May/Jun 2008

Stars of the online credit union world tell you how—and why—to get your Web log, or online journal, rolling.

It’s tough to remember life before blogs—they’re the online spots millions visit several times a day to grab news and views, from the latest updates from the campaign trail to the dating trials of reality TV stars.

Blogs are fast becoming a solid part of most Americans’ lives, and the people who write them are finding crossover success, whether it’s celebrity bloggers getting their own TV shows or home décor bloggers ending up in shelter magazines.

But it might surprise you to learn that this same phenomenon—the up-to-the-minute info, the juicy gossip and the blog-star to real-star transition—is happening in the credit union blogosphere. Or are you surprised to learn that there even is a credit union blogosphere? If so, perhaps it’s high time you join the many credit union administrators who regularly hit up informative credit union-specific blogs.

Of course the blog revolution isn’t about bystanders; it’s about getting in there, throwing up a page and connecting with your community. And for many credit unions (and for NAFCU too!) that has meant creating their own blogs as a way to get information out to—and solicit input from—their members.

“At this point, the very active passionate credit union blogosphere is still pretty small,” says Brent Dixon, creative director at consulting firm Trabian, which publishes the “Open Source CU” blog.

“I think that it is impacting credit unions at a very grassroots level.”

“It’s really about communication,” says Trey Reeme, Dixon’s former partner at Trabian and now director of channel integration at Texas Dow Employees Credit Union in Lake Jackson, Texas. “There are people who want to have deep conversations with you. And this is how to reach them… people who tell the credit union’s story at the grocery store, at church, and we need a way to communicate with them other than about their account. Usually the only ways we are communicating is in a branch setting or if they have a problem and are on a phone and perhaps at an annual meeting.”

Jamie Chase develops strategic marketing for credit unions at the consulting firm JayRay in Tacoma, Wash., and helps runs the company’s credit union blog, “What’s the Difference.” She notes, “The best thing that I’m seeing is members being engaged with what credit unions are really about.”

Part of the value of this new, deeper conversation is that it isn’t just two-sided. “When it really works well, it is members talking to members, a many-to-many conversation,” says Ron Shevlin, a blogger and author of “Everything They’ve Told You about Marketing Is Wrong.”

“And members will attribute the value of that conversation to the credit union.” That value comes at a bargain, says Shevlin, when you put a price tag on every piece of mail that goes out the door.

Shari Storm, chief marketing officer for Verity Credit Union in Seattle, Wash., agrees that the low cost of blogs is a boon; her credit union’s blog, “Our Voices,” has also helped in recruiting new hires. “A lot of our job applicants will say ‘I feel like I know you, I feel like I know the corporate culture,’ because they have been reading the blog.”

In Seattle’s difficult hiring market, says Storm, that’s a big plus.

How they got started

Dixon, Chase, Shevlin, Reeme and Storm are superstars in the credit union blog community; along with bloggers like Morris Partee of “Everything CU” and Ginny Brady of “The Boardcast.” They are the big names who themselves get blogged about, invited to speaking engagements and covered in the industry weeklies. But it has not always been so.

For Storm there was no one to emulate as she was essentially first on the scene. “I believe Verity’s blog was the first financial industry corporate blog in America. We were awarded that [distinction] by NetBanker.”

“Back in 2004, very few people had heard about blogging,” says Storm. “I was reading a parenting magazine and someone had written in and said they found their 13-year-old daughter’s blog. I had never heard the term, and so I researched it and I was just struck by the idea that teenage girls were putting their diaries online. And then the business implications hit me.”

Dan Veasey, director of marketing at Piedmont Credit Union in Danville, Va., runs the “Piedmont Credit Union Member Connect,” and also found blogging “kind of by accident,” albeit several years after Storm. “About this time last year, I was thinking that I wanted to find a way of getting more members involved. And being a techie kind of person, I looked on the Internet for ways. I was limited with our Web site because of hosting reasons. I found Blogspot. But honestly I didn’t even really understand what blogging was. Our blog was totally private…then a couple credit union blogger people found it, and then more after that. Then we started advertising it to the membership last summer.”

Brady, who started what is thought to be the very first blog by a credit union board member, had been reading them for quite a while before she founded “The Boardcast.”

“I started reading blogs in areas that interested me. This was something that I thought of doing just because I had an interest in it. And then I started thinking about my position on the board of directors at UFirst Federal Credit Union and that this would be a great way to communicate with the membership.”

In 2006 Brady brought her idea to the board and promised the project would be an inexpensive one; the directors told her to go for it.

Getting to blogging

The actual mechanics of kicking off a blog are pretty simple: You can sign up for one of the free online blogging platforms such as Wordpress and start posting entries. But making the major decisions required before Blog Post #1—what should the credit union blog about, who will write the entries, what kind of review process will exist and how much time will be devoted to it—are a bit trickier.

Reeme is walking through those very decisions now as he considers starting a blog at Texas Dow. “I have a couple of strategies. One is to launch an employee-only blog, taking a cue from what Verity did, giving employees a chance to write about events and what’s going on in their department. Members will be able to see it, but it won’t be a marketing piece.”

NAFCU Regulatory Compliance Director Anthony Demangone had similar decisions to make when he began the “NAFCU Compliance Blog.”

  “The secret to a blog is to be specific, know your audience and be true to your audience,” says Demangone. “Don’t waste their time, and make sure everything is what they need.”

And he’s careful to adhere to that.

When Demangone posts about upcoming NAFCU events, though readers may find the information useful, he’ll label them with a tongue-in-cheek “shameless plug.” And that opens a rather dicey topic in the credit union blogosphere: deciding how much marketing is too much on a blog. For Chase it’s simply a question as to whether it is the most strategic use of the blog to talk about your rates and services. “That’s pretty boring,” she says. One example that would be better, she says, is a blog that looks at preparing for college. “This would be a really great blog, financial matters and college money.”

“The best advice is to be genuine,” says Robert Rutkowski, who runs “That Credit Union Blog” for Weltman, Weinberg & Reis. “There’s still a level of, maybe crunchiness is the right word, in the blogosphere and in social media. If you’re doing it solely for the purpose of self-promotion and you’re transparent about that, it’s not going to work. There’s something still about blogging, at least from a credit union perspective, that if it’s just an avenue for corporate promotion, it will fail…or at least be scorned.”

But a little self-promotion is just fine, according to Storm. “I always kind of laugh at the social media purists. You shouldn’t push product, you need to post every day. It’s such a new field that I don’t think there are any absolutes.”

There is one hard-and-fast rule: set some.

“What I would recommend is to have a blogging policy,” says Chase. The risk is that the posts are instantly visible and not vetted by a credit union spokesperson or the legal department. A policy helps you set a framework. And that includes ensuring that employees feel comfortable participating in a way that is contributing to the organization, not detracting from their job.”

At JayRay, two employees vet blog posts. “You have to consider that when they are Googled, blog posts have the potential to come up even higher than your official Web site. That has the potential to be the first thing a consumer sees.”

“Having a team of two co-workers read your blog post before you press go takes 15 minutes, and it’s just part of a business best practice,” says Chase. “We’re not talking about someone’s personal diary here.”

To that end, Rutkowski suggests credit unions keep it nice. “Follow Thumper’s advice from the movie “Bambi”: ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’”

Rutkowski also advises bloggers to run controversial posts past the legal department but admits that can change the blog’s tone. “That starts to get heavy and it’s sort of anti-blog spirit.”

“The thing that makes a blog effective is its flexibility, its spontaneity,” echoes Demangone. “The more controls or limitations you put on it, that starts to eat away at the spontaneity. If you have to have 15 people…sign off on it, it’s not going to get updated regularly.”

“This might be a blog stopper,” says Partee. “Your members want to talk to people; they do not want to talk to an organization. They can sniff out organization-speak in a moment. But they have immense loyalty to the incredible individuals you have working for you. If you can, give them a voice.”

Brady balances it by having a friend proofread for her. She also sends any potentially spicy posts to her CEO and marketing director for a look. “For example, about two weeks ago there was a short announcement in our local newspaper about a product one of the banks had brought out that was very similar to what we do as credit unions. I wanted to comment on that, but I didn’t want it to cause enemies…so I sent that to them and they helped me refine it.” Needing a review of her posts though is an exception, not the rule. Brady estimates it happens about once a month.

Storm’s blog has about 10 different writers, each posting at least once per month but not more than once a week. “If everyone posts once per month, we are updating it twice a week.”

“There aren’t a lot of credit unions who are sending blog posts to the legal department first,” says Reeme. “That’s good because it allows us to be agile, but in the next few years, we may see attorneys on retainer at credit unions who say, ‘wait, we have a blog, why are we doing this, are people able to post unmoderated comment, are people entering their first and last names.’”

“You need to understand the risks of blogging, not to tell the family secrets. Treat it like you are sending an e-mail. There are certain things [you wouldn’t say] if you…send to everyone in your address book. Treat a blog like that. Everything’s archived. It’s on your permanent record,” he adds.

And don’t lose sight of the same controls you place on other marketing vehicles. “There’s nothing magical about a blog,” says Demangone. “It’s a publication. Truth in Savings, Truth in Lending still apply. You’re never going to say: ‘But your honor, it was a blog.’ It’s a risk that you can manage.”

Beyond the blog

For these credit union trailblazers, it’s not enough to own the blog world; they’re steadily branching out into other types of social media.

Brady’s begun using the online photo-sharing site Flickr. “We just moved into a brand new operations center this year and had a grand opening and a members’ preview. So I did a Flickr slideshow and those were pretty popular.” At the grand opening, the credit union’s CEO also sang the Star Spangled Banner, and Brady posted video of that on YouTube.

“Seattle Metro Credit Union has its own YouTube channel,” notes Chase.

Walter Everhardt, VP of marketing at First New York FCU in Schenectady, runs “First New York FCU News & Info” and has added podcasts. “We did one on auto buying tips, how to improve your credit score. We have done five or six. Our next one will be on home buying.”

“As far as the trends go, I see more video than even a few months ago,” says Reeme. “I think that video blogging is going to get hotter and hotter. For most people, thinking about social media is MySpace and YouTube, and maybe thinking about Facebook and LinkedIn. But for people who have been in social media for a while, we are looking at what’s next. And I think video and mobile are what’s next. Credit unions need to be thinking about this too.”

“Every credit union should be using social media, at the baseline using it to listen,” says Dixon.

But some Web 2.0 solutions can’t beat what members are already comfortable with. Many experienced blog-watchers use Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds as an easy way to keep up with their favorite sites. Free applications such as Google Reader help users manage their RSS subscriptions. But the credit union world seems to still prefer a simpler answer. “When I first launched the blog, I had an RSS feed,” says Demangone. “But it never stuck. I added an e-mail subscription and [they] quadrupled.”

Getting the word out

“You can’t just assume that you will reap the benefits just because you have the blog,” says Shevlin. “Commenting on someone else’s blog is probably the best way to generate traffic to your blog.”

“When you are blogging, you need to be reading other people’s blogs,” says Chase. “Make a comment there. You don’t want to have a blog and just have it sit there. It’s a conversation. Your friends don’t just want to come to your house; they want you to come to their house. We take turns.”

Says Partee: “Comment on the blogs that have to do with the community that surrounds your credit union. They’ll see your name and get familiar with who you are.”

“I’m always thinking of other ways that I can get people to notice it,” says Brady, who picked up a digital frame to hold announcements about “The Boardcast” in the credit union’s lobby.

But once you get people talking, what about the negative comments that may crop up?

“Credit unions compared to banks have much better relationships with their [members], better [member] advocacy,” says Shevlin. But even when a problem is expressed, he sees it as an opportunity. “Their lasting impression is not of the problem but how it was handled.”

Partee notes that no matter what, “people are going to talk about you…on review sites, blogs, etc. Do you want that just out there?”

According to Storm, “[Blogging] gives us a means of explaining things that we could never explain before. Like why we can’t put points on the debit card. You wouldn’t put that on the newsletter, you wouldn’t make a poster.” But, she says “Don’t jump into the fray unless you have thick skin. You do open yourself up to the court of public opinion.”

“Always keep negative comments up, unless it’s just completely offensive,” adds Dixon. “Our community has often come through and responded and gotten our backs before we even have to jump in. Then there have been times when we had to sit out a response overnight to try not to respond overly emotionally. No matter what, you have to remember that the comment is grounded in something that they believe is a point of truth.”

Perhaps the most salient reminder about blogging is that it is a conversation with a specific community—but one that can be overheard by anyone.

Shevlin posted about his surprise in reading a Credit Union Times article that quoted him, despite his never having talked to the reporter. The piece also characterized the feelings of several fellow bloggers on a topic—all culled from posts, not interviews. This was all copasetic, Shevlin assures, but it seems to have been a reminder that everything on a blog is on the record.

Says Storm, “The life of a blog is long and short. It gets kicked down but also is there forever.”

As much as blogs give credit unions and other institutions a new voice with which to address stakeholders, it takes away the possibility for something pretty coveted—the last word. But when you think about it, were you ever sure you were getting it? In truth, the conversations members might have on blogs have for decades gone on at coffee stations and other gathering places. Now you simply have the opportunity to listen in and respond when appropriate. And no one’s exempt. In fact, as I started researching this story, one blogger was telling another to expect my call. And my guess is that I, too, have lost the last word. This article will simply become part of the conversation. And it’s a chat I can’t wait to hear.

Kate Arcieri is a former associate editor of The Federal Credit Union.