Tag Archives: blogging

Net.Finance Day Three

Well the standout today at Net.Finance was Michael Seaton. He’s a great presenter who knows how to tell his story effectively without PowerPointing to death. It was great content, relevant and useful. I wonder about the sophistication of the crowd with social marketing, but I think he gave everyone something big and real to think about.

I feel a little bad that Vancity spent good money sending us out and the information is either too esoteric or too high-level and vague. Presenters need to give real world examples, challenges, successes, failures, metrics, results, stories. You know, actionable information to help the rest of us build business cases and spread the gospel of the web as a marketing, communications and engagement tool for our customers and prospects.

I am excited about tomorrow. For me, this is where all the exciting stuff is.

Okay, off for some Mexican food. Great Mexican food is about the only thing I miss about LA. I lived like two blocks from the BEST.

Net.Finance Day Two

So today started off strongly. Eskander Matta from Wells Fargo gave a very good presentation of some of the things they’ve done for business customers. People back at Vancity will be happy to know that business banking is a big focus here this year, and I don’t remember anyone addressing it last year. Some good info to take back with me, including the keynote address from Michael Donalson from HSBC. Everyone’s moving on business customers.

Also some great new research from James Van Dyke from Javelin Strategy & Research on online banking trends and stats. He was great last year and his info was strong and relevant this year too.

James McGuire from Royal Bank of Canada also had a great presentation, which I’m hoping to get my hands on. Great to meet the Canadians down here, and there are plenty of us. Everyone comments how the Canadian banks are so far ahead, which is nice to hear, though not altogether believable.

At the cocktail reception, I met Jim Bruene, which was great. I’ve followed his blog for a while and am a subscriber to his extremely useful Online Banking Report. Nice to put faces to names of the bloggers I follow.

The conference just isn’t as strong as it was last year. It’s good, and I am getting some great ideas to bring back with me, but last year by this time my head was already swimming with new ideas and I had taken a ton of notes of relevant material to bring back with me.

Looking forward to Michael Seaton tomorrow from Scotiabank talk about crowdsourcing, and of course I’m super excited about Thursday. Evidently a bunch of people are leaving tomorrow night, as Thursday’s an optional day, but 100 new people are coming in just for that day’s presentations.

Net.Finance Day One

It was a good kickoff today at Net.Finance. This was the Customer Acquisition and Cross Selling Summit, an optional first day to the conference. I gotta say, so far it doesn’t seem quite as strong as last year, but some great highlights.

It’s a tad early to say, but people seem to be buzzing about social media. There have been a few questions from the crowd, some comments in presentations about blogging, YouTube, Facebook, social networking, etc…

Emily Edwards, SVP of Online Sales Marketing at Bank of America was talking about Bank of America’s plans in the social media space, and she asked of her company “How do we start to give up control without giving up complete control?” I thought it was great to hear a big bank talk like that. People seem to get the new world of marketing where companies don’t control the message, and have to operate with a greater level of transparency to increase trust among the network of people who are talking about your company and brand online.

It’s nice to reconnect with some great people I met last year and meet some new folks, including Shari Storm from Verity Credit Union in my old stomping ground of Seattle. Also nice to meet some Canadians who make up a sizable group here, including Michael Seaton from Scotiabank, who was recently in a panel in Toronto with Rob Cottingham from Social Signal.

Looking forward to tomorrow, and hopefully meeting Colin Henderson.

I am excited to give my presentation. I think it will create some good dialogue, because it’s so far removed from anything anyone else is doing.

I discovered today that I can’t do math. This whole time I thought I had 45 minutes, but if I had added the minutes on the schedule together, I only have 35 minutes. Ugh. I’ll move fast and hope we have some time for discussion. I really don’t want to cut anything out, I feel it’s a strong presentation as-is.