Tag Archives: netfinance

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.

ROI on community.

I have been asked many times about the ROI of community projects like ChangeEverything.ca. Up until last month I had an answer, but it wasn’t very good, and I can’t even remember what it was any more. Just some mumbling about how we can’t measure ROI on everything.

At Net.Finance I heard Michael Seaton speak and he asked the audience, “What’s the ROI on a round of golf or lunch with a client?” I loved it. If a company is interested in being innovative, some money has to go towards projects where the ROI cannot be expressed ahead of time. You have to try it and see if it works. Certainly I wouldn’t recommend this for more than, say, 10% of your marketing or development budget. But if you want to innovate you have to have a little fun money to play with for experimentation purposes (rumour has it that Google developers can spend 10% of their time on side projects, that can end up creating important innovations).

And then, via Colin I came across this post by Will Pate: Online Community Success and ROI. He has found metrics and stats from a variety of sources indicating the benefits that community features will give to a website’s ROI. Nicely done.

Thanks Colin and thanks Will…