I like this ad.

Coincidentally I was working on a keynote that I am giving at a Marketing Association of Credit Unions roundtable here in Northern California about “Aggressive Youth Marketing” and I took a minute to goof off and I saw this ad.

When talking to CU Marketers, many of them are afraid to get “crazy” with their marketing, like this. Of course, by “Crazy” I mean competitive.

I have heard people talk about not wanting to damage another credit union or slapping down local banks.

Hey, those are all valid points. Irrelevant, but good points.

As the old saying goes, though, “You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”. What I mean is, you will never be able to negotiate with the local banks or friendly credit unions and convince them to give you their customers or members.

You can’t diplomatically steal away your competitions business. Eventually you will have to get a little crazy if you want to survive.

Many banks and credit unions are trying to survive right now. So don’t be surprised if your competition starts getting a little crazy and start coming after you. Things ARE that crazy out there.

You wanna get nuts? Come on, let’s get nuts!

So that is why I like this ad. Visually it says “If you want a ‘Big’ burger, you need a Whopper. Forget that little ‘Big Mac’ guy. He is a pipsqueak. That’s a snacker not a meal!” It identifies the competition and BK’s superior quality product (arguably). To be honest, it drags the competition outside and slaps him around a bit and then says “Now whatcha gonna do?”

Your competition is not your friend. Even if you have the same ideals and you like the people over there, when you punch the clock, it is your job to go out there and get members. Those memebers are going to come from somewhere, and likely, they are coming from a bank or another credit union.

You can’t share members if you want your members to consider you their primary financial institution. Love your fellow credit unioners the same way football players from opposing teams can go out for beers after a game of slamming each other on the field. Love them the same way politicians who can party together at a mixer and then slam each other on CNN. Friends are friends, but business is business. If you want to stay in business, you sometimes have to get a little crazy and get a little aggressive.

It is time to go to the mattresses!

When you have a better product and service, never hesitate to hold it up to your competitors for everyone to see. Remember the “Pepsi Challenge”? Pepsi took on the big red can and took huge market share from Coke. What happened? The colossal “New Coke” blunder happened.

Coke was so unprepared for this kind of confrontation that instead of responding to the ad in the marketing department, they went back to the recipe and changed it. In credit union world, this has been called “R&D’ or “Rip-off and Duplicate” which success has been pretty consistent with the “New Coke” success (as in not very successful).

Don’t jump into line with your competition. Don’t follow them around waiting for them to lead you to success.  Jump out of line, run to the front and trip the guy in front. As the leader goes face first into the sidewalk, everyone following him will fall too. You will be the only one left standing.

It’s all about healthy competition

Competition is healthy and being aggressive can be fun and effective. I have to do it every year at the CUES, CUNA and MAC awards conferences. I have to stand next to my competitors (no matter how much I like them and their work) and say “Look, we do good work, look at all of our awards and creative work!”. See, I think we are the best at what we do. If I didn’t think so then I should get out of the business right? Should I keep it a secret? Should I hide out with a few clients and pray for referral work? How long would I stay in business with that strategy? I have great clients and I ALWAYS appreciate it when I hear from a new client that one of my clients referred us. But I have had clients retire and a new VP will come in and cut all existing vendor relations. If I am not out there throwing elbows and competing then I might as well close up shop.

Time to bring it home.

Your credit union should excel at something. What is that thing? Do you have the lowest rates? Do you have a lot of branches making you super convenient? Do you have a bilingual staff? What is it? Nail that down and then take a look at your competition (Banks AND Credit Unions AND Check Cashing spots). Put a spotlight on them. Make them sweat…

Make THEM compete with YOU! Now get out there and kick some ass!

It still hurts my stomach to write that. That CU marketing exec was explaining why he was going to the lowest bidder and using low-rent graphic designers and canned marketing for his credit union marketing. I couldn’t figure out if he was trying to mess with my head or negotiate a better deal from me or what. All I know is that I threw up in my mouth a little when he said that.

I mean, if you want to kick me in the gut, why not just tell me that I am funny looking or make a Ritchie Cunningham jokes or something. Just don’t tell me that design doesn’t matter.

I care about what I do and I know that we do a good job and provide a valuable service for our clients. Our ROI numbers prove it. So I know I am right when I say, visuals are important if not more important than substance when it comes to making the sale. I mean, really, you can get tap water for free, pay 25 cents for a store brand bottle or $2.00 for “the good stuff” and there really isn’t that much of a difference to justify the huge difference in price right?

Oh, I guess I should say that the CU marketing genius is no longer employed at that credit union.

Anyhow, that is why I was giggley when I read an article called What’s Psychology Worth? A Field Experiment in the Consumer Credit Market. (which I came across via NeuroScienceMarketing).

This is pretty neat so hang in there.

There was a bank in South Africa who was trying to increase their loan portfolio (like most of us). They wanted to know what psychological factors impacted their customers the most. They mailed 50,000 customers a loan offer, and used several variations of two features of a traditional direct mail piece:

1. The mailed offers included a range of randomly selected interest rates – The thought is that the interest rate (along with repayment terms) is the most important criteria for whether a loan offer is appealing to the consumer. This is what we in the marketing biz call the “Steak” of the offer.
2. The bank also included several “psychological features” - details of the mailed offer that had nothing to do with the loan. Things like marketing copy and images and colors. These elements were intended to “frame” the offer in some way or otherwise alter customer behavior regardless of the rate. We call this the “Sizzle”.

What did the researchers learn?

People would pay a higher rate if the design were good enough. Or, that rate alone was not a significant enough motivator for the recipients. People responded to the “Pretty Postcards” more than the “Black and White” ones. So much for the “know-it-all”, unemployed credit union marketing genius who kicked me in the guts with his assertion that I am in the business of making pretty pictures with no true value. And that is how I really feel about that.

The researchers went on to say:

Inconsistent with standard economics, some of the psychological features also significantly affected take-up. The average effect of a psychological manipulation was equivalent to a one half percentage point change in the monthly interest rate. Interestingly, the psychological features appear to have greater impact in the context of less advantageous offers and persist across different income and education levels. In short, even in a market setting with large stakes and experienced customers, subtle psychological features appear to be powerful drivers of behavior. [Emphasis added. From What’s Psychology Worth? A Field Experiment in the Consumer Credit Market, Marianne Bertrand et al, 2005.]

The experiment featured a huge range in interest rates - 3.25% to 11.75% (I don’t even know how they got this experiment greenlighted - what credit union would have the courage to do this?). They also incorporated different features in the offer, including different descriptions of the loan, a comparison to competitive products, varied photos of males and females, and subtle suggestions to figure out what worked best.

The best part (in my opinion) was this:

For the male customers, replacing the photo of a male with a photo of female on the offer letter statistically significantly increases takeup; the effect is about as much as dropping the interest rate 4.5 percentage points… For female customers, we find no statistically significant patterns.

Overall, these results suggest a very powerful effect on male customers of seeing a female photo on the offer letter. Standard errors however do not allow us to isolate one specific mechanism for this effect. The effect on male customers may be due to either the positive impact of a female photo or the negative impact of a male photo.

What all this means is that it is usually better to have a female representing your loan no matter which demographic you are targeting, that men are gullible and that sex sells.

But take a good look at those numbers! Having an attractive female in the loan piece was as important as a 5% rate discount to the male recipients but made no difference to the female recipients. So it didn’t HURT the response to the females but gave a greater response to the male recipients. And having creative and interesting marketing pieces means that you might be able to have higher rates and still close loans. This is important to credit unions that cannot compete with banks in their market on loans.

Now I am not saying that you should sex-up all your marketing or play “Girls Gone Wild” DVDs in your lending department to squeeze a few extra points out of your members.

What I am saying is that you need to do experiments with your members and your marketing. If all you run are same old conservative stuff that every bank in town is running, how do you pull to the front of the pack in your market?

Do a “Crazy” experiment that blows past your current marketing strategy and see what happens. If it falls flat you can claim temporary insanity or go a different direction and try again.

Like this South African bank, you won’t know if you have an untapped resource of people willing to pay a few extra points unless you get their attention.

Maybe you need some pretty postcards or, at least, some pretty weird ones.

Note: After I posted this, I saw that Ron Shevlin posted on the same article. Read Ron’s apology to us marketing types who get the shaft when our design skills are compared to “Great Rates”.

Ok, first let’s get a few things out of the way. While I may have only been in the CU game for about 7 years, I have been in branding and marketing for about 15 years. One thing I can tell you is that “Bland is  not a Brand”

Even bran cereals and vegetarian foods are trying to say they have flavor, shouldn’t credit unions try to say at least that?

Nope, not if you ask the folks that I talk to. So many credit union folks have a “Fly below the radar” approach to branding and marketing that, if it didn’t make me want to cry, would crack me up.

Here is a fer-instance analogy. I own a coffee shop (as I seem to be saying a lot lately, but it is relevant – I swear!). My coffee shop is a lot like many credit unions. If I were to take the “Credit Union Methodology” of branding and marketing, this is what I would have to do…

1. Visit all the local coffee shops to taste their coffee and food. Then I would adjust my formula to taste exactly like theirs. Obviously this is what their customers like and since I want their customers, this I what I should do. It makes no difference that my product is superior and my existing customers love my product.
2. I need to look at my competitor’s products and rewrite my menu to serve the same thing. It doesn’t matter that I am nestled between four schools and have a great lunch crowd – I need to only serve muffins, Danish, scones and microwavable breakfast sandwiches. No salads, wraps, sandwiches, hot dogs, sodas (pops), mini pizzas, desserts or anything like that. That’s not what my competition serves, and they must be right…right?
3. My competition sells a bunch of stuff that my customers have never asked for and don’t seem to want like CDs, air fresheners, bookmarks, coffee machines and dishes. Maybe if I buy these things and line my shelves with them, then people will buy them. Maybe simply having these things, like my competition, will cause their customers to flock to my coffee shop.
4. My competition opens at 5am every day, we open at 6am. We used to open at 5am but since we serve a lot of teachers, cops and students, no one would come by till 6:30. Maybe I am doing something wrong. The other places must be getting traffic at 5:00 am. It has to be something I am doing and has nothing to do with my customers or their needs. I guess I will have to pay the extra payroll to be “competitive”.
5. My competitors use warm and welcoming colors on their walls. They have suede seats and piped in jazz music. This is much nicer than my funky 20ft airbrushed mural, local punk rock band photos and nightclub style booths and tables with rock music playing over the speakers. I should go towards creating a relaxing atmosphere instead of fun, funky and punk rock. I would hate to be known as that “weird coffee shop”. My customers are all the same after all, in lockstep and completely conformist…just like my competition’s customers right? I mean, no one wants to be known for being unique after all.
6. My competition never does PR stunts. They never go out to the Christmas tree lots and hand out coupons for free hot chocolate; they don’t give out free dog biscuits to their customers with doggies. They don’t give out free milk to the kids of parents stopping in for their morning, afternoon or evening coffee. They don’t make t-shirts calling their competition and their customers “Corporate Whores” or any of the other things that we do. We should stop doing that immediately because it is a waste of money and time. I mean our competition doesn’t do it…

Credit unions seem to suffer from an interesting condition that dictates that they must be in lockstep with their peers. Stepping outside of that perception of what is “Allowable” is met with fear and avoidance.

Even credit unions that are surrounded by banks and credit unions on every block are hesitant to try something wild and new in fear that their members or potential members might not take them seriously “as a bank”. Instead, they stand in line with their hands out waiting for a few table scraps that might make their way in their doors.

Credit unions are businesses and all businesses have something in common. They have to get non-customers (can we call members what they are for a change – CUSTOMERS) to give them a chance to make a sale. In order to do that, you have to get their attention. Sometimes it takes a slap in the face, a slap on the back or a pinch of the butt – whatever it is, you have to get their attention. Once you have their attention, you have a chance to make the sale. That is it. There is no magic bullet. But I can tell you this, you will never get their attention if you look like your competition.

Back to the coffee shop – we are known as “That crazy coffee shop”. We name our drinks funny names like “The Madd Hatter” (4 shot mocha) and “The Gunslinger” (6 shots of espresso and sugar). We have punk rock band photos and crazy murals. We have a drive through, a dining room and a patio for smokers. We host political meet-ups and meet-ups for the local wiccan groups. We are known as the crazy and weird coffee shop next to the tattoo shop. We are ALSO known as the coffee shop with the best coffee and service and employees in town. That’s not my opinion; it is the opinion of my customers.

I might not win the “Best Local Coffee Shop” in the local magazines or newspapers. I might not be able to compete with the “Mega-Banks” oops I mean “Mega-Chains” on advertising, price or locations but I know that I am beating the other local independent coffee shops. You know how I know? They are all for sale. Even after ripping off our signature drinks (and failing). Even after TRYING to duplicate what we have created. They are all suffering, even the ones who win the local “Best Local Coffee Shop” awards.

To me, I am ok with being known as weird and crazy, as long as I am ALSO known, by my customers, for being the best!

But there is a new shopping center near my neighborhood. Now, I am not rolling in so much dough that I walk around in a top hat, cane and monocle – but my neighborhood has a pretty high average income. This means that this little shopping center has a fairly cooperative clientele with generally higher deposit rates.

What I am saying is that it is a good neighborhood for a bank or credit union to move into. That is exactly what happened.

So in my little shopping center I have a local bank (about 800m asset size approx) and a credit union (about 6b asset size) and a UPS store (all places for notary publics to hang out). I have an account at the credit union but have never used them to notarize my papers. I thought it would make for a neat experiment – plus with gas at $5.00 a gallon, I didn’t want to drive across town to go to my regular place for notary services.

The security guard informed me that I would not be allowed to wear my sunglasses inside (for security purposes) so I took them off. He was pretty nice about it, but I live in California where we rarely take off our sunglasses, even when we are inside. I have permanent raccoon eyes (sunglass tan lines). But it wasn’t a big deal so I tucked them into my shirt.

There was one teller, not uncommon or unexpected for first thing in the morning. There was a member at the wicket so I stood in line. This is what I saw.

Three employees were sitting in guest chairs in the lobby (by the entrance door) stretched out and chatting about the weekend. When I say stretched out, I mean streeeeeeetched out. One guy’s butt wasn’t even on the chair seat. It looked comfy and uncomfortable all at the same time. I keep looking around and see a woman in a room sitting in a chair against the window facing the opposite direction. She looked back a few times to see me, the member behind me and the rest of the goof-offs in the lobby.

I wonder if she is waiting to open an account or get into a safe deposit box or something. She looks back and we lock eyes a few times. I smile as I understand how frustrating it could be to be alone in an office like that. She finally stands up and looks pretty upset. I am thinking she is going to open the door and start raising hell to get some attention. Then I notice that she is walking towards me.

“What do you need help with?” she asks curtly. I look and see she is wearing a nametag.

I was a little stunned. She was in charge. She wasn’t an irritated member, she was a pissed employee.

“I just need to get these papers notarized.” Showing her the papers.

“Come over here” as she walks away. I follow like a sheepish puppy.

“Let me see what you got. What are these?” I explain what the papers are and she looks and sees that there are two signature lines. One line is for me and one for the Vice President of the financial institution who sent me the papers, from Missouri.

“Yeah, see, we can’t do anything because this other person needs to be here too.” She said while handing the papers back to me.

“I just need a notary to verify who I am as I sign the papers, I don’t need you to verify the identity of the person who sent me the papers.” I responded, a little confused.

“Sorry, she has to be here for us to do anything. That’s the law.”

I collected my papers and walked out the door. On my way out, the Nod Squad that was busy holding the chairs down avoided looking in my direction.

The security guard politely suggested that I should have a nice day. It was a tough call at this point whether I could take his suggestion.

So there I am sitting in my car looking at the papers. This didn’t make any sense at all. I have never had the writing party have to be present for me to have my signature notarized.

I put the car in reverse and started to head to the office. At the last minute I turned towards town. I was going to head over to the place where I normally get this done. I know them a little better, they know me, maybe I can get some answers. Plus they were right next to the coffee shop and I was in need of a fix.

My regular notary signed my papers, gave me everything I needed, charged me $20 and mailed my papers off for me. We chatted a little and I was on my way with a smile. That’s how you treat a customer that you want to keep. I felt a little vindicated that I wasn’t a complete moron.

But that has led me to today. This happened three days ago and it is still irritating me.

My credit union, where I have been a member for about five years wasn’t friendly, service oriented or even cared that I was there. I was a pest to them.

No one wanted to talk to me. No one wanted to help me. No one wanted to do anything but send me on my way as quickly as possible so they could get back to their seat polishing.

I have thought about going back in to shoot some video with my Treo to send to their marketing department (these people are trashing their brand after all and that is important to me as a marketer – even though they are not a client). But I was so upset that I really don’t want to go back in there. They made me feel like I was at some angry ex-girlfriends house. Unwelcomed and unloved.

I was incredibly disappointed. Luckily I know where to go to get good service.

Too bad that it is not my credit union.

Does this happen in your branches? Are you sure?

I have been busy flattening the top of my forehead by slapping it repeatedly on my desk. It was slightly involuntary, but I call this tried and true practice “Launching a website”.

Yes, I know my methods are controversial, but aren’t most genius-like endeavors? Ok, enough, if I keep slapping myself on the back, my arm will fall off.

What I did was not really that spectacular, but it is something close to my heart. It is something important to me. It has to do with customer service and providing your members with a true value.

I think customer service trumps almost all marketing and branding efforts. See, you can prop yourself up as being the biggest and best, but when the chips are on the table, you have better have the deck stacked with solid customer service. Otherwise, you have just wasted a lot of money on marketing.

Second most important is having a product with value beyond its price. As a mentor of mine once told me, “Overpriced garbage may look like a great deal, but it still stinks”. He meant was that there has to be a true value beyond perceived value. You can’t create true value where there is none. Now this is an arguable position (Starbucks, Evian and Overpriced Foreign Cars to note a few) but the sentiment is clear. If you are going to charge a premium, then you had better have a premium product.

This is what brings us to where we are today…

Customer Service vs. Product Value vs. Your Competition

It started almost a year ago with a phone call from a client who asked me to sit in on a conference call with a vendor that was going to provide web development services. I know why credit unions use these services (instead of going through us). It is easy and convenient as they already have some sort of internet-like relationship with the vendor. I don’t take it personally and I try to help as much as I can to facilitate the process in the advantage of my clients.

The problem arises when I think the vendor is gouging. I take it personally when I think my clients are getting ripped off (or at least when I think they are getting ripped off). I am a little “Old School” in that regard.

I think that anyone who trusts me with their business also deserves my loyalty and, when applicable, protection. With this credo in place, it is sometimes hard for me to sit in on a meeting or conference call and listen silently while a client evaluates a service that is supposed to help them, knowing when a vendor is “pulling a fast one”.

So, as it goes, a client (who I will not name) was speaking with a vendor (who I will also not name) and the vendor told the client that they were going to charge the credit union several thousand dollars to copy and paste the content from their existing site to their new CMS credit union website. We are talking about 30 pages of copy and paste with maybe one or two text links on each page. Basically, this was a few hours of work or better described as several hundred dollars worth of work.

We hung up with the vendor and I freaked out. I told the client that there was no way I was going to let this guy get away with that kind of fleecing. I told the client that he should just let the site go up and I would copy and paste the content myself. I was a little beyond upset. The client, not to take this laying down (as in he doesn’t take crap from no one anyway), called the vendor and challenged the charge. The vendor backed down and did not charge them several thousand dollars. All was well in the world.

This little experiment made me say “There has got to be a better way”.

What was really at play here was that credit unions needed a CMS solution for their web sites. They needed an affordable internet marketing solution (that vendor’s package was super expensive already). They needed a selection of attractive designs - have you seen the template options out there (yikes)? Credit unions needed sites that could be launched in weeks (instead of months). They needed a true internet marketing value for their financial investment.

What they got were people with long arms reaching into their pockets.

Ok, so you are pissed and motivated. What did you do about it?

This is the type of experience that causes action. What did I do? Glad you asked. I decided that since there were no solutions that lived up to my expectations, I was in a position to put up or shut up. So I put up.

We launched CUQuickSites.com at MAC 2008 this year. While we launched the concept at MAC, we just turned on the site a few days ago. CUQuickSites hit all the points that I thought were missing from what was currently out there.

• Affordable solution – A complete credit union website for less than a month salary for a web designer.
• Solid CMS framework – Easy to use and simple to navigate robust in capabilities
• Quality layout designs – Not a “one size fits all” approach. New layout designs added monthly. Customizable for your credit union.
• Quality support – Video tutorials, telephone support, graphic design support
• Quick turnaround – launch in weeks instead of months
• Scalable – Easy to add pages, menu items and stuff like blogs and RSS or video to the layouts.
• Content Support – Access to our CUQuickBlogs content library to help you support your blogging efforts.
• Google and search engine friendly

Now I don’t normally like to advertise on this blog. At least I try to keep it to a minimum as much as I can. I really do try to keep this blog full of content of value and not a back door to our agency. But I think there is something here you can take away from our adventure in launching this internet marketing product.

So, here is the moral of the story.

Approach each relationship with “Service and Value” in mind and nothing will be able to get between you and your member.

When you put too much emphasis on the bottom line (like these vendors I mentioned) and not enough on providing value and service to your member: it is only a matter of time before someone figures out a way to make you obsolete.

Most importantly, make sure that your staff understands this too. Make sure they wear this philosophy on their sleeve. Make sure that they know that they may end up talking to someone who is willing to find a better way to serve your members.

By losing this focus, your staff member may inadvertently supply the fuel to cause action by your competition and not even know it.

• Currency Marketing’s CU Brand Blog - I like Tim and Nala and all the Currency gang. This is definitely a site to check out. Tim has a real handle on the credit union industry in Canada (America’s Hat). Their claim to fame is the incredible Young and Free Alberta campaign. Also as far as marketing companies go, I guess they are all right. I mean if you aren’t going to work with us, I suppose they would be a good second choice
• Netbanker - Excellent source for news on all things financial. I dont know how these guys find the time to do this. Excellent read.
• Trabian’s Open Source CU - This was the first CU Blog that I have ever read. When I posted, Trey Reeme sent me an email welcoming me to the party. I try to take that attitude and put it forward. They are still one of the top CU blogs out there and definitely worth of subscribing.
• Marketing ROI: Whims from Ron Shevlin - I am a bit of a Shevlin fan. He is pretty edgy, some say grumpy and cynical but I say whimsically perturbed.
• Jeffry Pilcher’s The Financial Brand - Jeffry has been serving the CU industry for a long time and brings a strong focus as to what CUs need to do to stay relevent in this new world. I am glad to see he has finally put his blog where his mouth is.
• North Carolina Credit Union League’s CU Communicator - I really like this blog. It is well written and speaks directly to the CU professional about things that are important (branding, events, promotions etc). Excellent resource.
  
• Everything CU - Morriss Partee runs the show at EverythingCU. Since we aren’t a CU we can’t actually get in and look around but from what I hear it is top notch. Also, knowing Morriss, you can’t go wrong with following his advice. He is a smart guy with a lot to offer your credit union.
• Market Insights’ Grow Your Bank - Excellent reference source. This blog references news from around the country relating to credit unions and banks.
• Creative Brand Communications The Story - Jeff Stephens and the team at Creative Brand have a nice blog going that hits on all things marketing and branding for credit unions. After you read all of our posts here, you should give them a look!
• CUES Nexus Connection & Skybox - This is the go-to site for credit union executives and marketing experts. CUES has created an extension of CU Management Magazine. This is a regular read for me and it should be for you too!
• Bruen/Bensley Blog - Ron Bensley and Charles Bruen are two big hitters. Their blog is awesome in that it touches on current events in the industry as well as a lot of humor. It is a fun and easy read with a lot of good information.
  
• The Better Banking Blog - This blog is more about banking and innovation in the banking industry. But is a nice peek into the neighbors house to see how they are living. Consider it “Competitive Review”. Well written.
  
• The CU Loop from Andy LaFlamme, Gen-Y employee at Maine State CU who has really come up in the industry. When was the last time one of your tellers turned marketing guy was quoted several times at a marketing conference by seasoned pros?
• The mysterious CU Skeptic - If you are looking for a challenging point of view, you need to check out this site. CU Skeptic pulls no punches when dealing with credit unions. My only wish is that he would post more frequently.
• Azaroff.com, by William Azaroff - I am an Azaroff fan. His blog is a reference on the industry. This site should be closer to the top of my list here.
• The Banktastics from The Garland Group - I’m a member, he’s a member, she’s a member, we’s a member wouldn’t you like to be a member too? Excellent social networking site for folks in the financial industry. Don’t let the name fool ya, it is mostly CU folks here.
• CUBlogs.org - This site is a “Two-Fer”. It is a blog about the industry AND a site that allows your credit union to give blogging a shot in a controlled environment. Very neato-o.
• The Bankwatch - Excellent site for news and info on the financial industry.
• Payment Industry Insider - An excellent site about news, trends and technology vital to credit union product development and growth. Also the site is amusing enough to make it one of my regular reads.
• Thwart Mediocrity - Trey Reeme who was the main contributor over at OpenSourceCU jumped into the CU “Real World” when he took a position at a Texas credit union. Now he gives his perspective of live inside and outside of the credit union industry with a peek into his personal life. He is a good guy and definitely worth a peek.
• Denise Wymore’s Cult-ivation - Ok, Denise talks about everything from credit unions, branding and customer service and more. She is an insider turned commentator. Excellent read!
• The Garland Group - Yes, the geniuses behind Banktastic.com have their own company blog too. Wheen do these guys find time to sleep. As always, I wouldn’t recommend them if they weren’t good!
• The Credit Union Warrior - An insider’s look at the CU world.
• WiredCU - Social Networking Trends and CU’s hosted by Gabriel Garcia. I have met this guy and he cracks me up. He is incredibly passionate about both the credit union culture ans social media.
• CU Communicator - A tiny corner of the WWW dedicated to helping credit unions become the worst kept secret in the world. They cover every topic from marketing to security. Excellent site.
• Credit Union InfoSec - “Random Thoughts on IT Security in the Credit Union Industry” is what they say, I say good info on technology, credit unions and how todeal with your IT department.
• The Life and Times of a Credit Union Employee - Brilliant. One of the first CU employee blogs (public) and still one of the best.
• What’s The Difference - The folks at JayRay do a great job with this site. Th provide a great perspective and voice to the credit union conversation. The topics generally revolve around communication with your board and your members. Great stuff.
• Tinfoiling - The ever-brilliant Gene Blishen is the General Manager of Mount Lehman Credit Union. He shares is incredible grasp of the credit union world as well as his knowledge on technology, services, trends and social media. If this list was in order of awesomeness, he would be closer to the top too!
• That Credit Union Blog - One of the first and still the best credit union blogs. If I had a “Top-Ten” list, this site would definitely be on it. It coveres everything from compliance to marketing to technology.
• NAFCU Compliance Blog - Do you remember those shows where the trusty guide would put his ear to the ground and tell you when trouble was on the way? Yeah, this site is like that trusty guide.

NEWS MEDIA & PUBLICATIONS

• ABA Banking Journal
• Adweek
• American Banker
• Bank Marketing
• Brand Week
• Credit Union Business
• Credit Union Magazine
• Credit Union Times
• Credit Union Journal
• CUES Management Magazine
• The Financial Times
• The CEO Report

Gen-Y Oriented CU Blogs

• Commonwealth Credit Union’s Young & Free Alberta Gen-Y website. - Currency Marketing’s behemoth youth marketing/social media experiment. See what all the hype is about.
• PSCU Financial Services’ Project New Age and its blog - Very interesting experiment in social media and youth marketing.
  
• Filene’s CU Tomorrow - You know who these guys are. They are Filene!
• CUNA’s YES CU Blog: Serving 18-to-30s - Youth marketing much? Then you should be checking this out!
• Young Money
• RBC’s P2P user-generated Gen-Y website about money - Another example of how the Canadians do social mmedia and youth marketing.
• YES Community - If you ever wanted to talk to a large group of “Under 30s” who know about the credit union industry, you have found your site!

Credit Union Blogs

• Change Everything (Vancity Credit Union)
• Our Voices (Verity Credit Union)
• True Story by Doug True - (Forum Credit Union)
• The Addisson Cafe - (Addison Avenue Credit Union)
• Brighter than a Bank - (Carolina Postal Credit Union)
• I Love My Hooptie - (Carolina Postal Credit Union - see a trend here?)
• UTFCU Rocks! - (UTFCU Credit Union)
• The Boardcast - (UFirst Federal Credit Union)

So, this isn’t a complete list. This is just a starter. I will be adding to this list as I can.

To the folks who attended the Marketing Association of Credit Unions 2008 Conference and Awards, I am compiling a list of the links that I mentioned in my presentation. I hope it helps in your presentations to your board and executive staff.

I will also be posting some of the slides with a short audiocast as a “mini presentation” that you can use to show to the folks who need more information on social media.

Now to the links:

Protecting your credit union’s reputation: A User’s Guide – This is where we talk about things like Google alerts and how you can use them to see who is talking about you, your staff and your credit union.

How to: Create your own credit union blog – This is a bit of a step-by-step on how to go about setting up your credit union blog.

Credit Union Web Design: What are your options – It is not as complicated as you may think.

Credit Union Podcasting: The Great Site Hype - If you are going to podcast, make sure you know what you are getting into.

CU Blogging 2: Rules for the road – More tips for setting up your credit union blog

Customer Service Millenium Style – There are a huge assortment of sites that act as consumer activists. Here are a few sites and examples of how companies suffer from and responded to online criticisms.

How To: What to do when your credit union gets blogjacked – This is where we show you how to do a little crime-fighting to find out who is out to get you or who is using your good name to line their pockets.

Another credit union blogjacking victim – This is where I talk about what happened to the folks at AFCU. Someone used their name to set up a fake blog that steals news about their credit union to sell Google ads.

Credit Union Blogging is not for Everyone – It really isn’t you know. But if you want to start looking into the costs and technology required to get the ball rolling, take a look at this post.

Free content for your credit union blog – You don’t have to write your own stuff all by your lonesome. There is plenty of good stuff out there that you can use free and clear!

Welcome to Stupid Life CU – Wonder why I left Second Life out of my social media presentation? This is why.

Friday Fun: FreecreditReport.com Makes me laugh – Yeah, it has very little to do with credit union marketing. But this post still gets 60 to 70 unique hits a day and exposes my company to potential clients all over the world. Has it resulted in any business? I don’t know. Does it hurt? Absolutely not!

Blogs are like asses, everyone has one – find out what your employees are saying about you. This is in reference to my comment that your employees or customers could be out there damaging your brand. Creating a forum to discuss issues gives you the power instead of outsourcing it to one of these sites.

Bank of America beat us to the punch again – creating a small business forum with social capabilities has turned Bank of America into a small business resource. It creates an affinity to BofA as well as exposure to their brand of being a bank that cares about small business.

Hang in there. I have more info on the way. And always, if you have a question – feel free to give us a shout!

Twitter is the perfect marketing wingman. He will tell everyone around you about the things that make you great. He will even go out and bring cool people to you. He is awesome like that. But not only is he a great wingman, Twitter makes a pretty good partner.

He likes to talk for hours and hours about all the things that you are interested in and listens when you want to talk about yourself. He wants you to tell him about your day.  He is always there when you need him. He always wants to chat online – when you are ready to chat. He wants you to text him all day long and tell him about the minutia of your day.

Jokes aside (for now), I have fallen back into Twitter. At first I didn’t care for it so much, it was kind of pointless and slightly dumb. I mean, why would someone care if I were at Target buying rash cream for my daughter? Plus I didn’t know anyone on Twitter that I wanted to hear from while they were shopping for rash cream.
Then something funny happened. The other CU people that blog or leave comments here were talking about being on Twitter.

Not being one to miss out on a party, I showed up. It was a whole new experience. There were three or four conversations going on. As my buddy list grew and more people got involved in the CU Twitterverse it became a tool. We would discuss immediate and current happenings. It created a filter for the bloggers to noodle out ideas before committing them to the interwebs. It became a sounding board where we have discussed outdoor credit union concerts, social media, branding, books and news.

Some of us have promoted current or interesting blog posts, web links or each other when there is an accomplishment that is noteworthy (like the Currency Marketing and Commonwealth CU hat-trick at CUES this year).

Twitter has become party central with all the people you like to hang out with. Because of this, Twitter has been experiencing some growing pains.

With the adoption of various third party twitter scanners that run as Instant Messenger like applications and the influx of users – twitter use has exploded. This growth has caused a few glitches – but overall, it is a regular part of my daily communications with the “outside world”. And if I am in conference with a client or “Twitter Silent” for a day, I can log in and look at the whole day’s conversation to catch up.

Why is this important to credit unions?
Well, for one, look at Washington Mutual. After they launched the WhooHoo campaign, a snarky individual set up a WhooHoo twitter account, which has satirized WaMu’s new marketing strategy. He has been leaving posts like

“WaMu. We don’t nickle and dime you, we overdraft you. Whoo-hoo!!!”

That’s funny, well it made me laugh. But what if someone started doing it to you? But for every guy like the WaMu guy, there are some legitimate folks have started tweeting (the verb form of “Twittering”)

As of today British Airways has started twittering (thanks Brad Garland) along with JetBlue tweeting about fare deals.
Wesabe has been tweeting, UTFCU and AllianceCU has been tweeting and even Comcast has been monitoring and responding to tweets regarding their services and practices. Lots of news stations and other information providers are jumping in too.

If this trend continues – then your members will be tweeting soon (they already are). With the adoption of mobile tweeting applications and the ease of having tweets sent to your cell phone as SMS/Text messages – it seems to fit right into the current pop culture trends.

But as one of my “Twitter Friends” poses the question “What if your board members could twitter with your CU members?” Talk about organizational transparency and serving the needs of your members!

So how do I catch the Twitters?

Tweet Scan - is a live search engine for Twitter. It searches all public messages on Twitter. You can search by keyword, author, and date with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.

You can use this to monitor who is tweeting about your credit union.

Summize - While other tools for searching Twitter have been around a while, they’re often not stable or consistent. Summize is FAST and shows trending topics plus different language searches.

There are also some nifty search operators like the one that helps you look for Tweets where people say “Credit Union” but only Tweets that include links. Of course, there is an RSS feed for any search results page as well.

TweetWheel - You may have a 100 or even 1000 followers. Which of your followers know each other? See how connected your members are. Build your own network. Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually. Note, if you have a LOT of followers, this will take a while.

Who Should I Follow? – When you first jump onto Twitter, it is hard to get the ball rolling. You can “Follow” me and I will introduce you to a bunch of other cool folks or you can use the tool, whoshouldifollow.com. It looks at who’s following you that you’re not following back and has sliders for filtering by popularity and physical location.

One thing you could do here is find out really popular Twitterers in your local area that your competition is NOT following and follow them. This may provide an opportunity to connect with their sphere of influence while they’re not looking.

Twerpscan - Now that you’ve beefed up your list of people to follow, who shouldn’t be following you? If there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hopes those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block.

The thing about this tool is that you have to login, so you may want to change your password to something temporary before running the tool and then change it back when you’re done. Twerpscan checks the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between them offering each follower’s name, bio, last tweet, a reputation thumbs up or down, followers, following and a link to block the follower if the ratio is over the threshold you set.

TwitterLocal - Is a neat tool for finding people who are tweeting in your area. It is on ly as accurate as the profile the tweeter creates so don’t get discouraged if there is no one in your area. Maybe they didn’t put in the city you are at and instead filled out their profile saying that they live “In Hell”

Twubble – You now have a few friends and want to know who they know or if you already have some folks in common. Twubble is a cool way to build your network quickly.

But that’s not all. You can go here for an excellent list of other twitter tools or here for a huge list of Twitter goodies or simply Google Twitter Tools and have at it.

But don’t forget to set up your Google Alerts because twitter comments are spidered by your favorite search engine.

Now for the flying leg drop!

This is the “finishing move” as to why you should seriously look at Twitter as part of your online marketing strategy.

Because it is 100% word of mouth and an edification based consumer awareness platform.

Here is a sample of what has been going on on Twitter that you don’t know about. These are actual quotes from people tweeting about credit unions.

Employees Tweeting? You know it!

“I love our Krups coffee machine in the credit union lobby. One cup at a time of Columbian + Hot Chocolate = Mocha time (sorta)

Members Tweeting? Uh huh!

“ look for a credit union — way better than banks. I’m a member of Patelco.”

“Just noticed that the Stanford credit union is now offering podcasts w/financial tips. Haven’t listened to any, but it’s a cool idea.”

“@mintdotcom any outlook on adding more local credit unions? I would like to add my car loan but its a credit union local to saint

Non-Members Tweeting? Of Course!

“I’m thinking the FAA Credit Union or Bank of America. Thoughts?”

“Have you tried Nevada federal Credit Union?”

Why is everybody always Tweeting on me?

So there you have it. People are using this system as a first person communication tool. You can get involved with the people in your community. You can get involved with the trendsetters in your FOM. You can get actual, real Word of Mouth exposure with Twitter. You can respond to people in real time that are in line at your credit union complaining about the long lines. You can actually serve your members better.

And the best part – it is free. It just takes a little time and effort on your part to get the ball rolling.

You never know, that wingman could introduce you to the partner of your dreams.

For those of you who do not know, Alltop is the newest project from serial entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki.

Ok, you might not know Guy Kawasaki. He started with Apple way back before LCD monitors and iPods. Then he grew into a small business kingpin with books like “The art of the start” and blogs like “How to change the world“. Now he is a Venture Capitalist who gives start-ups the funding to get smart projects off and running. So, now he has a project called Alltop.

Alltop is a list of the “Best of the web” in a variety of subjects. That’s why we are honored to be included in the ranks! We appreciate the vote of confidence and hope that the folks, who stop by here, throw some support to Alltop. It is a very cool site to find the best stuff out there on the web.

It also wouldn’t hurt to check out Guy’s personal blog and read up on him, he is a smart guy and really has something to offer those of you with an entrepreneurial spirit and drive.