recent comments
everythingcu on
May 07, 2008
Brent Dixon on
April 08, 2008 Denise Wymore on
April 08, 2008 everythingcu on
April 08, 2008
wazaroff on
April 08, 2008 benry on
April 08, 2008 Tawnya Lancaster on
April 09, 2008 Tim McApine on
April 09, 2008 wazaroff on
April 09, 2008 Tiven on
April 09, 2008 wazaroff on
April 10, 2008 Matt, the Credit Union Warrior on
April 15, 2008 wazaroff on
May 23, 2007my upcoming conferences
:.see all
about me
I'm William Azaroff. I direct Online Strategy & Community Engagement at Vancity, Canada's largest credit union.
My opinions and views are just that, and don't reflect the views of my employer (or, perhaps, anyone else).
my peers
:.BankerVision
:.Banking Kismet
:.Banktastic
:.The Bankwatch
:.Benry
:.The Boardcast
:.Buzz Canuck
:.The Client Side
:.CU Communicator
:.CU Employee
:.CU Hype
:.The CU Loop
:.Currency Marketing
:.Denise Wymore
:.Doug True
:.EverythingCU
:.The Financial Brand
:.Marketing ROI
:.NetBanker
:.Nexus Connection
:.Open Source CU
:.Small FI Blog
:.Social Signal
:.The Story
:.Tinfoiling
:.Trey Reeme
:.Verity's Our Voices
:.Visible Banking
:.Web Strategy
Congrats to Flock, hats off to Facebook.
So we gave it all we had, but in the end ChangeEverything.ca didn't take home a Webby.Truly, it was such a crazy honour just to be nominated. We got all of Vancity behind this, right up to our CEO. It was great and very fun, but it was not meant to be.
The last time I was able to check, we were in second place for the People's Voice Webby Award, but a distant second (7%) to Facebook (78%). Needless to say, Facebook took it.
And the judged award went to the very cool Flock, the social media browser.
Here are the winners in our category of Social Networking
Labels: changeeverything, facebook, flock, social media, vancity, webbys
posted on Tuesday, May 06, 2008
ChangeEverything.ca is nominated for a Webby Award.
I am so pleased and excited to announce that ChangeEverything.ca was nominated for a Webby Award.
This is such an incredible honour, and follows on the heels of being an Official Honoree last year. Please vote for ChangeEverything.ca for the Webby People's Voice Award.
It is worth noting that the four other sites nominated in the category of Social Networking are:Perhaps you've heard of some of them. It is mind-boggling to be nominated against some of the biggest developments in social networking of the last year or two. Amazing also to be the only company-created social network, up against a bevy of startups.
Equally impressive is the lineup of judges who selected the nominees and will select an ultimate winner.
The Academy is an intellectually diverse organization that includes members such as musicians Beck and David Bowie, Internet inventor Vint Cerf, political columnist Arianna Huffington, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening, R/GA Founder and Chairman Robert Greenberg, Virgin Atlantic Chairman and Founder Richard Branson, Crispin Porter + Bogusky Partner and Chief Creative Officer Alex Bogusky, and The Weinstein Company Co-Founder Harvey Weinstein. Members also include writers and editors from publications such as The New York Times, Wired, Details, Fast Company, Elle, The Los Angeles Times, Vibe, and WallPaper. The 11th Annual Webby Awards received over 8,000 entries from over 60 countries and all 50 states and generated over 750 million media impressions worldwide.It is pretty much exactly two years since we started developing the site from a concept, and so rewarding to see where Kate has nurtured and engaged the community of over 3,000 registered users. I am also heartened that we are the only socially responsible community in the running. Proves you can do well by doing good.
UPDATE: I added a link to where you can vote for ChangeEverything.ca for the People's Voice Award.
Labels: banking, changeeverything, corporate responsibility, credit union, drupal, facebook, innovation, media, social media, technology, vancity, web 2.0
posted on Tuesday, April 08, 2008
SPLIT IT - a TD Canada Trust Facebook app.
My newest NetBanker post went up today about TD Canada Trust and how they are leveraging Facebook:TD Canada Trust Launches "Split It" on Facebook
I'll wrap up my three part series on social media next week (as always you can see all my NetBanker articles at netbanker.com/azaroff).
Labels: banking, blogging, facebook, innovation, netbanker, social media, td canada trust
posted on Thursday, August 16, 2007
Facebook reunites mother with her adopted son.
You gotta imagine the people at Facebook will make hay over this.Labels: facebook, media, news, vancouver, web 2.0
posted on Thursday, July 19, 2007
Finances on Facebook
Jim Bruene has a great post on netbanker.com about the rise of financial services on Facebook.Watching the explosion of content, and users, at Facebook, may be the most interesting thing we've seen since the rise of the commercial Web in 1995/1996.
Jim writes about the opportunities that exist for FIs to sponsor Facebook applications like ChipIn. Jim documents how ChipIn works really well using screenshots. Nicely done. It's exciting to watch this new explosion of financial services within Facebook. It really democratizes how people can access money.
And I'm not just mentioning this because he gave Vancity's Bike Share a nice plug (although it didn't hurt).
Labels: banking, changeeverything, credit union, facebook, microcredit, netbanker, social personal finance, vancity, web 2.0
posted on Monday, July 09, 2007
Update on community platform.
I want to update my earlier post on using the social web as a community platform.This morning we launched the Vancity Bike Share. In a nutshell...
Vancity Bike Share wants to see you to get on a bike, share it with others and spread the word about cycling. It is a chance to try alternative transportation, increase your daily exercise and share with your community.
We used ChangeEverything.ca as our platform to engage people and drive them to find out more and register. We ask participants to use the site to blog about their experiences with the bike, and also to find the person they want to pass the bike to after they've been riding it for three weeks. In addition to ChangeEverything.ca, we also used Facebook as a way to get the word out.
To be honest I wasn't sure how it would go. Would people use these online tools to get involved? Could we use the social web to get people to take action? I hoped so, but I wasn't sure.
But this event proves the power of a social network site. Within a week we had 23 applications to get a bike through the site, and the media attention has driven more people to the site to register and take part in the discussion.
Vancity has two factors working in our favour here: One is that we are local and deeply involved with the local community so the relevance factor is high. We tapped into issues (bike sharing and eco-friendly transportation) that Vancouverites care about and therefore the discussions on the site are meaningful to them. Second is that the values of Vancity, which are well known locally, fit with this initiative. People see it as genuine and trust the process. It doesn't seem like 'marketing'.
Asking some of the people who took one of the 40 bikes this morning, four told me they heard about it on Facebook. Amazing that at least 10% came from leveraging this social utility for free.
Read the bike share blog posts on ChangeEverything.ca.
Powerful stuff.
PS: I also need to say that Kate is my new favourite person!
Labels: banking, blogging, changeeverything, corporate responsibility, credit union, environment, facebook, innovation, technology, vancity, vancouver, web 2.0
posted on Wednesday, June 27, 2007
The social web as community platform.
Vancity, like many mission-driven organizations, is involved with lots of community activities and events. We ask our members to vote for organizations to donate money to and for our Board of Directors, as well as asking them to engage in a variety of community events that we're involved with or sponsor.Now that ChangeEverything.ca has been operating for almost a year and has well over 1,000 registered users, it's big enough we can use this community platform to engage people in the issues we are involved with. Let me make it clear that we won't use it to promote our product or services, our rates or promotions, nor our main credit union or banking functions. But we can use it to engage people in the myriad of community activities we're involved with, activities that our members say they want to know more about.
Now, every mission-driven organization doesn't need their own social networking site to do this. Vancity's Online Community Moderator, Kate recently used Facebook as well as ChangeEverything.ca to launch our Bike Share Program. The details, as well as how to get involved are listed at ChangeEverything.ca, but she used Facebook as a way to get the word out about the kickoff event. You can see our Facebook event here.
I would argue that Facebook represents an important, free opportunity for credit unions to leverage, and expand the knowledge of what they're doing in the community among their members and prospects. Not as a place to directly acquire new members (although that may be a happy outcome), but as a place to engage your community (whether members or not) around your mission. It's an advantage credit unions have over banks because they're inherently more community-oriented and therefore have more credibility in a place where people gather online.
When I first happily got sucked into the world of Facebook, I noticed that there were already two Vancity groups, one for employees and one for investors. These weren't created by Vancity intentionally, but the community wanted a place to discuss issues about us. We can either be passive and watch these conversations about us take place, or we can engage back and inform these discussions, not direct them, but get involved and see what we can learn by doing so. As long as the people involved understand and respect Facebook and aren't there just to obviously shift the focus to a sales and service approach, we should find ample opportunity there.
Oh, and next time you're on Facebook, please say hello.
Labels: changeeverything, corporate responsibility, credit union, facebook, innovation, technology, vancity, web 2.0
posted on Friday, June 22, 2007
Facebook and Twitter
I'm not very good at keeping up with my Twitter. I guess I'm just a poor Twitterer. I like the concept of microblogging but I'm not much of a text messager, nor do I go to Twitter very often to update via the web. Now that I've been sucked into the wonderful world of Facebook and am loving it, I found out about a site that will update your Twitter status when you update your Facebook status. It's called fbtwit.com and it seems to work great.The nice side benefit is that when you update your Facebook, and your Twitter status is also updated, you can use Twitter's status widget on your blog to tell everyone what the hell you're doing.
Thanks to Alexandra Samuel for this tip.
Labels: blogging, facebook, innovation, technology, twitter, web 2.0
posted on Saturday, May 19, 2007
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.