A few days ago, on another web service a few of us have been playing around on (read: researching), Gene Blishen posted an event reminder for Northern Voice 2008. What is it? From the Northern Voice site, “Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging and social media conference… .”

Mt Lehman Credit Union, home of Gene, has sponsored the event for the last three years and has promoted it in an interesting way. They hired a local(asterisk) street artist named Basko5 to design the event posters.

At first, I liked the idea because the poster was so rad, then I found out there was more to it than just fun and sass, which is when I liked it even more.

I asked Gene to tell me more about it. Here’s what he had to say:

This was a Vancouver event with a number of well known bloggers and Web 2.0 industry types attending (Scoble, Siffray, Bray, Hardin). How do you market to savvy bloggers? We thought that anything “in their face” wouldn’t fly so we thought to use a local street artist to develop some artwork and then use it (posters, stickers, buttons). Basco5 (who is my youngest son) said he would be interested and unknown to me was very popular with a group of these bloggers. It fit perfectly.

All of these items [posters, stickers, buttons] are gone in the first day. The posters are hot items and we only give out 3, saving a few for some of the volunteers and guest speakers…

The poster this year even took on a social media aspect, Basco5 put the poster up on flickr and invited comments for completion. That worked wonderfully. After all is said and done what do we get? Fantastic word of mouth, and from that more queries about Mt. Lehman as well as positioning us as part of the local blogging community.

The only birds not killed with this stone are the ones in the poster. What a great, specific way to get involved in your community using social media.

Another great example of specific involvement is how The Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union handled their graffiti problem. Since repeatedly washing it off the sides of their branch wasn’t deterring the vandalism, they reached out to a local graffiti artist to paint murals on it.

This solved their vandalism troubles because, out of respect, graffiti artists don’t vandalize each other’s work (Irony Alert!). Additionally, and more importantly, they reached out in a way that was specific to their community.

In The Lower East Side’s case, they didn’t use social media, but the spirit is the same. They embraced and celebrated a thing that represented a point of stress due to its being unknown, hard to control and not at all bankish. If you think the ROI of a blog is hard to justify to your board, imagine trying to convince them to commission a professional vandal to paint your branch.

Credit Unions are community specific, and communities aren’t always involved in the types of safe, measurable things bankers are. Blogging may not be right for your credit union. If so, asking your Marketing Director or CEO to start a blog doesn’t make any more sense than asking them to pick up a can of spray paint. But if those are the things your specific communities are involved in, then meet them there one way or another.

How are you making yourself visible in your communities in non-bankish ways?

(asterisk)He was local until recently, when he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark.