bc blog

Members of the Brighton Consulting team were pleased to attend the City of Sydney Credit Union Industry Chapter Meeting on the 18th August.

Social Media was the topic of the night with a fantastic presentation from Anders Sorman-Nilsson, Creative Director at Thinque.

Anders told us that in his opinion Social Media isn’t a fad.  The statistics are startling.  If ‘FaceBook’ was a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world.  96% of Gen Y have joined a social media site – social media shapes their thought processes.  Yet, social media isn’t limited to Gen Y, the fastest growing segment is 55-65 year old women.  And social media is not limited to the PC or MAC, 80% of twitter usage is on mobile phones.

During the night we had many conversations with credit union staff who were fired up by Anders’s presentation but just didn’t know where to start.

Below are some simple things to consider when developing a social media strategy.

Before you begin, ask yourself what you are trying to achieve.  It’s tempting to jump into implementing Social Media tools like a FaceBook page, but doing  this without an appropriate strategy won’t do much for your brand. Social media tools should be used to support existing business objectives.  For example, are you trying to understand and resolve customers’ service issues or create a sense of community?

Listen before you engage.  Identify the communication preferences of your target market, i.e. do they prefer weekly emails or to read a blog.  What are their information needs? Recognise that not everybody will want the same information or will be using the same tools.

Develop a communications plan.  Social media is fairly straight-forward to implement but more difficult to maintain.  Think about what messages you are trying to communicate, what individuals and/or groups should be responsible for regular content creation, which social media tools you wish to use and how often these tools should be updated.  Keep your communication strategy simple and manageable.

What gets measured gets managed. In order to keep improving your social media efforts, you need to get organisation buy-in.  This is best achieved by measurement, reporting and the assigning of KPIs.  Measurement can be as simple as increased site traffic to customer retention or increased profits.

In summary, if you are willing to experiment, social media is a great way to engage with customers’ in an open, honest way.  It just has to be properly co-ordinated in line with your other marketing activities.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us.
 

I’m sure it must be a coincidence, but…

Following my post earlier today concerning great work done by Zanna Corby, I’ve now received another commendation about a second member of our team, Dan Whitmarsh, which, if anything, is even more glowing than Zanna’s! I wonder if this sets a precendent.

Here’s the commendation in full:

Hi Anthony

I would like to take a moment to thank you and your team for the work that has recently been completed for Orange Credit Union. The project of converting from Rubik to My Viewpoint Internet Banking was a job that would not have been successful without the help of yourself and especially Dan Whitmarsh. The work involved to get the project completed within the tight timeframe, and a moving feast of technical data, was very much appreciated by the credit union.

What I especially liked (and appreciated the most as a client), on go live night, was the fact the Dan hadn’t ‘clocked off’ the job. It was Dan’s attention to the detail and persistence that meant our members didn’t lose Internet Banking functionality for an extended period of time.

Dan’s patience and knowledge won out with the end result being fantastic. We are vey happy with our new Internet Banking site. The elements under Brighton’s control - layout, colours and functionality - have been a hit. I look forward to working with Dan and yourself on the UDA mobile banking platform project.

Gavin Cook
Corporate Services Manager
Orange Credit Union

Every day at Brighton we get dozens of tasks and change requests from our clients (hundreds on a busy day).

While no company can ever be 100% perfect, we’re pretty obsessive about our service and take a lot of pride in our work.

So it was particularly gratifying the other day to receive this commendation from Joanna Vella of SCU concerning the work of one of our team, Zanna Corby.

I’m pretty impressd by it… and I think Zanna is too (just quietly). So I thought I’d publicise it…

I would like to commend Zanna Corby for the excellent service that she provided to SCU during the setup and implementation of the 2010 appraisal process at SCU. Zanna’s assistance was invaluable.

I was on a tight timeframe to get the system ready and I called on Zanna’s expertise on numerous occasions. Problems were quickly resolved; either ‘on the spot’, that night or by early the next day. Zanna followed up on every issue to ensure that we were comfortable with the process … even arriving for an on site visit to provide last minute instructions to the HR Team.

I hope your company is able to acknowledge Zanna’s great service and attention to detail - we really have appreciated it at SCU.

Joanna Vella
Member & Staff Relations Manager
SCU

Joanna - thanks for taking the time to let us know about this. It means a lot.

Beyond the Orphanage (BTO) was formed in 2007 by a group of dedicated volunteers who saw first-hand in Addis Ababa the plight of Ethiopian orphans. Since then, the team has made it their life’s mission to make a difference.

The team at Brighton have been delighted to work with BTO, designing their website in 2009 and currently hard at work developing exciting new features. In fact, I was so moved by the BTO story that I have recently started helping out, sending enewsletters, updating the BTO facebook page and generally spreading the word.

It’s a very exciting time for BTO, with the team heading to Ethiopia on the 21st November to open the BTO drop in centre and computer lab. It is amazing to see the fruits of so much labour finally coming together.

The team will be spending time with the amazing children, hearing their stories first hand, seeing where they live, visiting them at school and seeing the BTO program in action.

Can you help with book or computer equipment donations?

The BTO kids desperately need fiction, picture, dictionaries, poetry and encyclopaedia books. If you can help please send the books to: Beyond the Orphanage, PO Box 30350, Addis Adada, Ethiopia. If you can help with computer equipment, please email Roger at: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

Can you help with other forms of donation?

Of course BTO always desperately need cash donations to keep on sponsoring our kids. Did you know you can donate securely via our website?

Learn more via the BTO website or follow us on Facebook.

Now here’s an interesting question.

What will happen to websites as a result of the growing influence of social media?

Social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are being used more and more by organisations to engage online. Will this eventually lead to traditional websites becoming redundant?

This question is posed in an interesting post I just came across: Is Facebook Killing the Web Site?, which refers to a number of other recent articles on the same subject.

Just came across this really useful strategy set for increasing blog traffic:

• Find out what questions people ask and answer them
• 
Write about current trends
• 
Link your posts together
• Make it easy to retweet your posts

The strategies are simple and practical and are fully explained here.

Brighton Consulting launches our new integrated CMS/mobile web interface designed for Credit Unions and Building Societies.

The mobile website, as it is commonly referred to, has been specifically designed to operate on the small screens of modern mobile phones. The mobile website works in conjunction with an organisation’s main public website and ensures essential information is easily accessible on a range of internet connected devices.

Our first mobile website, piloted by Horizon Credit Union, went live in June and has performed very well. When somebody using an iPhone or Android phone searches for www.horizoncreditunion.com.au they are now automatically redirected to the mobile site and enjoy a far smoother browsing experience.

The mobile website provides members with secure, convenient access to key online functionality and information through their mobile phone. Moreover, Horizon is able to easily update and expand the mobile website as all of its content is driven by the same Content Management System behind its main public website.

Developing a mobile website helps to accommodate for the growing number of people who use their mobile phones to access a range of services over the internet. The mobile site also ensures that your brand is technologically up-to date, and enhances your online customer service channel.

Gangsters and crooks have been glamorised by big movies for many years. In recent years the computer hacker too has been given the Hollywood treatment.

You’re probably familiar with the storyline: the geeky loner that at the beginning of the movie is causing computer trouble because he’s bored, transforms into a hero whose computer infiltration skills are needed to save the day.

Unfortunately reality is different:  there is rarely anything heroic about somebody trying to break into your computer system with the aim of stealing your secret information.  Most hacking is done for criminal benefit and usually doesn’t make for make for an overly uplifting story.

However a recent article in Credit Union Magazine "Black Hats, White Collars: Cybercriminals’ Secrets Revealed", aims to counter the Hollywood glamorisation.

The article outlines what hacking is really all about. It looks at how a hacker attempts to gain entry into computer systems and what this criminal may do once on the inside. We are also given a nice introduction to what tools the hacker has at their disposal. The article is a little lengthy but it’s well worth the read and suitable for all readers.

I recently attended, with almost 50 other Australia Credit Union representatives, the 1 Credit Union Conference, held in the glittering city of Las Vegas from July 11-14.

The conference was a combined effort of the World Council of Credit Unions and CUNA and so incorporated a large emphasis on the US credit union industry.

One of the reccurring themes I observed through the four days of the conference was the remarkable degree to which the American population has lost trust in the banking industry as a result of the GFC (or the ‘great recession’ as it was called by a number of speakers). As a result, the US credit union industry is experiencing an increase in interest and membership - credit unions are being seen as serious, viable alternatives.

I was also pleased to be shown a variety of new social media case studies that could easily be applied to the Australian market.

Lastly, listening to, and speaking with, Americans representatives, it became clear that the Australian Credit Union industry is in no way lagging behind its American counterparts. In fact, in many respects the Australia Credit Union industry is a world leader.

I’ll be posting more on the conference in the weeks to come.

The Coca-Cola "Happiness Machine" campaign: a hugely-succesful viral video promoted with only one Facebook update and one tweet.

This is an excellent interview on the background and strategy.