Brilliance from Bankwatch and GonzoBanker
Posted by Trey Reeme on August 11th, 2006
Colin posted a great response at Bankwatch about the Vancity site:
Vancity’s ROE may be half that of the chartered banks, by design, due to membership benefits. However that doesn’t give Credit Unions exclusivity to the notion of community development. They may be good at it, but they are not exclusive owners of it.
So well done to Vancity in carving out this space for themselves, and nicely aligning it with their model. But the space is new enough that there is room for banks to enter the space too. The advantages that will come from social networking that aligns with GenY are high stakes.
Vancity entered the social web with the right attitude. For them, it’s about building community. But Colin’s absolutely right: credit unions don’t own that notion.
For a Friday laugh, let’s hope banks and credit unions aren’t holding social web strategic planning sessions similar to the war room in this GonzoBanker article! (Thanks, George!)
I believe that social networking does fit the credit union model more nicely than it fits the bank model, but that doesn’t mean that banks aren’t itching to enter the space – or that they couldn’t be very successful in doing so. The GonzoBanker article might be tongue-in-cheek, but I’m seriously bracing for a chain reaction of financial institutions blindly building MySpace profiles.
That GonzoBanker article was great. I hadn’t seen that, thanks for the link…
Well, I cringe at the fact that many credit unions are indeed having similar discussions. Although I must say that having a myspace profile for your credit union is not necessarily a bad thing. Why not?
The dangers, of course, are attempting to be too “hip” with the content and believing that the CU is actually doing something to attract and serve young adults simply with a myspace profile.
Aside from the dangers, it is a way to communicate what credit unions are, how they are different, and letting youth and young adults know credit unions can help them.
A myspace profile can be a good thing as long as CUs take caution and are smart about what they post and realize it is only an adjunct to serving youth and young adults.
Warning: Don’t click on the following links if you’re at work. You could get in trouble. If you do lose your job, don’t blame me.
Josh, You’re right – there’s nothing inherently wrong with a CU building a myspace profile.
After all, there’s over a hundred million users sending friend requests to classic bands like the Beatles, professional wrestlers like Hulk Hogan, and political figures like Condi Rice. :) (Ok, so those are made up. There are a ton of people using myspace in very cool ways. Many are musicians.)
I’m not really worried about CUs entering myspace. With so few CUs with RSS enabled websites and hosted blogs, a mass move to myspace isn’t happening soon. My point is that jumping onto social media as a trendhopper (blogging/podcasting included) tends to backfire for companies if there’s not an understanding of why there’s a trend in the first place.
Now, do I think a credit union myspace profile could be done right? Absolutely. A CU with a passionate member base and a transparent culture could pull it off. But I’d feel better advocating a Vancity effort over myspace anyday.
I think efforts like Vancity’s are where credit unions can really carve out a niche in social media. Nothing about the changeeverything site feels forced, salesy, or cheesy. I’d argue that it’s more Gen X than Gen Y, but Gen Yers aren’t choosing FIs based on myspace profiles, either. It’s largely about convenience and price.
Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge hits on myspace as an advertising platform in this article today: Is MySpace.com Your Space? Very interesting read…
To quote from the interview with Harvard professor John Deighton: “[On myspace] Fox created a profile page for X-Men: The Last Stand. Disney ran a contest to place the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on the profile page of a MySpace member, turning the winner into the most popular kid on the block. Unilever, Pepsi, and many of the national advertisers that Google aspires to serve are playing with it.
Q: What do you think of MySpace as an advertising platform? How will it develop?
A: I think MySpace is a really exciting marketing frontier, fertile with possibilities. It is a rival to paid search, and products like MySpace might conceivably evolve into something even bigger.
Google’s limitation as an interactive marketing medium today is its insistence on respecting the anonymity of its users. MySpace puts the power of individual identity in play. You’re not anonymous on a social networking site—you’re exactly the opposite. You’re presenting a managed self to the world.”