Dear CUs: How do you manage the social?
Posted by Brent Dixon on July 22nd, 2008
Many social media tools are either cheap or free (including blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger, DIY social networks like Ning, podcasting tools like Odeo, and online video like YouTube and Viddler).
But as anyone who’s jumped into the space can tell you, this doesn’t mean social media is a cost-free answer to a given strategy. The big costs are time and commitment. Creativity. Empathy. Enthusiasm. From a person or group of people. And it can almost become a double-edged sword, because the more successful your social media initiatives are – the more people are participating in your community and conversation – the more resources are required to manage it all.
From moderating comments, to creating content, to monitoring conversation elsewhere on the web – social media, a prospect that at first glance may look shiny, new, accessible, and cost-effective, can be extremely resource intensive.
So I want to ask some credit unions that are doing it, some of which I’ve called out specifically below: How do you approach resource management for your social media projects?
Do you hire a community manager? Do you clear room from an existing employee’s plate? Do you spread the work out among several employees? Do you close your eyes and hope for the best?
And beyond that, maybe the scariest thing of all, what if the initiative goes really, really well? What if your community becomes enormous and active? How do you plan to grow with them?
(I’d love to hear from: Carolina Postal CU’s Deb McLean, MidState Educator’s CU’s Danielle Chatfield, Members CU’s Matt Davis, UTFCU’s Brandon Ballentine, Premier CU, Whoever is overseeing America First CU’s Review System, Verity CU’s Shari Storm, Vancity’s William Azaroff & Kate Dugas, and anyone else who’s hands are dirty with social media.)
Great question, Brent, and I’m looking forward to seeing others’ replies.
We are 70M, 15K members and it’s a one-(wo)man show for us; namely me—Community Affairs Director. Our social network is also a brand new initiative that’s only been up and running for about a month, but even with it so young it definitely requires resources.
Researching, writing, and updating content is the biggest time commitment for us right now. We haven’t done a widespread rollout to our members yet, but do already have a small core group following. One of members did contribute a blog post, but so far it’s largely CU content.
I want to encourage members to contribute to the site as well. Maybe I’ll pay $1 for posts that share information on what they’re saving for. Maybe I’ll enter people into Prize Based Savings type rewards whenever they comment, blog, or otherwise post content related to money management.
I’m going out to local agencies and looking for “guest bloggers” as well to try to spread the writing load. I’m hoping to get an attorney to contribute on wills and trusts, our local 529 plan expert to chime in, and hopefully a certified financial planner to periodically answer members’ basic financial planning questions, etc. etc.
It’s a great big sandbox for me right now. Can’t wait to pull some other resources into the mix and get the community driving more content.
It will certainly help when we do a full member rollout. If the community becomes enormous and active then we’ll have to dedicate additional resources to it. We’ve been playing with the idea down the road of having a person dedicated to supporting student run CU branches, and social network support and content could certainly be part of their role.
Looking forward to reading about others’ strategies as well!
Whoa! Where to start? I started developing the idea behind whatareyousavingfor.com shortly after the 2007 Forum/Trabian Partnership Symposium. In February of this year, I sent an email out to all of our staff to get a feel for how many employees had interest in blogging/social media. Those who showed interest were asked to sit on a “blogging committee”. This committee was tasked with sharing a little about their personal journey of saving, spending, and financial management. My intention was simply to develop pre-launch content on the site that would serve as a template for member use.
As time has passed, content creation has fallen almost exclusively to myself and my assistant, Carla. The blogging committee’s other responsibilities simply took precedence. This is far from ideal because our hope has always been to have as many voices as possible sharing their thoughts and experiences. Even worse, it has severely limited the amount of fresh content on the site. As member traffic picks up, this will no longer be that big of an issue. At this point, though, it has put a major strain on Carla and I. After all, our responsibilities run much deeper than this blog alone. At the end of the day, content creation isn’t one of those things you can necessarily assign to just anyone. You need the special combination of writing ability, personality, research ability, motivation, and unafraid openness to draw people to your site.
I think all of us who are embracing social media are wanting to facilitate conversation. Our conversation is simply guided by the central question “What are you saving for?”. Like Danielle, I understand that huge success will require additional resources to be dedicated to the site. As of now, though, we are content to guide the conversation with a dual voice.
I could totally see credit unions forming “social media” or “electronic communications” positions/departments to fit these emerging needs. I truly think there’s a special talent that good bloggers must have to develop a site worth visiting. This, unfortunately, is talent that may well not currently exist within your staff. CUs that succeed in this arena will definitely need to develop specialized staff to pull it off.
I could kiss you Brent, we’re just starting to do a research brief on using social media. Ergo, I will pilfer liberally from these responses.
But I contribute too: A WSJ article from July 22 (http://tinyurl.com/5cr26m) says:
CU Warrior, it’s good to hear we’re not the only ones facing content challenges.
Here’s an item that I’ve been pondering and I briefly mentioned at the REAL Solutions meeting in Phoenix…are we in a “chicken or the egg” situation of our own making? If the average age of a CU member is 47…does that mean we’re targeting a communication medium that the majority of our members may not understand or know how to use?
But of course we know our average age is 47…so we’re trying to lower it…and one of those mechanisms is to enter the social networking space that appeals to younger individuals….
But what can we do to get them there in the FIRST place and to join the conversation?
YoungFreeAlberta comes to mind as a model.
Also, part of the reason I bought the StressFreeWallet domain was to set aside an area that wasn’t so in-your-face attached to the credit union brand, and am working hard to make it very educational focused without lots of overt product/service advertisement. I figure if we become a trusted advisor through the site and give playful reminders along the way of what we can help with…hopefully that builds the trust that’s necessary for them to call us when they need a financial service.
I’d like to buy stacks of post-it notes that simply say, “Join the Conversation. www.StressFreeWallet.com” and compensate one of our college student employees to plaster one of our local college campuses with them…and see how that affects traffic. Since our site is so new and there’s low traffic as it is, we should be able to attribute a spike in traffic directly to it =-)
(side note: once I can get some time to work on graphics I do want to at least have our logo and link back to our main page show up periodically throughout the site)
Remains to be seen. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
In a perfect world, I would hire a young, hip, articulate person to manage all our social media. This person would have an in-depth knowledge of credit union products and services as well financial services in general, possess impeccable writing skills and it would also be great if they also spoke several languages and wore funky glasses.
In the real world, I and my capable staff of two manage our social media as best we can. To me, it’s just one more ball to juggle. I think if you give it too much thought, you might be scared off and never do anything. To quote my yoga instructor – if you don’t start somewhere, then you will be nowhere. (It sounds better if you say it with an Indian accent.)
But seriously, you have to just dive in and give it a try. We tried My Space. We had a cool page and lots of friends initially, then after a while the only friends we got were creepy old men, so we dropped it. We tried a live blog on our website. We got some interest in it initially, but after a while we decided we didn’t have enough interest in discussion of relevant topics, so we dropped it. We have morphed our collection of emails from members who love us into a sort of blog wannabe and TV campaign. We are happy with that now, but it too will probably evolve into something very different. So to answer your question, we use a combination of utilizing existing marketing employees to manage social media along with closing one eye and hoping for the best.
Nice observations, Kerry. Good reminder that sometimes thing grow, twist, and change over time.
Here’s the ironic thing that’s been going through my head lately when it comes to our site, Stress Free Wallet: I honestly think if I de-coupled it from the credit union and just had myself out there blogging as a financial institution “expert” and plastered ads all over the site…I could probably make some money off of it. I wouldn’t have to pay as much attention to being PC and could feel more free to observe on things I might not say when it’s attached to the CU.
So it begs a bit of the question for me whether people are really more interested in that 100% independent third party opinion than they are of the opinion of the institution that holds and invests their monies. If it’s a credit union-sponsored site will they just assume it’s biased with no valuable information?
I don’t know. I know that I get magazines at home from Costco and AAA that have some valuable articles…but they’re sprinkled with self-serving references and I recognize it as such. But I still like getting the publications because they have great content that’s not all self-serving.
Don’t you wish you had a crystal ball and could look 3 years in the future and see how all of this turned out? =-)
Awesome question—and some great replies so far. I’d love to see this post revisited a few times over the next year so that we can share experiences as our sites bring in more and more traffic (hopefully). Like most of the other sites mentioned in the post, UTFCU’s student site (utfcu-rocks.com) was recently launched. While the site is currently available, the real push to bring attention to the site will not start until students start returning to campus, so most of my time so far has been spent designing and building the site’s backend and creating the initial content.
So far, I’ve been responsible for most of the work relating to the site, while our marketing department has been in charge of the student campaign in general. We’ve also had great buy-in from credit union employees who have been more than willing to help make videos, spray paint graffiti, and volunteer for various activities we’re planning in the next couple of months.
While I plan on managing most aspects of the site myself, I’ve spent quite a bit of time building a content management system for the site that makes it easy for anyone at the credit union to make updates in the future. In addition, we’ve tied in several other social tools we’re using, such as our Flickr stream, Del.icio.us account, and Twitter feed, which also makes it easy for anyone to add information to the site.
Perhaps I’m crazy, but I would love to see the site become so popular that we have difficulty finding the time to manage it. To me, that seems like the type of problem any of us wouldn’t mind having! We’re not there yet, but I look forward to tweaking, adding, and removing features until it does happen. In the mean time, I think the most difficult task ahead is rationalizing the amount of time needed to create and nurture an online community around the site – especially while the community is small and the response rate is low.
What a great post with great responses. I actually work on the upkeep of most of Tropical Financial Credit Union’s social media.
I have blogged for them at http://tfcu.blogspot.com/ and have created a youTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/tropicalfinancialcu for them.
Social Media can be a powerful tool in getting your company’s name out there, especially for a local credit union like http://www.tropicalfcu.org.