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.
 

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.

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.

Just saw a story on Flipboard - an ipad app that aggregates articles and stories from your friends and contacts on Twitter and Facebook into a ’social magazine’.

It looks really interesting and makes me think of all sorts of ways in which socially content can be shared.

Here’s the video:

‘Regret Nothing’ - the new youth-oriented financial services brand for Encompass Credit Union has just been launched. And we’re excited to have been involved in the conception, design and development of the new brand.

The new site (still in prototype) is now live at www.regretnothing.com.au.

The business issue is a familiar one: like many credit unions, Encompass Credit Union is confronting an aging membership with declining need for its core lending products. To ensure its ongoing viability, the credit union needs to attract new members from a much younger demographic. The solution is to be ‘Regret Nothing’.

Rather than rebrand the entire credit union, Encompass has launched a new youth-oriented brand designed to appeal to the needs of this younger market.

Aspirational and overtly young, the ‘Regret Nothing’ initiative will be progressively developed to provide youth-oriented financial services and budgeting tools. With a focus on helping young people achieve their dreams, the brand is designed to help them make sure they ‘regret nothing’.

The first stage of the website has now been launched: future developments will be forthcoming.

Looking for an easy, professional and entertaining way of engaging footy fans. Try CUtips, the aggregated online football tipping competition that is free for members and non-members to play.

Footy tipping is a big part of football. It provides conversation at the water cooler, something to look forward to on Monday, hope in winning prizes and most importantly, connects fans and their game.

Our online footy tipping comp removes all of the hard work, no more bits of paper or complex calculations. You can easily set up an office competition and invite your colleagues to play. Each week tippers can track their progress within your competition without you having to do a thing!

This year’s comp offers

• a $20,000 prize pool
• no charge for tippers
• Super 14, NRL and AFL comp
• weekly, end-of-season, lucky dip and wooden spoon prizes
• an easy-to-use tipping engine

Try it out, visit one of our client CUtips sites and follow the link on the homepage. Feel free to join a comp to try it out and let us know if you would like to discuss next year’s comp.

Do you manage multiple financial brands? Maintaining a professional and manageable web presence for multiple financial brands can be challenging, time consuming and expensive.

Maritime Mining & Power Credit Union (MMPCU) tasked us with the challenge of developing a new ‘master’ website that was capable of managing multiple financial brands. This challenge was required to support the merger of MMPCU and Gosford City Credit Union (GCCU).

Aside from the obvious design challenges, the new website needed to be managed from a single CMS installation. Our latest CMS – byond3 – manages multiple templates with ease. You can manage promotional pages, landing pages, minisites from a central management console. On top this, byond 3 provides front-end editing, flexible user management, publishing alerts, integrated blogs, forums and enewsletter modules – all with financial grade security.

Check it out how we manage two integrated financial brands through the one CMS.