Tag Archives: azaroff

Off to Net.Finance.

Online Innovations in Financial Services MarketingOn Tuesday I fly to New York for a couple of days to attend and speak at Net.Finance’s Online Innovations in Financial Services Marketing conference. This is an extension of their main conference which occurs every April in Arizona.

Last year the final day was focused on innovations in the financial services industry, and included an excellent set of speakers and presentations. I spoke about ChangeEverything.ca, why Vancity did it and what we get out of it.
Next week I will be doing a brand new presentation about responding to bloggers. I have been delivering the presentation internally, getting some incredible feedback, and am excited to deliver it in New York.
I’m particularly keen to see some terrific people, including Shari Storm (who always speaks right before me), Michael Seaton, Jurie Pieterse, Jason Knight and Jim Bruene.
I have been to the last two Net.Finance conferences, and find them to be valuable sources of information and incredible networking opportunities. This April’s conference looks like an outstanding line-up. I am delivering a presentation about FIs and social responsibility. It’s a big topic, and frankly I’m a little nervous as I begin to plan out what I want to cover.
So let me know if you’ll be at either of these two conferences, and if you are there, please make sure we connect in person.

TWO QUICK UPDATES: One, I’m so excited that my friend Trey Reeme will also be there. And I’ll try and blog the conference each night. No promises though!

For credit union employees on LinkedIn.

I’ll be honest with you, I am not quite sure what to do with LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn started this service a little while back, and I thought it would be cool to create a group for all credit union employees on LinkedIn. But then I wondered if I was the right person to create such a group.

So I passed the idea to my friend and EverythingCU marvel, Morriss Partee. Morriss went ahead and started the group.

I’m not sure where it will go, but if you’re a CU staff member who uses LinkedIn, go ahead and invite yourself to this group and let’s see what develops.

And if anyone has any thoughts as to where it can evolve, let Morriss or myself know (and if anyone wants to create a little icon for the group, that would cool too!).

UPDATE: To join the group, click here.

Reflections on five years of blogging.

Five years ago today, I was living in Los Angeles, working at the now defunct Media Revolution, producing a site for Honda motorcycle enthusiasts when I decided to start a blog.

Initially my blog was merely a place for me to put links to interesting, funny or political sites and media I liked. I did this instead of annoying my friends with group emails. Here is my first month of content. Pretty benign.

My blog stayed that way for four and a half years until April of last year when a few people asked me why I don’t write about social media and banking topics. They pointed out that many of the people writing about such things worked at vendors and not on the client side. So on April 3rd of 2007 I posted that I was taking a a new direction, and would be writing about the intersection of social media, online branding and the world of banking.

What I never could have predicted was how personally transformative the experience would be. The online community of FI bloggers I have joined is amazing. Insightful, supportive, funny and helpful. I have grown to admire, respect and lean on these fine folks and consider them to be an important part of the social fabric of my life (most of them are in the “my peers” section on the sidebar of my blog’s homepage). I am addicted to speaking at conferences now, partly because it’s the best chance to see these great people in person from time to time.

Many of these people are connected to me via LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, my personal tripod of social media utilities.

Then in July, Jim Bruene who created NetBanker, one of the best and brightest blogs dealing with the online world of FIs asked me to guest blog on his site, which reaches thousands and thousands of people in the industry. I nervously started writing for him in July of last year. I was able to start some healthy discussion about issues around social media in the world of finance, and as a result met more great people whom I otherwise wouldn’t have known.

The final part of the transformation happened in November when I used my blog as a place to ask for help from my readers and subscribers with my upcoming Net.Finance NY presentation. I received several extraordinarily helpful comments from others in the industry, and this input made my presentation exponentially better. I am excited to deliver it later this month.

I’m excited to see what 2008 holds in store for our community of industry bloggers. I, for one, am very optimistic. See you on the circuit…