January 14. And I'm going to be covering those three things that I just barely scratched today, questions, choices, and gamification in your marketing, for more engagement, so that...you were just talking about this, Russ. You were just talking about the tire kickers. When I was doing regular, traditional marketing, this was before cabe. Traditional marketing, I would fight to get people into a half an hour appointment, I would chase them and then sometimes they wouldn't even be qualified to be sitting there, I'd realized that oh, and then I'd spend the first 15 minutes trying to get them comfortable. Because everybody's always, you know, like, I don't want to buy anything, you know what I mean? And so they got the guard up. So compare that with a, I have people calling me today, they say how much is it? I want to work with you. Because they like and trust and know this personality. Why? Because I put it all over the place. I put it in my marketing, I put it all over the place when you are able to find a medium where you can put your personality, you will never get another tire kicker.

Russ Johns 31:45
Yeah, you will love it. I love it. RJ. so we got to do a webinar together, we got to do a training session of some sort, something. We're going to be doing something and you'll track down RJ on YouTube. Follow the #PirateBroadcast™ on YouTube. You know, it's like, let's grow these channels. Let's grow this help. Let's add value to the world and build relationships. RJ. We could do this together.

RJ Redden 32:16
We need to do this together, Russ because like, you know, just out of the blue. I had just started with this product and there's Russ Johns going to be on a webinar and like, is that my restaurant? Is there a beard involved in this and I look up and there you are. I'm like oh my god, I have to get a hold of that guy. Um, yes, we must do some stuff. Because here's the deal. The world has never needed us more than it does right now.

Russ Johns 32:46
Yes. Let's put it out there. Share a little kindness, share a few gifts here and there. Nuggets of knowledge, all that kind of good stuff. So people can get ahold of you every day on your live stream. Where's your website? Where's your contact information? What's the digits they got to type in to get there?

RJ Redden 33:05
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So hey, if you just want to hang out with me for half an hour, just type in meetRJ.com.

Russ Johns 33:10
MeetRJ.com, I love it.

RJ Redden 33:15
Yeah, meetrj.com. You'll be popped over to my calendar, claim your spot, we'll be chatting in no time. If you'd rather lurk, find the live stream, come come visit me, come visit me on any of the places that I broadcast. It's all simultaneous, you can come hang out wherever you are at. And we'll be talking today, we're talking today about gifts.

Russ Johns 33:38
And what's the name of the live stream,

RJ Redden 33:41
The Bot Signal,

Russ Johns 33:42
The Bot signal, I love it.

RJ Redden 33:46
Um, and, and those are two places. And if you just want to, you know, email me or something RJ@BlackBeltbots.com, it's pretty regular.

Russ Johns 33:56
And as always, all that information will be enclosed, included and processed into the post today, later today at RussJohns.com. So you can go track it down and you can put it out there. The transcription, the post, the podcast, everything's there. And so it's amazing. It's amazing. And thank you for the producer, Tracie, putting this all together. So thank you, Tracie.

RJ Redden 34:24
Thank you, Tracie. I respect what you're doing Tracie. The professionalism was beautiful, was the first thing I said to Russ when I got on, that is amazing stuff.

Russ Johns 34:37
Yeah, we love the production and everything that goes into it. So appreciate you RJ, thank you so much for being here everybody. Thank you so much for your time, effort and energy and being here. Hope you learn something, hope you could take away something good. And as always #kindnessesiscool, #smilesarefree, and you #enjoytheday. Don't go away.

Exit 35:08
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