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

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 Control website.

“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 view the whitepaper.

Photo credit, ArtemFinland