One of my favorite innovation operators and a real champion of corporate Irving Wladawsky-Berger wrote about MMV in his blog recently. He also talks about working with Citi at large which is exciting and timely.
UPDATE: I will be at Finovate tomorrow. This looks like a great event and I will post photos and comments.
Jim Bruene of Netbanker fame has organized a much needed event in Finovate 2007. Speed dating for venture capital ala the DEMO conference. I am sorting out my attendance, but I know some other folks from my team who will be there. There also seems to be a dearth of tickets (sold out!).
On October 2nd, 2007, twenty of the most innovative companies in the financial, banking and lending industries will gather in New York to offer a glimpse of the future of mobile, personal and online finance.
The presenters are:
CheckFreeClairMail This is the type of event that we need to see happen frequently in order to support innovation in the financial services space.
Two of my favorite banking blogs have started discussing a topic that I also love to talk about, banks and blogging. Rob Findlay at the Bank Channel has posted regarding research by the Javelin Group indicating that blogging is the answer to the bank-to-consumer communication issue. Ron Shevlin who oversees Marketing ROI build further stating that banks better get into the blogosphere, and figure out how to do it right.
I have written about corporate blogging and specifically that corporations and banks need to get on with it as a matter of message control and participation in a hypergrowth channel for consumer interaction. I would add to it now that this channel is the de facto channel for topics that can be tagged as innovative. Imagine how much easier it would be for us to figure out the whole US mobile banking mess if we had been blogging with interested customers, partners, experts, whoever at the same time that we were discussing strategy, hiring consultants and having kick-offs internally.
From an organizational perspective, the value that interaction with senior management generates, particularly among those who have no traditional avenues to do so, is routinely underestimated. I come across folks at Citi everyday who operate blogs in their free time and would love to do so at work, just for the exposure and the thinksharing. Most blog-related discussions at work inevitably come to the questions of “…what do we get out of this?”. Well, Banks have to turn a corner and believe that honest, open. two-way dialogue is the cornerstone of the new bank. This needs to happen with employees, customer, shareholders, constituents, regulators, competitors, partners…the list goes on. And as for the question of the ROI of blogging, I leave you with Nobel Prize and Oscar winning author George Bernard Shaw’s quote:
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
I mean really, why not just gather the best of the bloggers in your space, say financial advice because I’m a banker. Pay them to do what they do best. If you look at BlogShares, there are over 250 personal finance blogs with good traffic numbers. They are written from diverse perspectives ranging from poor folks trying to make it to cashed out .com entrepreneurs just dropping wisdom on the way to a publishing deal.
Buy them and host them and provide them a staff to make it better. They are already voluntarily evangelizing the product. You definitely don’t want a competitor to get at them.
We could all learn a thing or two from Oprah.
This week there has been a middling stir regarding Dell’s public blog. Largely any kind of de-shrouding of the corporate enigma is received with some automatic appreciation. Dell’s effort was also met with the requisite criticism from the uber-bloggers who feel Dell was half-hearted in their attempt and did not meet expectations. While I agree the “Direct Conversation” with Dell seems a bit sanitized and mediated at first glance, it is an enormous step for any hierarchical corporation to fully open up publicly and interactively.
The comments seem fairly direct and unfiltered on the site which seems like a reasonable start. Around the blogosphere, Dell is getting the whip for not immediately, pro-actively bringing up important issues (exploding computers, 14 hour hold times, new pricing strategy…Bueller?). Alright so the blog does actually suck. For now. This is v.1 and as we in the 2.0 world where companies share decisioning and address consumers directly: continuous feedback, improvements, perpetual beta, and other 2.0 jargon should be applied. In fact Dell did the smart thing in their latest post by addressing the criticism of some biz-blog heavies.
The fact that Dell has a feedback platform is a phenomenal move considering the now medieval looking companies that it beat up on the way to the top. (Compaq Presario anyone?)
Also, working in a mega corporate, I can tell you the decision to greenlight a blog that is even slightly cloudy and occasionally trustworthy is like a pox on the PR department and the multitude of agencies that rely on being able to produce volumes of mediocre marketing because the message is always the same. Imagine that, now they will have to actually read and hear what people are saying about the product and produce communication that explains what the consumer wants to know.
I for one welcome Dell to the discussion. Take your time jumping in, trust me there is alot to talk about.
You are currently browsing the archives for the blogs category.
Neosophic.com is written by Jayastu Bhattacharya. Content management by WordPress 2.0.3. Theme by Lasse Havelund.
15 mySQL queries executed in 0.114 seconds.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
