10/20/2009

Interview featured on The Financial Brand today

By Tim McAlpine

Jeffry Pilcher interviewed me recently (back and forth in e-mail form) and he just published the article today. I gave my thoughts on integrated social media marketing. Please take a read and leave a comment!

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08/04/2009

We helped Verity Credit Union launch a search for a wildly creative, funny and talented Seattle-area mom today!

By Tim McAlpine

I am thrilled to unveil Verity Mom for Seattle's Verity Credit Union. I'm so excited because:

• It's a new social media program aimed at connecting and learning from Seattle-area moms. Moms are a segment of the population that we feel credit unions have tremendous potential to attract.
• At the center of the program is a public search for a part-time mommy blogger. We think this is a really compelling story and the chosen mommy blogger has the potential of creating fantastic content. And, our experience running four successful Young & Free Spokester searches will help us greatly.
• We are working with social media pioneers. Shari Storm and her team at Verity Credit Union launched the first corporate blog by a financial institution in North America. Their experience will undoubtedly add to the success of this program.
• Another one of our challenge marketing concepts is now live and will help in fulfilling our purpose. Simply put, it is our purpose to help credit unions deepen their relationships with members and to persuade bank customers to become credit union members. We feel that the Mommy Blogger Challenge has the potential to attract thousands of new members to the credit union movement and Verity Credit Union is the ideal partner to launch with.

Here are some of the pieces

Verity Mom microsite

Video: Are you our Verity Mom?

Clockwise from top left: branch posters, floor decals, print ads, beach balls and staff info sheets

Here's what Shari Storm, Verity Credit Union’s Chief Marketing Officer, had to say, “Moms make most of the spending decisions in a family and they hold the most influence over where their children will eventually do their banking. We are looking at this as a multi-generational strategy. Our intention is to build a place where moms meet, talk and we have a chance to ask more questions and learn more about them. Currency Marketing provides the perfect platform for this.”

When we began talking with Shari and her team about this concept, it was obvious that Verity Credit Union has a passion to understand and serve families and offer the products and services those families need most. We worked with Verity to tailor our Mommy Blogger challenge marketing program to match their brand, launch an exciting blogger search and introduce Verity’s Cartwheel Checking account to new visitors. This account is perfectly suited for moms.

Here's how the program works:

• Moms will visit veritymom.com and fill out an application
• Everyone can watch and participate as the applicants are narrowed down to three finalists
• Site visitors will vote for the finalist they think should be the winner
• The winner will receive a part-time blogging contract worth $20,000 per year, a MacBook Pro computer and a Flip Mino HD video camera
• Prizes will be awarded to the other two finalists as well

Please take a moment and visit the Verity Mom microsite. For more information, download our press release.

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04/01/2009

Challenge marketing for credit unions part 10: appropriate resources

By Tim McAlpine

If you are just jumping into this series, I suggest starting at the beginning. + Part 0: preface + Part 1: introduction + Part 2: it's OK to sell + Part 3: your challenge, your product offer and your reward + Part 4: jump start your program + Part 5: should you require a log-in to participate? + Part 6: building your program on a suitable web platform + Part 7: creating interesting, entertaining and educational content + Part 8: encouraging multiple levels of participation + Part 9: setting participation goals and consistently measuring

This is the final part of the 10-part blog series on challenge marketing. Note to self, the next time I commit to doing a 10-part blog series that blows up to more than 15,000 words, I will definitely write the series in advance and then publish each part in a much shorter span of time. Thanks for following along and for waiting patiently!

Figuring out who should be involved and what is it going to cost

Now that I have told you everything I know about running a successful social media challenge marketing program for your credit union, the two big questions left are:

1. Who?
2. How much?

Who?

Before we get into the make-up of your social media challenge marketing team, here are a few common people mistakes that I see credit unions making with their social media activity.

1. Under powering their social media initiatives. Most credit unions that have dipped their toe in the social media space are running that involvement off of the side of someone's already full plate. This approach yields disappointing results and leads to a general feeling that social media is ineffective. There are countless credit union blogs and Facebook pages now and it is evident to me that most of these efforts are not receiving the proper attention that they need to thrive. The content is lacking in quality and quantity and it's clear that very few people are interacting or visiting these sites.
    
2. Sectioning off social media as an IT responsibility, a marketing responsibility or a corporate communications responsibility. It's all of these and you need these departments (or individuals, if your credit union is small) on side and fully supporting and believing in your initiative.
    
3. Not telling your staff about what you are doing. You need to promote your social media initiatives to the entire credit union staff on a consistent basis. One of the easiest ways to do this is to distribute all new blog posts to an all-staff e-mail address. If you set up your RSS feed through Feedburner, this is a built-in free service.
    
4. Not telling your members about what you are doing. I estimate that most credit union's have less than 5% of their members' e-mail addresses. This needs to change. Ask your members for their e-mail addresses and permission to communicate to them through e-mail. In addition, make sure to promote your initiatives in branch, within your online banking system, on your corporate website, on your ATM screens and anywhere else you can think of.
    
5. Restricting access to the social web for most or all of your staff. This goes hand in hand with mistake #3. I wrote two extensive blog posts here and here on the question of whether or not to allow access to the social web from within your credit union. I believe whole-heartedly that if you are going to get involved with anything to do with social media, everyone within your organization has to be able to see and feel the excitement that you are attempting to create. Unfortunately, your IT and HR departments at your credit union most likely whole-heartedly disagree with me on this topic! Your program will not necessarily fail without this access and internal support, but it will be severely hampered to maintain staff engagement over time if the only place that your staff members can see and interact with what's going on is from home on their own time.

Now, let's talk about your team. Between conceptualizing, planning, building, launching, writing and nurturing your initiative over time, you will need dedicated human resources. Those resources can be in-house, outsourced or a combination of the two.

The in-house approach: Members Credit Union's What Are You Saving For? program was built from the ground up by Matt Davis and his public relations assistant. Everything from naming, branding, website development, video production, public relations and printed material production was all done in-house.

I asked Matt who is involved with the site on a day-to-day basis and how much time is dedicated to keeping it going? Here's his response, "In terms of employee resources, the WAYSF blog is maintained entirely by two people: myself (Director of Public Relations) and my assistant (Carla, Public Relations Assistant). Carla creates most of the graphic and video content. I edit and direct the content. When we launched the program, our intent was to let the savers take over. In other words, we wanted to create a very small percentage of the site's content ourselves so members of the site would feel like the site was theirs. This is a strategy that, while formed with good intentions, has not generated the amount of content we desire. Our 'hands off' approach has meant that only five to 10 hours each week are spent on WAYSF. Much of this time is spent creating new content, moderating comments and dealing with SPAM issues. Going forward, we anticipate taking a more active role in content creation to inject more excitement into the program."

The combination approach; outsourced creative and development, in-house on-going management: The creation of Vancity's ChangeEverything.ca was a collaborative effort between a number of companies and individuals. This Hollywood-style approach works best when you have an in-house expert assemble the right team and drive the process. William Azaroff has the experience and necessary ability to provide the strategic leadership, vision and project management skills to make it work.

William originally worked with the social media strategy firm Social Signal to establish the vision and concept for what the community would become. The original user interface design was developed by a freelance web designer and a freelance Drupal developer themed and coded the site. The initial promotion of the site was tied to Vancity's brand advertising campaign that was managed by Vancity's marketing department and its agency of record, TBWA\Vancouver. Currency got involved in 2008 when we redesigned the user interface and worked with Affinity Bridge who refined the Drupal deployment. Like I said, that's a lot of partners and individuals to manage and it does take a confident and competent leader to pull it off.

I asked William how much time is spent on ChangeEverything.ca on an ongoing basis. Here's what William had to say, "We have two people who think about ChangeEverything.ca a lot. I don't spend much time working on the site directly, but it falls under my jurisdiction, and I make sure it gets proper corporate attention. Kate Dugas, the site's Community Moderator spends about half of her time working on the site. At times it can be less and at certain points, like launching and closing a contest, it can be more."

The combination approach; outsourced for creative, development and on-going management, in-house talent and program support: Currency fully manages the Young & Free Alberta program on behalf of Servus Credit Union. We are in charge of all aspects of the program including strategy, planning, marketing, creative, branding, advertising, website maintenance, content creation through the launch and spokesperson search phases, support and training for the Young & Free Spokesperson and anything else that is required 365 days a year. We coordinate subcontractors for media planning and buying, guerilla marketing, website technology, public relations and any other services that are needed from time to time. On the client side, there are three employees that support the program. Kim Crockett, the Young & Free Program Manager, Jere Ebert, the Young & Free Champion and Myles Peterman, this year's Young & Free Spokesperson.

There is no right or wrong approach. As you can see from these three examples, you can structure your challenge marketing team a number of ways. Your challenge marketing concept will largely dictate the size of your team and the skill set that each member needs to possess. The other factors that will effect your team size is who is creating, moderating and managing the content creation, how much interaction you expect and how that interaction is setup. For instance, if you are approving all user-generating content before it goes live and you have an extremely popular initiative, this particular task could swell to a couple hours every day.

I suggest doing as much as you can in-house and relying on outside expertise when and where it makes the most sense. If you take an entirely hands-off approach and outsource every aspect of your program, it may come off as too slick and will likely not be a true representation of your credit union. By being more involved, you will gain more knowledge and recognize opportunities as they arise.

It's up to you to strike the proper balance for your credit union's situation and goals.

How much?

Once you have your concept ready, you need to create a realistic annual budget. Start by breaking it down into categories.

One-time costs

• Setup costs
• Concept development (original or license)
• Website development (build, buy or open source)

Ongoing costs

• Program management
  • Outsourced professional fees
  • In-house wages directly attributable to your program
• Website hosting and ongoing maintenance and enhancements
• Media buy
• Collateral materials
• Challenge rewards

These are broad categories that you can elaborate on depending on the size of your program. Once you start to itemize all of the elements that you will need and the resources necessary to back your program, you will soon realize that the scope and scale of a social media challenge marketing program is much bigger than launching a corporate credit union blog. However, when done well, a social media challenge marketing program has a much higher chance of driving an actual return on your investment.

Because of the potentially high cost of a social media challenge marketing program, I highly recommend introducing a new market-leading product that is directly tied into your program. You need to aim to recover the costs by attracting new members to your credit union that will utilize your products and services.

That's it, I'm finally done!

If you want further information on social media challenge marketing, check out the section on our website. You'll find links to this blog series and a directory of our available programs. I now plan to take these 10 posts along with the feedback in the comments and assemble them into a white paper or short book. I'll keep you posted.

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01/08/2009

Challenge marketing for credit unions part 9: goals and measurement

By Tim McAlpine

If you are just jumping into this series, I suggest starting at the beginning. + Part 0: preface + Part 1: introduction + Part 2: it's OK to sell + Part 3: your challenge, your product offer and your reward + Part 4: jump start your program + Part 5: should you require a log-in to participate? + Part 6: building your program on a suitable web platform + Part 7: creating interesting, entertaining and educational content + Part 8: encouraging multiple levels of participation

Setting participation goals and consistently measuring

The first step when planning for success is to agree on what success means to your team. Will you define success by traffic? By new accounts opened? Net new deposits? New member growth in a defined segment? An increase in brand awareness? Share of wallet? Media attention? Increased revenue? The list goes on. My point is, everybody involved in your challenge marketing program should be in complete agreement on the success measures and be open and honest about making changes along the way if your program is falling short.

You should track as much as possible without the task of tracking becoming too onerous. You should also set realistic goals and monitor and adjust these goals as time goes by. For example, if you are going to measure how many blog comments you expect to get, it will be almost impossible to predict before you launch your program. But, you will have a pretty good idea of how many blog comments are coming in on average. The same will hold true with new account openings.

William Azaroff shared with me what he and his team track for Vancity's Change Everything online community, "When we first launched, we had a huge list of stuff we tracked including unique visitors, Technorati authority, RSS subscribers, total registered users, average time spent on site, total changes, total blog posts and total comments. My new way of thinking is that we will only track what is actionable. We now track unique visitors, registered users and total content added. Plus, we also manually track real-world impact (anecdotes about how Change Everything has had a real-life impact) and the alignment of the site content to our community leadership pillars which are 1) acting on climate change 2) facing poverty and 3) growing the social economy (and by that we mean not-for-profits and social enterprises).

For Member Credit Union's What Are You Saving For?, here's what Matt Davis had to say, "The measurables we pay most attention to are: 1) new WAYSF accounts 2) WAYSF deposits 3) blog posts and comments 4) blog unique visits and 5) earned media. While the belief is that increased activity on the blog and in the press should lead to increases in both accounts and deposits, it is mostly just a predictor of potential savings activity. I do believe, however, that all five of these measurables feed each other. Success in any of these categories inevitably lead to success in the others."

And, finally, to give you an idea of what to we track with the Young & Free Alberta program, here is our master tracking list:

• Accounts
  
  • Accounts opened
  • Accounts switched
  • Total accounts
  • Funds on deposit ($)
  • Average per account ($)
  • Total loans held ($)
  • Total investments held ($)
• Website
  
  • Traffic
  • Page views
  • Average time on site
  • Y&F Club members
  • Spokesperson applicants
  • Blog comments
  • YouTube video views
• Online
  
  • Facebook Advertising
    
    • Fans
    • Impressions
    • Clicks
    • Click Through Rate
    • Average cost per click
  • Google Adwords
    
    • Impressions
    • Clicks
    • Click through rate
    • Average cost per click
  • MSN Advertising
    
    • Impressions
    • Clicks
    • Click through rate
    • Average cost per click
  • Twitter followers
  • GoMobile
    
    • Impressions
    • Participants
    • Contest entries
• Direct mail
  
  • Response rate
    
    • Current Y&F members
    • 17-25 non-account
    • Turning 17's
• Public relations
  
  • Hits
  • Impressions
  • Earned media ($)
• Demographics
  
  • Total entities at the credit union
    
    • People
    • Businesses and organizations
  • Total members aged 17 to 25
    
    • Not in Young & Free at all
    • Percentage NOT associated to YF
    • Young & Free only
    • Young & Free and other account
    • Percentage associated to YF
    • Percentage of total personal entities
  • Total credit union memberships
    
    • Held by 17 to 25 year olds
    • Percentage of total memberships
    • Young & Free memberships
    • Percentage of total memberships
  • Average age of persons

This is a very comprehensive list and takes a fair amount of time and energy each month from different people to keep it current. You may decide to track fewer items or track all of these items and more. You may also decide to track weekly, monthly or quarterly.

That's a lot of numbers—now what?

Anybody can track numbers, but what you do with your numbers is most important. What you care most about will depend on your definition of success that everyone agreed on.

Because Young & Free Alberta's first priority is new member acquisition, we concentrate on the correlation between new account openings and web traffic and ongoing interactions on the site. We constantly look at the numbers to see trends. Do we have more account openings during our spokesperson search phase? What happens when there is no supporting media driving traffic and sales? What months perform best? How does this year compare to last year?

Other areas of interest that we pay close attention to for Young & Free Alberta are media hits and also the effectiveness of the media choices made during the search phase. It is important to us to know were each of our spokesperson applicants learned about the opportunity. This information will influence the media choices in subsequent years.

It's easy to get wrapped up in the excitement and newness of social media and lose sight of your business objectives. You can have a YouTube video that has been viewed by tens of thousands of people, but what really matters is how those views are translating into new business or other key success factors that you have defined for your challenge marketing program.

It is so important to consistently monitor and analyze your numbers and to share the results with everyone involved. This will help you to collectively refine and improve your program as time goes on.

Next up: allocating appropriate resources and support.

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01/06/2009

Challenge marketing for credit unions part 8: encouraging participation

By Tim McAlpine

If you are just jumping into this series, I suggest starting at the beginning. + Part 0: preface + Part 1: introduction + Part 2: it's OK to sell + Part 3: your challenge, your product offer and your reward + Part 4: jump start your program + Part 5: should you require a log-in to participate? + Part 6: building your program on a suitable web platform + Part 7: creating interesting, entertaining and educational content

Encouraging multiple levels of participation that build and reward an army of followers

How do you get people to not only take you up on your initial challenge, but to also continue to be involved with your challenge marketing program website throughout the year?

It's worthwhile to go back and review the 90-9-1 Principle that I cited in Part 3. Remember that 90% of users are the "audience," or lurkers, 9% of users are "editors," sometimes modifying content or adding to an existing thread and only 1% of users are "creators," driving large amounts of the social group’s activity. (Source: 90-9-1.com)

Since participation is driven by your creators, your energy and your thinking when developing your challenge concept should centre on how to get and keep your creators involved. The more compelling your content is, the more likely your editors are to participate and the more likely you are to convert your audience from lurkers to contributors.

Encourage and facilitate various types of interactions

Your blog is key. Everything that is new should be blogged about. Your blog will enable you to disseminate information on a regular basis and to encourage dialogue with site visitors. And because your blog will be the main source of information, you should make sure to offer ready access to various subscription methods. I recommend running your RSS feed through Feedburner because it offers both RSS and e-mail subscription options and lots of free tools to optimize, publicize and track your feed traffic.

I would also suggest going beyond a blog with other forms of interaction. On Young & Free Alberta, in addition to commenting on blog posts, there are various ways to add content and to interact with the site. All visitors can vote on weekly poll topics, submit poll ideas, add events to the calendar, add to the free stuff directory and ask the experts a question.

On Change Everything, casual visitors can view all of the content, vote on the latest poll and comment on blog posts. Logged-in members can initiate changes, write blog posts, create success stories and nudge and follow other site members.

On What Are You Saving For?, casual visitors can use the savings calculators, read blog posts and view videos. Logged-in members can initiate savings goals and comment on blog posts.

Leaving a comment on a blog can be very intimidating for those not immersed in the online world. People who are timid about leaving a blog comment will be far more daring with an anonymous vote on a poll. Make sure to include at least two or three lightweight ways to interact with your site.

Ask for permission within every interaction and communicate often

Gaining permission is the key to building long-term return traffic. The time to draw people back for their next visit is while they are involved in the current visit. A typical visitor will likely be drawn to your site through a referral, a link, a shout out on a social site or maybe even through a paid advertisement. Take advantage of this momentary attention. If you are lucky enough to have encouraged this visitor to interact with your challenge marketing site, now is the time to ask for permission to enter into an ongoing dialogue. We recently upgraded the database functionality of our Young & Free platform to include e-update opt in options throughout the site. Every time a visitor comments on a blog post, submits a poll idea, adds an events to the calendar, adds to the free stuff directory, asks the experts a question or votes for their favourite finalist during the spokesperson voting phase, he or she is asked, "Would you like to receive e-updates and the chance to win great prizes?" More than 75% of participants on the site opt into the the Y&F Club.

To sweeten the pot and reward our visitors for ongoing participation, we offer simple, yet attractive monthly prizes that range in value from $50 to $150. To keep our audience in the loop, we send out an informative Y&F Club e-update every month. Because we have gained permission to e-mail our visitors, fewer than five people unsubscribe every month.

Constantly remind your staff and members about your challenge

Out of sight out of mind is not a winning strategy! Take advantage of the branch setting by putting your challenge marketing program in front of your staff and your members. Consider dynamic point-of-purchase posters and displays, ATM screen graphics, short videos for your plasma screens and banner ads on your corporate website. And remember, your members are not coming in through your homepage, they are bookmarking your online banking URL, so don't forget to include links within your online banking system and on the exit screen.

Additional participation strategies for a short-run annual program

If you are running a 12- to 16-week annual program, your schedule will likely culminate with the bestowing of your reward. Much like any popular reality or game show on TV, after the prize has been handed out, you will see participation, interest, traffic and attention drop off abruptly until your program is relaunched next year. This is to be expected. If you plan to run the program in the same period of time year in and year out, you will see the participation, interest, traffic and attention build again as you approach relaunch, because you've created built-in anticipation and interest.

You should not put much energy into promoting your challenge in the off season, but since you have likely grown your e-update and blog subscriber base, you should keep up the blog and e-updates from time to time. Consider tracking what your winning contestants have done with their reward or build excitement as you near the next year's challenge.

Additional participation strategies for a 52-week program

If your program is perpetual, you are going to have to work very hard to sustain a high level of interest year round. A good strategy is to break your year into phases and to make your reward in the competitive phases something that can fuel the rest of the year.

You can expect a high level of participation throughout a competitive challenge phase especially if the challenge has an exciting and appealing human interest story coupled with a significant reward. With Young & Free Alberta, the 12-week competitive challenge phase is broken down into three mini-phases. The applications, the shortlist and the public vote. The drama and excitement of young people gunning for a great job and doing everything within their creative powers to impress voters is undeniably exciting. Not only are our competitors actively participating on the site and around the social web, they are driving friends, family and fans back to site for more. The sheer excitement builds as more and more people are drawn into the story. This challenge phase finally culminates with the winner being surprised with the reward.

Since the prize with Young & Free is a full-time spokesperson position, the rest of the year has built-in sustainability. Our Y&F Alberta Spokester's job is to talk, type and tell good stories on the site by creating daily blog posts, weekly video blog posts and podcasts and getting out and attending and speaking at events.

Another worthwhile strategy to explore is to split your year into short bursts of excitement. Change Everything has a series of mini challenges with smaller rewards throughout the year. Some one-time challenges, like the Bike Share program, and other annual challenges, like the Viva la Resolution challenge surrounding the New Year, fill the calendar with reasons to get involved and to repeatedly return to the site.

What Are You Saving For? account holders are eligible to win monthly cash-prizes of at least $100 and can compete for a $2,000 share certificate in the semi-annual Biggest Saver Contest. These periodic competitions ensure that participants are engaged and casual visitors are intrigued on an ongoing basis.

No matter which way you slice and dice your year, you will need to leave your visitors wanting more and to give them a number of ways to interact and plenty of reasons to return.

Next up: setting participation goals and consistently measuring.

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12/06/2008

Challenge marketing for credit unions part 7: content

By Tim McAlpine

If you are just jumping into this series, I suggest starting at the beginning. + Part 0: preface + Part 1: introduction + Part 2: it's OK to sell + Part 3: your challenge, your product offer and your reward + Part 4: jump start your program + Part 5: should you require a log-in to participate? + Part 6: building your program on a suitable web platform

Creating a steady stream of interesting, entertaining and educational content

You have a great challenge concept, a great product offer and a fabulous reward. You have promoted your initiative with your staff, your members and your potential members. You have a memorable URL and a great website with plenty of ways to interact. Now what? You need great content and lots of it.

First off, let's talk quantity

How many blog posts per month does your challenge marketing website need to establish a loyal, large and active following? Some social media experts will advise that you should only publish a blog post when the feeling hits you. I can agree with this advice for a personal blog. The urge to post may come once per week or even once per month. Or if you are a cat, you may feel like blogging everyday!

But I cannot agree with this advice for a major marketing initiative for a business. If you are investing time and money into a challenge marketing program with an expectation that you will attract new members that will want your products and services, you are going to need to be very deliberate with your content creation schedule. I would recommend approaching blogging like publishing a newspaper. Establish a very regular publishing schedule with hard deadlines. Publishing regularly and often is critical to making a return on your investment.

To give you an idea of the blog-publishing rate in our industry, I visited a few of the top credit union blogs to get a feel for typical blog post and comment quantity.

Seattle's Verity Credit Union was the first financial institution in North America to establish a blog. Since 2004, the 13 Verity staff writers have collectively posted between two to 15 posts every month on the Our Voices blog. There have been 44 posts over the past 12 months. Judging by a quick scan, I would estimate that an average post receives one to two comments. Our Voices is a great example of a pure informational and human-interest blog brought to you by the employees of a credit union.

With just one author, The Boardcast from Ginny Brady of New York's UFirst FCU, has published 90 blog posts over the past 12 months. Each post receives between zero and five or more comments. Considering that Ginny is an unpaid volunteer board member and that her content consists of mostly long-form essay-style blog posts, The Boardcast's quantity and quality is phenomenal.

These are impressive numbers for pure informational blogs, but I would argue that your challenge marketing website will need more. Let's contrast the above numbers with our three challenge marketing examples.

Since soft launching in January 2008 and then opening it up to all members in April 2008, What Are You Saving For? has had 90 blog posts published by a number of authors. Each post yields between zero and a dozen comments. April was the high point with 20 posts.

Over the past 12 months, Change Everything has had 344 blog posts published by dozens of authors. Each post yields approximately three to four comments. January was the high point with 64 posts. This isn't surprising, considering that it's a site about change and the popularity of New Year's resolutions.

Over the past 12 months, Young & Free Alberta has had 335 blog posts published including more than 90 original videos. These posts have yielded 1,369 blog comments or approximately five comments per post. This past October was the high point with 50 blog posts published as our three 2009 Young & Free Alberta Spokesperson finalists vyed for the public's votes.

As an interesting side note, I think DeAndre' Upshaw's application video and blog post for the Young & Free Texas Spokesperson challenge takes the all-time-most-comments-on-a-credit-union-blog-post award with a total of 218 comments!

These challenge marketing examples might seem like too much content for your credit union to commit to creating, but if you are not posting on a very regular basis, you run the very high risk of not having return visitors. Here's a typical scenario to consider: a new visitor is drawn to your site by clicking on a Facebook ad or a banner on your corporate website, seeing the URL in print or by being referred to the site by a staff member. They take action and visit the site. This person likes what they see and bookmarks the site or, better yet, subscribes to your RSS feed or e-updates. If you are lucky, they return after a day or two to see what's new, but unfortunately, there is nothing new. They then forget the site exists and never return.

The social web is a very busy place with massive amounts of new content being pushed out by the second. The consumers of this content—your potential creators, editors and audience (read part 3 for a refresher)—are used to websites that deliver fresh content very regularly. And in order for your challenge marketing program to draw these folks in and entice them to becoming your fans and participants (and ultimately new credit union members), you need to have a very aggressive content creation strategy.

Take a look at the top destination blogs on the Internet—they are run like newspapers. For example, Gizmodo, one of the top technology and gadget blogs, publishes up to 80 new blog posts every single day! And, it's sites like Gizmodo, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Lifehacker and other top blogs, not to mention news sites like MSNBC, CNN and your local newspapers that have set an expectation that destination sites post great content at a dizzying pace.

To make your challenge marketing program a success, my recommendation is to post something new every weekday. In fact, over the past couple of months, we have upped the total posts on our Young & Free sites to at least two or three posts per day and at least five pieces of multimedia per week (including 12seconds.tv videos, YouTube videos and podcasts). This has contributed to increased traffic, increased participation, increased e-update sign-ups and, most importantly, increased account sign-ups in both Alberta and Texas.

Second, let's talk quality

Boring, uninspired content doesn't get any better with quantity! Everything that you post to your site should meet a minimum quality standard that you are comfortable with. This definition of quality is up to you and what you feel your audience will connect with.

Your site should have a consistent tone of voice and personality regardless of whether there is one author or 100. The tone of voice for Young & Free Alberta is smart, fun, quirky, youthful and engaging. Two overriding rules for Young & Free Alberta are:

1. Entertain first, educate second
2. One educational post for every 10 off-beat, quirky posts

For user-authored sites like Change Everything and What Are You Saving For?, quality can be measured in the passion shown by site members committing to changes in their lives and communities. The content published on both of these sites is not always entertaining or educational—but that's OK, that is not necessarily the intent of every post.

If you, your team or a dedicated blogger are responsible for the content, make sure that everything you create makes people want to come back for more. I recommend having strong opinions on your topics, but beware of polarizing your audience—remember, this is a corporate initiative backed by a conservative financial institution. I would steer clear of sex, politics, race and religion. Most of all, have fun and be engaging.

Third, vary the format of your content

Text posts can get pretty repetitive—especially if you are cranking out new posts everyday. At the very least, include artwork or photos within your posts from time to time. This will help your posts grab attention and get read, especially within an RSS reader, where all content looks the same. Our 2008 Young & Free Alberta Spokesperson, Larissa Walkiw, included an original colour illustration with every text blog post to add interest.

I highly recommend throwing video into the mix. You can either embed existing video from YouTube or create your own. You don't need a professional video crew or expensive equipment. For as little as $150, you can get a Flip digital camcorder with built-in video editing software and you are in business. And with free video hosting at sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and Viddler, there is no excuse not to produce your own videos from time to time.

Also consider podcasts and live shows. I know I talked about quality just above, but feel free to experiment and try new things. Your audience will forgive you if your content is slightly lower quality than the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

Fourth, involve your audience

Depending on your challenge, there will likely be a portion of blog posts that are created by your team at the credit union and a portion of blog posts that are created by participants in your competition or from within your community. The participant-authored posts will easily attract a lot of attention and comments from family, friends and fans.

For your credit-union-authored posts, you will have to work a little harder to get comments. Too often, blog authors write long essays (like this one) that cover every angle. In the end, there is nothing left to discuss. The best blog posts are typically short and inspire action and dialogue.

Social media pioneer Ze Frank had audience participation down to a science during his one-year run of The Show with Ze Frank.

Thousands of photos, videos and music files were contributed by the audience, including over 1,000 photos in one 20-hour period. Viewer feedback from a previous show often served as a launching point to a new topic. One episode was scripted by thousands of viewers using a wiki.

Be deliberate and conversational with your posts and don't be afraid to ask the audience to participate in one form or another.

Fifth, set the rules

You should include a privacy policy and a terms of use statement as well as a blog comment policy on your site. Your privacy policy and terms of use statement should detail how you collect and use information and how you ensure privacy and security. Check out Change Everything's terms of use to see a great example.

Your blog comment policy should detail what you define as acceptable and unacceptable. Here is a great article from The Blog Herald on why you should include a blog comment policy and how to create one. Also check out the Young & Free Alberta blog comment policy to get more ideas of what to include.

Some social media proponents will advise that nothing should every be deleted from your blog, but I disagree. Remember, you set the tone and you have every right to remove comments that are in poor taste, negative or self-promotional.

In our first 11 months of Young & Free Alberta, we only deleted two comments out of nearly 1,000, but during the 2009 spokesperson search we had our first run of negative comments. They were directed at one applicant and we decided to delete more than 20 negative comments that came in within a 24-hour period. This zero-tolerance approach curbed this negative run and had no lasting negative effects within the community.

Finally, here's some blogging resources to help with your content creation

There are countless blogs about blogging best practices! I would recommend Copyblogger, ProBlogger and Chris Brogan to get you started. All three of these sites offer a very steady stream of great articles with practical tips and advice that you can put into action. 

Next up: encouraging multiple levels of participation.

Subscribe today + RSS + Blog by E-mail + E-newsletter + Follow me on Twitter

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11/28/2008

Challenge marketing for credit unions part 6: platform selection

By Tim McAlpine

If you are just jumping into this series, I suggest starting at the beginning. + Part 0: preface + Part 1: introduction + Part 2: it's OK to sell + Part 3: your challenge, your product offer and your reward + Part 4: jump start your program + Part 5: should you require a log-in to participate?

Are you overwhelmed yet? I have published a lot of blog posts in the past two weeks on challenge marketing for credit unions. In hindsight, I likely should have waited until the end of this series to release our new programs, but we were so excited to get them done early that I figured why not.

So, lets dive back in and finish out my challenge marketing series so I can get that white paper done!

Building your program on a suitable web platform

In this part, I will begin with specific features and functionality that I recommend including as part of your challenge marketing web presence and will finish up with website platform considerations in broad terms.

Recommended features and functionality

A blog with an RSS feed is a must. Your blog is the best way to push out a steady stream of content and encourage return visitors. I suggest using FeedBurner to power your RSS feed. FeedBurner provides great usage statistics and plenty of other features including the ability to subscribe to your feed by e-mail.

Your website must have the ability to embed videos, podcasts and other widgets from various web services. Most popular blogging platforms including Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress allow embedding. If you are relying on a web design firm or your IT department to build a custom blog, make sure that you have the ability to see and edit the source code of your blog posts and content pages within your content management system—this will allow you to embed third-party code exactly where you want it throughout your site. You will definitely want to test out embed codes from various web services to ensure that everything will work in advance of your launch date.

The most important thing to consider is the site layout and design. Your site layout must incorporate various ways to reveal all of the great content within your site. Your homepage should feel fresh everytime a visitor returns and give quick access to what is important. A standard blog is fresh by design—the latest post is at the top—but the major problem with hosting a challenge marketing program on a standard blog is that typical blog layouts are great at displaying what's new today, but they are very poor at displaying historic information. I suggest providing quick links on your homepage and throughout your site to all of your contest entrants and other popular content. This will promote longer site visits and more interaction.

If your challenge will include a public vote, you will need to design a voting system that is easy to use and completely secure. I am not a fan of the unlimited voting allowed by popular talent competitions like American Idol where individuals can cast hundreds of votes. In a small local competition, the results can easily be gamed by a small group of people. Consider building in an e-mail confirmation or some other way to verify that people are not voting multiple times. If your voting system relies on cookies to block mutliple votes, browser cache is easily cleared and people can vote over and over. Your voting system should be able to track IP addresses, computer platform, browser and other key information—this will enable you to quickly spot vote gaming if it occurs. It is important to ensure that you are conducting a fair competition.

Another important voting consideration is to predesign your phases. You should have a search-phase design, a voting-phase design and a winner-phase design. It is much easier to do all of the design and development work in advance, because once your challenge is live there won't be any time to test and proof your different phases. Ideally, all you should have to do is update your finalist and winner details and your system should provide a way to switch between phases on the fly. I do not recommend taking your site down for extended periods of time to make phase changes—this will frustrate your visitors.

Promote lightweight ways to interact throughout your website. Not everyone is comfortable leaving comments on a blog. In fact, according to Forrester Research, only 20% of Gen Y Internet users and only 4% of Baby Boomers Internet users have ever left a comment on a blog. Consider adding polls, submit a question forms and even the ability to add to a regional calendar or a resource library relevant to your challenge.

I also recommend including a forward to a friend function and the ability to subscribe to a regular e-mail service.

Include your product offer on your site on a dedicated page and include links throughout the site to this page. Keep your product offer subtle but always present. On your product page, make sure to do a good job of selling your product benefits and provide an easy way to sign up.

If your challenge program will have a presence on any mainstream social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube or others, make sure that you include prominent links on your site to your page or profile on each service.

Looking to take it even further? There are a number of white label social networking platforms on the market where you can add all sorts of functionality and interactivity to your site. Make sure to check out Kick Apps. I haven't used any of their services yet, but the demo videos on the Kick Apps website look very impressive.

Finally, a couple of notes on things not to include. Don't include Flash intros or splash pages. Let your visitors cut right to your fresh content. Agency creatives love Flash, but keep in mind that social web users as a rule are annoyed by Flash. Also, do not include any videos that start playing automatically.

Microsite or a section on your primary website?

First a few thoughts about where your challenge should live on the Internet.

Most corporate social media initiatives are spearheaded by the marketing and communications department and are launched as a separate microsite with its own URL. And just so we are clear, I am including a blog or a company sponsored social network under the microsite umbrella. A microsite is essentially an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. There are technical and marketing reasons for the decision to go with a microsite.

The most common technical reason for this decision is that corporate IT departments prefer to keep their networks as closed as possible. For example, your IT department would probably not be very open to embedding third-party code from YouTube or providing direct links to Facebook or MySpace on your primary corporate website. Even though the security risks for doing so are low, most credit union IT departments are intentionally conservative when it comes to Web 2.0. I completely understand this position, as IT's first priority is to keep your network up and running and to make sure that your members have uninterrupted access to your online banking system.

In addition, larger platform issues may be at play. Quite often, the head of IT may have set a global policy that dictates that your credit union can only use Microsoft technology. Again, this makes sense from an internal technology point of view. IT can easily deploy Microsoft technology across all of your desktop computers, servers and applications and hire certified-Microsoft IT employees that fully understand your chosen platform.

I am not anti-Microsoft. Microsoft's .Net framework offers a comprehensive suite of development tools and technologies that allow you to do everything that you could possibly want with your challenge marketing program. But the world of Web 2.0 and social media is largely build on more open platforms, including Linux and PHP and to a lesser extent, Adobe Cold Fusion. Many of these alternative platforms and frameworks require less time to build out complex social applications and, in many cases, these technologies are open source and cost less or are even free.

Another consideration that pushes marketers to by-pass IT and build a microsite on their own is the question of capacity. Like I stated above, IT is in the business of keeping your credit union's technology infrastructure up and running. You request for a custom, feature-rich website section will require a lot of resources to build, test and deploy and can likely be accomplished in less time within your marketing department or with an outside vendor.

Marketing's desire to push the envelope and shout from the roof top by whatever means possible often causes tension between marketing and IT. Having your challenge marketing program running on a separate microsite will likely be easier to execute and will allow you, the marketer, the sandbox you desire to experiment with the latest embeddable social applications.

Nike is renowned for its use of microsites. Nike.com is literally made up of hundreds of microsites organized by countries and sports. The rationale is simple. If I am a golfer, Nike immerses me in its golf offering on Nike Golf. If I am a runner, Nike immerses me in its running products and community on Nike Plus. By giving each of its market segments its' own microsite, Nike is able to create deeper relationships with niche groups.

As you can see, there are many reasons to go with a microsite. However, there are also numerous reasons to go with a section on your own website provided that your IT department is open to embedding third-party code, has the capacity to build the features and functionality that your program will require and has the ability to give your challenge section the distinctive and exciting flavour that it will need to attract and retain a group of committed site visitors. Advantages to a section include the simplicity of having everything under one website content management system, the control offered by having everything in-house and the ability to easily point existing site visitors to your new section.

URL considerations

Whether you decide that a microsite or a section within your corporate site is right for your challenge marketing program, you will need to decide how you will brand your URL. Here are three basic structures to consider.

www.your-challenge.com
your-challenge.your-cu.com
www.your-cu.com/your-challenge

Although including your credit union's URL has merit, I prefer a unique and separate URL. A unique and separate URL can be shorter, easier to remember, easier to include on all of your promotional support pieces and will likely be more readily accepted by the community you are attempting to create.

For example, www.changeeverything.ca is much easier to remember and fits much better with Change Everything's vision and purpose than www.vancity.com/changeeverything.

Whichever way you go, make sure to provide lots of visible cross links from various parts of your primary corporate website. Constantly aim to inform your established traffic that there is something exciting going on at your credit union. I recommend placing linking banners throughout your primary site, including placement on your home page and on your online banking exit screen. I also recommend changing these banners up from time to time.

What about no website at all?

If you prefer to totally bypass IT and not even build a site for your challenge marketing program you can! Maine State Credit Union recently ran a "Maine Through a Mainer's Eyes"  photo contest and posted all of the entries on Flickr.com. 

This is a great example of a simple challenge marketing program executed without a dedicated website section or a microsite. In creator Andy LaFlamme's words, "Running this contest cost almost nothing other than an investment of time and effort."

I have seen a few user-submitted video contests hosted directly on YouTube lately. YouTube recently expanded its channel customization options. You now have the ability to add graphics and more closely match your credit union's own website and brand.

Embarq, a US telephone and Internet service provider, just ran a 48-seconds video contest directly on YouTube.

The nice thing about this approach is there is no development or hosting costs and it would take very little effort to get your challenge up and running. But don't be fooled into thinking that the millions of people on YouTube will happen upon your channel, you will still need to heavily promote your challenge on your credit union's website and through other marketing channels.

If this approach is of interest, you will want to consider your URL carefully. Your YouTube channel will begin with www.youtube.com/user/, so your URL won't be easily remembered or be something you necessarily want to brand on anything. One way to work around this would be to buy a unique domain name and have your registrar redirect it to your YouTube channel URL.

Let's analyze our example sites

All three of our example sites are microsites with unique URLs. But the similarities end there. Each site has very different functionality and was built on three very different platforms.

WhatAreYouSavingFor? is built on the very popular and free open-source Wordpress blogging platform. There are two flavours of Wordpress: Wordpress.com which features easy setup and free hosting within a global blogging community and Wordpress.org which offers the free download of the Wordpress software which in turn needs to be installed on your own Linux server or a third-party hosting service's server.

The advantage with downloading and installing your own copy of Wordpress is that you have access to thousands of open-source plug-ins and can customize the look and feel of your site (known in the Wordpress world as your theme) as much as you like. The disadvantage is that you will need some coding skills or the help of outside expertise to help you if you want to significantly customize your site.

WAYSF's creator, Matt Davis, is a self-confessed non-coder, but managed to customize a premium theme and deploy WAYSF on his own with very little outside help. WAYSF makes use of embedded YouTube and Vimeo videos and numerous free Wordpress plug-ins. Matt has also used Wordpress as a quasi social network by enabling visitors to become site members and submit their own savings goals to the site.

Change Everything is a microsite with its own unique URL. It is built on the robust open-source community software platform, Drupal. Drupal is an ideal platform to build complex social networks. In fact, major social networks like FastCompany.com are built on Drupal. However, unlike Wordpress, Drupal is not necessarily as easy to deploy and requires the assistance of very specialized developers. The original concept and design for Change Everything was facilitated by the social media consultancy Social Signal in 2006. Earlier this year, Currency was contracted to completely redesign the user interface. We worked in concert with Affinity Bridge, a specialized Drupal development firm that handled all of the theming and the deployment of the new code base. Change Everything has full social networking capabilities including user profiles, user blogging, friending and nudging.

Young & Free Alberta is a custom design deployed on an Adobe ColdFusion content management system (CMS). MySpace, one of the world's most popular Web 2.0 websites, is a built on ColdFusion. It is also widely accepted and used in the corporate world with 75 of the Fortune 100 companies relying on ColdFusion. Our technology partners, K1, have a feature-rich platform that includes dozens of available plug-in components. For our Young & Free sites, we utilize the blog, the calendar, the FAQs, the polls and the custom form components throughout the sites. All of the forms include the ability to subscribe to our monthly e-updates. Two unique features of the site are our voting system that requires confirmation by e-mail and the ability to instantly switch between launch, voting and spokesperson term phases. The CMS also has built-in e-mail functionality that enables us to easily send regular e-mails to all Y&F Club members. Young & Free Alberta makes use of YouTube videos, 12second.tv videos, UStream.tv live videos, Flickr photos and many other third-party embedded code.

There you have it. Likely more technical gobbly gook than you ever expected from my blog! Hopefully you will find this information useful as you navigate the various technical questions that come up as you consider your own challenge marketing program! I will leave the final choices to you, your marketing team, your agency and your IT department.

Next up: creating a steady stream of entertaining and educational content.

Subscribe today + RSS + Blog by E-mail + E-newsletter + Follow me on Twitter

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11/25/2008

New: The Big Idea Biz Challenge

By Tim McAlpine

Based on Filene Research Institute's open-source concept, The Big Idea. This challenge will appeal to would-be entrepreneurs of all ages including everyone from business students to recently retired Baby Boomers that have an interest in self-employment. Really, anyone who is actively considering starting their own small business.

The challenge

• Convince site users and our judges that you deserve the $10,000 business starter package by filling out an entry form, submitting a business plan and creating a 60-second video on why you deserve to win.

The reward

• We recommend a total giveaway value of $16,000
• The grand prize is $15,000 in funds, mentoring and services
• The two secondary prizes are Quickbooks Pro ($500 each)

We will develop a custom name and find a unique domain for your challenge.

+ Get full details on the Big Idea Biz Challenge
+ Read my blog post that explains our full challenge marketing offering

Subscribe today + RSS + Blog by E-mail + E-newsletter + Follow me on Twitter

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11/25/2008

New: The Mommy Blogger Challenge

By Tim McAlpine

Mommy bloggers are a huge part of the blog-o-sphere. This challenge sets out to hire a mother to blog part-time on behalf of your credit union. Your new blogger will help mothers navigate life as a mother in your region. Blogging topics will include everything from money tips to mom-friendly product and service reviews. We are talking to 25- to 45-year-old moms who are actively using mainstream social media including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and other social applications.

The challenge

• Applicants complete an entry form, a blog post and submit a favorite mom-themed photo and produce on-going content to convince site users that they deserve the job.

The reward

• A part-time position with the credit union for one year.
• A Macbook laptop computer and a Flip Mino digital camcorder to keep.
• Two Flip Mino digital camcorders for secondary prizes.

We will develop a custom name and find a unique domain for your challenge.

+ Get full details on the Mommy Blogger Challenge
+ Read my blog post that explains our full challenge marketing offering

Subscribe today + RSS + Blog by E-mail + E-newsletter + Follow me on Twitter

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11/25/2008

New: Youth Scholarship Challenge

By Tim McAlpine

All credit unions give away scholarships. Why not stand out from the crowd and encourage students to compete to see who is the most deserving? We are talking to 17- to 25-year-old students who are actively using mainstream social media including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and other social applications.

The challenge

• Applicants complete an entry form, create a 60-second video and produce on-going content to convince site users that they deserve the scholarship.

The reward

• We recommend a total giveaway of $10,000
• The grand prize is $5,000 plus a laptop computer
• The two secondary prizes are $1,500 each

We will develop a custom name and find a unique domain for your challenge.

+ Get full details on the Youth Scholarship Challenge
+ Read my blog post that explains our full challenge marketing offering

Subscribe today + RSS + Blog by E-mail + E-newsletter + Follow me on Twitter

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