Guest blogger on NetBanker.

If things have been a little quieter around here than usual, I have a good excuse. I have started guest blogging on one of the biggest and best FI blogs around, netbanker.com.

Jim Bruene runs a great blog, his insights and research into how FIs use (and underuse) the online channel is amazing. I have long been a fan and follower, and was happy to finally meet him face to face in Arizona in April at Net.Finance. And now I’ll be adding to his blog a few times a month. It’s an incredible honour for me, as this is the first time Jim’s ever had anyone besides him write on his blog, and because he has 6,000+ RSS subscribers (to my mere 40).

I’ll be writing about how FIs can better use the social web and brand themselves online. I’ll try and write from an insider, client-side perspective. I have the blessing from the folks at Vancity to do this, which is nice not to need the typical “these thoughts are my own and do represent…” disclaimers.

My inaugural post is entitled Finding your way to the Social Web. It’s an examination of how FIs could better leverage the Social Web, and uses a proposed Bank of America case study. You can see all my posts collected together here.

Jim welcomed me aboard very warmly, and I appreciate that. I’ll be linking to my posts on NetBanker from my blog everytime I add a new post, so stay tuned.

Finances on Facebook

Jim Bruene has a great post on netbanker.com about the rise of financial services on Facebook.

Watching the explosion of content, and users, at Facebook, may be the most interesting thing we’ve seen since the rise of the commercial Web in 1995/1996.

Jim writes about the opportunities that exist for FIs to sponsor Facebook applications like ChipIn. Jim documents how ChipIn works really well using screenshots. Nicely done. It’s exciting to watch this new explosion of financial services within Facebook. It really democratizes how people can access money.

And I’m not just mentioning this because he gave Vancity’s Bike Share a nice plug (although it didn’t hurt).