Virgin Joining the P2P Marketplace

Virgin is sticking to it's brand of "developing fresh approaches to consumer issues and challenging the status quo" with this stake in Peer to Peer lending. It'll be interesting to see who is first in Canada to offer P2P lending. Colin Henderson from Bankwatch was sounding like he's not that far away from launching something in Canada.

Full Virgin article: http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=16939

Blow up your homepage

At least that's what Seth Godin says.

Banks with Blogs

Shari Storm, who is the CMO at Verity CU in Seattle was one of the very first FIs with a blog. Her presentation at Net.Finance is podcast here. If you're planning some desktime, give it a listen.

Busting Out of the Inbox - 5 New Rules for Email Marketing

These are pretty good tips on email marketing - very timely information. That said, some are practical and some are fairly pie-in-the-sky. For example, "Delivering relevant emails relies on the integration of data from different sources into a single knowledge base" is easier said than done.

Also, a great stat from the article is:
For promotional email campaigns, segmentation delivers, on average, a 7x increase in open rate and a 14x increase in click-through rate. “If you’re not using segmentation, you’re an email
laggard.”

Full White Paper:
http://www.rightnow.com/pdf/webcast/rnt_emailpeppersrogers.pdf

BMO delves in podcast for First-Time Homebuyers

Not especially well done or interesting or really believable in my opinion but I think it was smart to team up with reality tv / celebrity.

http://www4.bmo.com/personal/0,2273,35649_20596970,00.html

Do's and Don'ts In Pricing

Very timely and relevant to Vancity at this time:

Although I can't agree 100% with this comment, "Companies should not trust that their sales and marketing people would feed them accurate, un-tainted data. They should find data sources that are more reliable" it's probably founded in some experience.

http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=14082&SectionID=2

Canada Cannes - DDB picks up the print ad award

Globe & Mails creative competition reveals the top ten finalists...

http://contests.theglobeandmail.com/cannes/downloads/2007_Competition.pdf