Technology :: Friends blog

According to a 2008 survey conducted by Azuki Systems, a mobile media solutions company, the highest level of Internet access via mobile phone is in the 35-55 age group and those who earn more than $100K. I start this blog post on mobile banking with those numbers because: 1) it is somewhat surprising - I would have guessed younger; and 2) highly desirable demographics are using the heck out of their mobile phones. Not so surprising I guess when you consider the cost of getting Internet access on a mobile--something most teenagers and young adults can afford.

This is important, I think, because consumer habits and expectations have a tendency to transcend all areas of their lives. So what may start off primarily for personal use, like texting, can expand into business life as usage of it becomes a norm. Perhaps that’s why SMS (short message service) is the most widely used technology for mobile banking—aside from the fact that it is likely the easiest and least costly service to implement. SMS has been around a long time now, huge numbers of people are using it, and it is easy to use and fairly inexpensive. SMS has reached the “tipping point,” using a phrase coined by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the book by the same name.

the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell

Mobile banking is still in its early stages. It is also not without issues. Awareness is low, even though most major banks offer it in some form. Consumers have security concerns, not unfounded, especially with SMS, because it is simply not secure. Many also feel little sense of urgency to conduct financial transactions on phones that can wait until they get home.

the vast majority of online users are simply not interested in mobile banking…they prefer to wait until they can access the Web, ATM, or phone channel Excerpt from Forrester Mobile Bank Report

Despite these issues (and what new service doesn’t have them?), it is only a matter of time before they are overcome. Access speeds will get faster. Consumer cost will decrease further and mobile devices will get better. Besides there are plenty of other surveys that show consumers are open to using mobile banking. For instance, a 2008 survey conducted by Fiserv/Checkfree (opens as a PowertPoint) shows that 79 percent of respondents would be interested in conducting financial transactions using a mobile device.

So what is a credit union to do?

It almost certain that mobile banking , like home banking, will become a consumer expectation. For now, mobile banking is a strategic play and differentiator because so few financial institutions offer it. Eventually, though, it will be required to compete effectively in the marketplace.

When is the right time to move?

For some, the answer is now, as members demand it. American First, Michigan State University, Patelco and Stanford are just a few credit unions that already offer mobile banking. Aside from being larger credit unions, they each have a membership that is highly receptive to and want new technology-based financial services.

Fortunately, there are some good system players, like CO-OP Financial Services, that are working with mobile solution leaders, such as mFoundry, to guide the way. They are aggregating the buying power of credit unions to help build the necessary economies of scale to bring costs down. They are also making the connection point between the mobile banking interface and core processing systems a little easier. Data processors will be offering mobile banking solutions in the near future as well, and some are already.

For credit unions where jumping completely into mobile banking doesn’t make sense right now, a good place to start is to provide a condensed, mobile-optimized version of your web site. For example, providing hours, locations, ATMs, contact information and rates aligns well with how consumer are currently using the web on mobile devices (e.g. looking up information) and meets immediate need. Building a mobile web site also is generally not a big cost or time investment.

CU Village is working with a number of credit unions that use our content management system to do just that. Once launched, these credit unions will be able manage mobile sites in the same place and way they manage their regular web sites. In some cases, content can be shared across the two sites, like rates using our centralized rates management system. In other cases, the web site content needs to be streamlined to work better on mobile devices. In either scenario, we can work with clients to map out a mobile site and content plan, and guide them through the entire process. Access to the mobile sites will be through a special URL using de facto standards such as m.yoururl.org, www.yoururl.org/mobile or the like. Because both screen and keyboard size tend to be small on mobile phones, keeping the URL as short as possible is important.

The bottom line is that mobile banking, while new and leading edge, will reach a tipping point eventually. Keeping your eyes on the trends of mobile web usage and member sentiment will help you gauge when the right time is for you to make the move. In the meantime, consider making smaller steps with a mobile version of your site and other mobile services like SMS alerts and meeting reminders. It will help get your feet wet and give you a sense of member interest in mobile services without huge risk or investment.

Next post, I'll dig a little deeper into the type, format and form of content to consider including in a mobile optimized web site.

 

How do you measure the ROI of social web initiatives? The snappy answer is that it doesn't matter because the investment, beyond your time, is probably zero. (In most cases, getting on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. is free). But your time does have value. So if you're going to spend it on something, you and your credit union should expect some benefit.

To get the discussion going, and I do hope to get your thoughts on measuring ROI, I very briefly want to lay out the social web planning model defined by Li and Bernoff in their book Groundswell. I think it is a worthwhile exercise because if you don't first define what you want to achieve, there really is nothing to measure. The acronym for the model is P.O.S.T. and it goes like this:

• People - Who you want to target and how you expect to engage them
• Objectives - What you expect to achieve and what your members expect to get
• Strategy - How you will connect with your members
• Technology - What applications you will use

The Objective portion of the model is where you define what you want to achieve. It is certainly OK to have marketing and sales goals like increasing membership, loans and the like. But those cannot be the sole basis of your initiative. You have to dig deeper, because the social web is about conversation, sharing and collaboration. So think of objectives that can develop into an enduring storyline that will engage your members more than a litany of marketing messages would. It could be helping your community, providing financial education or many of the other great things credit unions do to help members. Or your objective could simply be to gain insights into the financial needs, issues and concerns of your members.

Once you have your objectives defined, determine how best to measure how you're doing at achieving them and ROI. Measuring the number of fans, followers, traffic and return visits are all metrics you want to watch because they give you a sense of usage and reach. But what they don't measure are member insights and depth of relationship the social web can give you, or the value of that.

To give you an example, I have been getting email questions since starting these efforts from a credit union about social media and the web, which have been great. They have helped to validate that there is interest and in discussing the ways credit unions can leverage the web, and they have given me insights into how at least one credit union is approaching it all. That dialogue helped to inspire this topic, and will influence CU Village's approach to providing services. Honestly, I don't know how you place ROI on those series of interactions, but I do know they have been of huge value to me. I look forward to getting more of those kind of interactions, especially those directly in our blog, Twitter or Facebook page, precisely because of the insights and relationships they give not just to me or CU Village, but to the community of credit unions that are participating.

For credit unions wanting to measure the ROI of their own social web efforts, I recommend looking to the member interactions you get and the insights you gain from them. Because measuring success for the social web is more like the way you would measure success from a focus group or survey than a direct mail campaign. The value comes from what you learn and act on.

Don't get me wrong, the social web is not all soft goals. Sales and marketing goals are critically important too. But if you get your member relationships right through better understanding of their needs, the natural outcome will be achieving your business goals.

For more information on measuring ROI, check out The ROI for Social Media Is Zero by Augustine Fou, chief digital officer of Omnicom's healthcare consultancy group, and How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business by Aaron Uhrmacher from Mashable.

Congratulations to the Minnesota Credit Union Network on their new site! Name: Minnesota Credit Union Network Web Site: http://www.mncun.org Launch Date: April 2009

This is the third in a series of blog posts laying out CU Village's plan for using the social web. In the first two posts I talked about the people we want to reach, our objectives and our strategies. In this post, the last in the series, I'll hit on the technologies we'll be using, for what purpose and why.

Technology		Purpose	Why
Twitter		Stream of ideas, resources, trends and topics of interest related to web strategy and execution. Also, share quick updates on CU Village initiatives, accomplishments and promotions.	In response to customer focus group input for CU Village to help clients keep on top of web innovations and ideas. Our Twitter feeds focus on the best-of-the-best provided in bite-size chunks.
Blogger		Thought leadership, best practices and big idea promotion.	In response to customer requests for insights and resources that can be used to perform better and help credit unions continue to innovate. If Twitter is a raw feed of ideas, our blog is the place we provide analysis, context and guidance
Facebook		Relationship building and sharing of the more visual and design oriented aspects of what we do.	Because many of our clients cannot access Facebook at work, this one is a bit tricky. But like Twitter, it is a great place to share ideas with a network of people that have something in common. We hope that our "fans" will use our fan page as a place to network with us, each other and share ideas of their own. Dell's social media Facebook page is a good example of a successful community in action.
YouTube		Educational videos and showcase of our multimedia work.	Still very much in the early-stages, but we do a lot of great video and multimedia (see http://mcul.cubetvonline.com, which is technology we developed and videos we produce). YouTube is a great place to distribute media because of its large audience and reach.
LinkedIn		Company information	Maintain a presence and be part of a large audience of networked professionals.

There are other technologies we are and will be using, like Picasa, and our own web site and own technologies. But what I've listed above hits the key ones. We'll also be looking for ways to improve how we provide customer support online. Our partner Constant Contact, mentioned in one on our recent Tweets, has a great model we'll be looking at to possibly emulate.

On a related note, the other benefits that we are hoping to achieve with our social web plan are to continue to position CU Village as a leading credit union web site developer, improve our search engine rankings, and build awareness of who we are and what we do. So while first and foremost, it is about helping our clients and credit unions get the most out of the web through collaboration, it is also about marketing.

The marketing elements of our social web plan, in fact, are one of the reasons we are using third-party technologies like Blogger and Twitter. This is important because search engines determine rankings, among many other criteria, by the number of sites linking to your site and the content you have. The social web helps with both. (Check out Mark Arnold's blog post on search engine optimization, he is senior vice president for Neighborhood Credit Union.)

The writers of Groundswell tell readers to "concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies," hence the word "social" in social web.

From there it is not too big of a leap to make the connection between credit unions with fields of membership and common bonds, and the communities and networks being built through the social web. Using the planning process defined in Groundswell (People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology), I'll be exploring how credit unions can use the social web to connect with members in future posts.

In my last post, I opened the hood a little on CU Village's objectives for getting onto the social web. The question I left at the end, however, is how do these objectives tie to our strategies related to using the social web? So here is a quick summary of our social web objectives (what we want to achieve) and our strategies (how we are going to achieve those objectives):

Objectives		Strategies
Drive thought leadership		Keep customers abreast of current trends and issues Develop and identify best practices
Build better and deeper customer relationships		Provide easy access to training, resources and support Make client communications easy, meaningful and frequent
Enable and encourage collaboration and dialogue		Garner customer input on product development and customer service Cultivate an ongoing forum for sharing ideas

I am sure we'll be adding to and revising our strategies, but it is a start and meant to evolve.

In terms of who we want to reach, which is an important question to answer when developing a social web plan, we want to connect with you. We want to target those that truly want to leverage the web to serve their members, and play a role in driving the future of doing that.

What are the risks? We may get some critical feedback. No one may show up. We may make it easier for our competitors to find out what we're doing. We could stub our toe on our execution.

Is it worth the risk? A quotation from a recent Harvard Business Review blog post sums up the answer pretty well…

Hold the social web up as a mirror - look at yourself through the eyes of your customers - and you'll uncover new possibilities for growth and innovation that your reflected glory efforts can help deliver. (The Power of Reflected Glory Marketing, Alexandra Samuel)

…in other words, yes it is worth the risk.

Next blog post, I'll dig into the technologies and how we will be using them.

CU Village recently made the plunge into the social web realm. In part we had to because we're a web company. It is expected. I also firmly believe that you have to practice what you preach. Or as I tell my staff, we have to "eat our own dog food" to gain real understanding and credibility that what we do, say and sell actually works for our clients in the way we promise.

Just as importantly, we jumped into the social web because I think there are real and meaningful ways we can use it to engage our customers. In this post and ones to come, I will be opening up the hood on our thinking about the social web and how we plan to use it. In a similar way, I'll be sharing some ideas on how I think credit unions can make use of it too. Consistent with the idea behind the social web, we welcome your input along the way.

CU Village's Definition of the Social Web Web-based tools that enable interaction among individuals that have some common bond. Examples include Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube. (agree or disagree, we use Web 2.o as a somewhat synonymous term)

The social web is not an end unto itself. It is a tool, a strategy and way to get an objective accomplished. For CU Village, that objective is customer engagement in three key ways:

• Thought Leadership
• Relationship Building
• Collaboration and Dialogue

Thought leadership is the cycle of guiding and learning. For example, CU Village has years of experience creating web sites, and we share that expertise with our clients through our web development process. However, we learn something new with every project and every client. We help our clients be better and smarter about the web, and they return the favor by helping us do the same through their divergent viewpoints and ideas. Thought leadership, then, is the process of cultivating great ideas from internal and external sources, and sharing them.

Relationship building is just as it sounds. It is the building of trust and knowledge that can be used for synergistic value and benefit. The better we know our clients and they us, the better we can anticipate need and provide the right solution. Likewise, the better our clients know us the better they know how we can best serve them.

Collaboration and dialogue is the ongoing conversation we want to have with our clients. It helps to ensure we stay on track. It also brings our customers into our product development process. Of course, we need to do our part in staying ahead of the curve, but some of our best product and service ideas come from our clients. We love that, welcome it and want more of it.

So what does all this have to do with the social web? Check back later…

Amplify Credit Union has taken an expansive and yet holistic approach to leveraging the social web. They have a presence in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other key sites. Importantly, they are doing it in a way where there is consistency across the sites they are in and one effort complements the other. For example, posts on their Twitter site often point to what is going on in their Facebook page. Also important is that Amplify is striking a good balance of keeping it fun and interesting while still being professional.

• Name: Amplify Credit Union
• State: Texas
• Assets: $502,072,213
• Members: 41,179
• Web Site: http://www.goamplify.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/goamplify
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/AMPLIFYFCU
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-TX/Amplify-Credit-Union/25493017892
• Flicker: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goamplify
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/amplify

  Amplify's Facebook Page

Detroit Edison Credit Union (DECU - https://www.detedcu.org/) invests a lot of effort into their Web site—and it shows.

One of things they get right is the advertising they do within it.  For example, though their home page is advertising heavy, DECU manages do it without coming off like a used car salesman.  The way they accomplish it is by 1) having dedicated, defined and consistent space allocated for advertising and 2) creating their ads so that they look polished and professional, and, importantly, complement the design of their site.

DECU Home Page

DECU Use of Space Analysis

Where many organizations go wrong with their Web site advertising is by having a disjointed approach to it.  For example, one common mistake is that ads are thrown on the home page without thought on how they will impact the integrity of the design of the site.  Another mistake is ads lack a common, consistent and visual appealing design.  The result?   A home page that looks like an unsophisticated laundry list of stuff, which can negatively impact both the positioning of the organization itself and effectiveness of the ads because of too much clutter.

Fortunately, we have good examples, like DECU, that get it right.

A reader recently gave me a little nudge () to focus a bit more on credit unions that really got me thinking.  The feedback was with all the great things credit unions are doing on the Web, why so much attention on banks?

First the explanation, I have limited my reviews so far to banks not because I think they have anything up on credit unions (they don't), but so that I can feel freer to be more critical when needed without fear of offending my readership.  Unfortunately in doing so, I have missed an opportunity to highlight the many innovations credit unions have and continue to make.
 
So moving forward, I am going to make things right.

I am going to shift my blog to center more on specific examples of things credit unions are doing right (and sometime wrong) with their Web sites and with electronic service delivery.  So help me out, as you come across credit union innovations that inspire and excite you, let me know and I’ll try to write about them.