Welcoming CUTweetTrack to Community

We're excited to offer CUTweetTrack, a collective of all the credit unions using Twitter, their own private group on Community.

Social media is a hot topic in the Financial Industry right now. Roger Conant saw a need and created a solution with his profile @CUTweetTrack on Twitter. There he follows all the credit unions, leagues, and credit union social media initiatives (typically aimed at drawing the GenY crowd to the credit union movement) that are using Twitter. He has compiled over 330 Twitter profiles in the credit union industry.

His profile has two benefits. First, for the general public, it's the place to go to find out if your credit union is using Twitter. The second benefit is for the credit unions themselves. Roger quickly noticed that credit union Twitter methodology was quite varied among the different profiles. He knew that credit unions pride themselves on collaboration and set about creating a spot where they could discuss the tools, benefits, different strategies and best practices for the Twitter platform.

The next step in the CUTweetTrack project was to create a blog. Roger enlisted the help of his friend and colleague James Robert Lay and the creative team at PTP NEW MEDIA to create the CUTweetTrack blog, the credit union resource for Twitter to help credit unions connect, communicate and listen. The first post, on June 14, 2009, was a great interview with Peter Hodges of BellCo Credit Union in Colorado.

The last step to making CUTweetTrack the truly collaborative project that Roger envisioned, was to find a community platform where the credit union staff could feel free to discuss anything and everything about Twitter and social media in a private forum. This is where Continuity stepped in and offered our Community. We are happy to provide a free, secure environment where credit unions can have discussions, share documents (for remix and reuse under Creative Commons licensing) and connect to each other.

If your credit union is one of the many that CUTweetTrack follows on Twitter, please feel free to join Community. Joining is a simple process requiring only your name and email, plus a username and password that you generate yourself. Once you've joined, you'll want to go to the Group Directory and join the CUTweeetTrack group in the Social Media category. Some of the conversations already started are:

• What to Tweet?
• Quantifying Success
• and Supporting Special Campaigns
  

Twitter polls: What Does Your Audience Want?

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.