Tag Archives: social media

Ready and raring to present.

I spent a big chunk of this past weekend creating my presentations for both Net.Finance 2008 and CUES Experience.

Net.Finance 2008It’s funny to look back at my initial presentation from last year’s Net.Finance about ChangeEverything.ca. It was so full of words and clunky. I am relying mostly on images and my own storytelling now to get the message across. It’s a big evolution, and I’m excited to see how it will go over.

My talk at Net.Finance will be Corporate Social Responsibility As Key Differentiator, which may be like speaking socialism to a room full of bankers. Hopefully I can at least make it funny and entertaining. I am pulling data from our experience at Vancity as a community-driven organization, proving the model that social marketing can break through the clutter, epsecially in our heavily commoditized industry.

CUES ExperienceAt CUES my talk is called Credit Unions and Social Media: A Case Study, and will cover a lot of the same ground, but deal a lot more with social media and go into more detail around how ChangeEverything.ca works. I have the luxury of a 75 minute session, which is by far the longest talk I have given. It’ll be nice not to be pressed for time, and be able to engage in a discussion throughout, rather than at the end, time permitting.

Partnership Symposium 2008I’ll take what I learn from them to shape my end of the year keynote at the Partnership Symposium 2008. I’m really excited about it. My talk is called Engaging with the Social Economy, and I’m just starting to wrap my head around what I’ll cover. It will deal with how credit unions are uniquely positioned to use the banking platform to make our society a better and more equitable place.

Please let me know if you’ll be at any of these events. I look forward to seeing you there.

Honestly, who cares about Twitter?

I often find it hard to explain the value of Twitter. The first time I tried it, like a lot of people, I didn’t get it or get into it. It was only once I found my community (in my case a community of credit union thought leaders) that it resonated with me.

Now I don’t have to figure out how to explain Twitter because the fine folks at Common Craft have produced a great new video that does that better than I ever could.

Ladies and gentlemen: Twitter in Plain English.

Twitter is where my community is.

A few weeks back I wrote about the mass migration over the weekend of my Twitter community to Pownce. We were all impressed with Pownce’s platform and the ability to have more detailed threaded conversations.

But it didn’t last. Even Ron Shevlin who proclaimed that he had moved to Pownce and was never looking back, went back. Now it seems like no one is left on Pownce. And why is that?

I think it shows that community is more important than the platform. Twitter is where everyone is. Naturally there were some holdouts, and as a result the community was less fulsome on Pownce, and we went back.

I would guess this will happen to anyone using social media to foster community and relationships. It will happen a lot.