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

The Social Web creates trouble for Chase

My friend at The Client Side blog has this great video where people use the Social Web to find flaws in Chase Bank's practices. Could this happen to us?

link

Low-cost ING Direct plans to mosey out West

More competition coming our way... Damn our proximity to Amsterdam!


Duncan Mavin, Financial PostPublished: Friday, April 27, 2007
ING Direct Canada hopes to celebrate its tenth anniversary by expanding the low-cost, nobranch banking model out of Ontario and into Western Canada, the bank's chief executive said yesterday.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=539ce1f7-66c9-444f-8f03-fb074f9a537a

Credit Union National Association using YouTube to promote the merger

From CUCBC's newslist...it's nearly a 4 minute video but it is a focused message - credit unions are there for the 'little guy'.
US credit unions urged to send “Little Guy” to Capitol Hill A new lobbying tool to use in supporting credit union legislation--and to vividly display the differences between credit unions and banks--has been posted by the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) on its website and on YouTube.com. (CUNA News Now)

http://www.cuna.org/initiatives/lg_video.html

Search Engine Marketing Gains Confidence

from http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625541

JupiterResearch Reveals SEM Executive Survey Findings › › ›SearchDay By Kevin Newcomb April 11, 2007
A majority of search marketers are planning on spending more on search this year, and are mostly satisfied with the return on investment (ROI) they are seeing from search. Those are two of the findings from a new JupiterResearch report, "US SEM Executive Survey, 2007: Understanding the Increasingly Sophisticated Search Marketer," released Tuesday afternoon at Search Engine Strategies New York.
"Very few people are dissatisfied with search. The ones that are tend to be smaller advertisers managing less than 1,000 keywords," Kevin Heisler, JupiterResearch analyst and lead author of the report, told ClickZ. "We see many advertisers getting more aggressive with their spending, especially agencies. They've figured out what makes search so successful, and are content with the ROI."

From Seth's Blog...Tie's Relationships to Accuracy with a great example

The Dabbawalla's secret
Zaki points us to the phenomenon of the Dabbawalla. These men deliver thousands of lunches every single day in Mumbai... from the person's home to their office, hot and fresh.
The reported error rate is one in six million.
How is this possible? How do you create and run a service with thousand of employees, no technology and a poorly-educated workforce and have better than six sigma quality?
Simple: the dabbawallas know their customers. If they rotated the people around, it would never work. There's trust, and along with the trust is responsibility. By creating a flat organization and building relationships, the system even survives monsoon season.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/04/the_dabbawallas.html

Cell Phone Banking

Cell phone banking is taking off in the US. Two major US banks are launching their mobile banking products in April/May of 2007 and many others have made commitments to be able to offer mobile banking in the near future.

Where's Canada at? Here's an article from the Sun that talks to the technology Telus will be offering soon. Doesn't sound like full-fledge mobile banking but it's a start.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=8a5f1f86-1259-4037-9403-054a01e901ba

How big of a THREAT is Peer-to-Peer lending?

A couple good postings below that give a great background description of what peer-to-peer lending is and predictions on who is going to be impacted the most from P2P lending. Definitely something we'll have to keep our eye on.


Great descriptive article on Peer-to-peer lending from a UK newspaper...
http://www.nextcu.com/2006/01/zopa_for_you_p2p_lending_is_co.html


Insights and predictions of Scott Patterson (VP of E-Commerce at Callahan & Assoc.) on the impact of peer-lending on credit unions...
http://www.nextcu.com/2006/01/zopa_for_you_p2p_lending_is_co.html

5 Brands Make Their Mark on MySpace

Here's an interesting article on how 5 brands are using MySpace well.

Is It Time for Marketers to Enter the Social Whirl?

eMarketer estimates that this year experimenting marketers will spend $280 million on social network marketing in the US, and an additional $70 million in international markets, mostly to create profile pages and sponsored promotions.

See the article here.

Time To Take Another Look At Business Blogs

"A generation for whom sharing information via social networks and personal blogs is second nature will demand being addressed as human beings, without the filters applied by traditional corporate communications," says Mr. Belcher. "Marketers and PR professionals who want to remain relevant in this environment will add blogging and blogosphere literacy to their skill sets, or risk falling behind their customers."

From an interesting eMarketer article.

Ford Bold Moves

So this is interesting. Ford has a new strategy of an online documentary about how they now suck but will get back on top. Will it work? Take a look at FordBoldMoves.com

Have Broadband Will Bank

Interesting article from eMarketer.

Web Now a Mass Medium?

An interesting eMarketer article.