Tag Archives: social media

Social Media Marketing Best Practice: Community Engagement

About a week ago, Morriss Partee blogged this: Social Media Marketing Best Practice: Use multiple media.

In this post, he tagged me, along with a few others, to continue a topic of Social Media Marketing Best Practices started on the Twist Image blog by digital marketing guru Mitch Joel.

He asked me to continue this thread by adding my two cents, so here goes.

My Social Media Marketing Best Practice is Community Engagement:

I used to call it Web 2.0, but that seemed to focus too much on technology. So I started calling it Social Media, but I think that focuses too much on the tools and leads us to jump to solutions before we fully grasp the issue we’re trying to address. Now I simply call it Community Engagement. The most important thing is to never lose sight of our core objective: People. We need to keep the people we’re trying to engage in a conversation front and centre, and develop a plan to inspire participation around a relevant topic, event, issue, brand, product or service.

I hope this thought furthers the conversation a little.

Thanks Morriss!

It’s all about me…

In front of the Mendenhall GlacierTwo cool things happened to me today that I want to tell you about.

The first thing is that I gave my presentation to the Internet Marketing Conference, which is happening today and tomorrow in Vancouver. It was only a 25 minute slot, which is short, but I delivered it in about 15 minutes, so we had time for some good questions. I usually like longer slots to get into more details, but it was fun to give a short, tight presentation instead.

A couple of people blogged it, which is a first for me, I think.

Miss 604 live blogged it, which I appreciate. And one of the sponsors, Techvibes summed it up nicely.

The second thing is that my friend TJ McCue published an interview he did with me. I’ve known TJ for about a year, and we met… um… hey TJ, how did we first meet? Anyway, I admire TJ for his smarts and entrepreneurial spirit. He’s always got something cooking, and it’s usually pretty interesting. He blogs on the Dun & Bradstreet content portal called AllBusiness.com. He ran an article called Why Bother with Blogging or Social Media. It’s a good piece, and may be part one of two.

Enjoy, and thanks for this indulgence…

NOTE: Here’s part two, it’s called Why Bother with Blogging or Social Media, part two

Vancity and the Microfinance wiki.

I am so pleased to announce the new wiki Vancity has launched. It is for the Microfinance community in Canada, and lives at microfinance.ca.

Why did we launch a wiki? Well, in short, we are a longtime Microfinance practitioner wanting to expand knowledge amongst those who are involved with Microfinance in Canada.

We have a product called Circle lending, in which a peer group takes out very small loans together, and help each other to succeed in what are usually home-based businesses to repay their loans together. It is an amazingly transformational product, designed to help lift people out of poverty and give them a new chance.

Additionally, we have a Microcredit Toolkit, which is an open source peer lending model so any institution can replicate it. We were incredibly honoured that Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for founding Grameen Bank, personally endorsed our toolkit a couple of years ago.

As you can see, we are deeply involved with the Microfinance model in Canada, and wanted to create a place where we could take the open source concept a little further. So we created and are hosting a wiki where anyone can add information as a practitioner, researcher or follower of Microfinance in Canada, with the aim of growing and evolving a central knowledge repository about the subject.

I think it’s a great example of a very inexpensive solution to create affinity within a specific community. Now let’s see if people find it useful.

I want to recognize the amazing Catherine Ludgate, who manages Vancity’s Microfinance programs, and without whose support this never would have been launched. The second I came up with the idea of a wiki to bring together the Microfinance community, Catherine was enthusiastically on board. If you want to know more, here’s a great article about Catherine.

I also must thank Tim McAlpine and Currency Marketing for creating a wiki that doesn’t look like a wiki. See the screenshot below to see what I mean…

Oh, and PS: Colin Henderson at CommunityLend, I am hoping you’ll be the first to add yourself to the wiki…

microfinance.ca