We've got a couple of polls running over on Twitter at the moment and figured we would cross post them here on the blog. Social media is an area where more and more community financial institutions are dipping their toes into lately yet many express a concern with not knowing how to actually use the medium to effectively reach their community audience.
Since these polls are very simple to set up and only require a couple of seconds to respond to, we'll be making this an ongoing project. Once a month we'll post a new question to the Twitter community at large and we hope that the results of these polls will be informative to financial institutions. If you have any suggestions for future polls, please post them in the comments section, we'd love to hear from you!
Also, we'd like to let you know that our whitepaper, Crowdsourcing for Community Bankers, is now available completely free, no registration required. It's available both in pdf format and as a printable article in the whitepaper section of the Continuity Engine website.
Twitter polls: What Does Your Audience Want?
Crowdsourcing for Community Bankers
"Crowdsourcing for Bankers? What does that mean?"
"So, it's like a Facebook for bankers? That must be exciting!"
These are some of the comments I've received as I try to tell people what it is our company does. I'll admit, when I first was introduced to the concept by Andy Greenawalt, Continuity Engine's founder and CEO, I had a very similar reaction. You know what though? As I watch our Community grow and bankers help each other with discussions and document sharing on such topics as mobile banking, disaster recovery, International ACH Transaction policy and many others, I do get excited. A platform just for community banks and credit unions that brings together bankers from across the country to share their strengths and get help in the areas they would typically hire a consultant for, is pretty cool!
Andy recently wrote a whitepaper that really crystallizes the concept of crowdsourcing for community bankers. Below is the overview from the paper. You can read it in its entirety, or download the paper, on our website.
Crowdsourcing for Community Bankers
Overview
The requirements of regulatory compliance for community banks and credit unions are at an all time high, and getting more rigorous each year. From GLBA, to safety and soundness, each area is requiring increased focus, definition and work. Each area of the organization needs more detailed policies, procedures, check lists and audits. This increase in work, and its required resources, is happening at the precise time that it can least be afforded.
The position of this paper is that to address this problem, we must make the effort of the work a variable in the equation, and not a constant. The regulatory requirements are certainly not in your control; therefore the work that needs to be done is a constant. It is “HOW” the work gets done that must be variable, the effort. Traditionally each organization has used its own folks, manual methods and consultants to address these areas. The problem with attacking the challenge in this way is that there is no leverage. If you need to move enough dirt to plant a single seed you could use a spoon, but if you needed to plant a field of corn the spoon would simply not move enough dirt. The effort required for the work done wouldn’t make sense. The position of this paper is that there is a new way to attack these problems more efficiently, while saving money, but it’s all a question of HOW? This is a paper about trading that spoon of dirt for some real tools, and working the field with less effort.
Read the rest or download the whitepaper at Continuity Engine.
Photo credit, ArtemFinland
