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Picking up from Part 1 of my and Trey’s Seattle experience…

Thursday: Social Media with the KCCCU

On Thursday Trey and I spoke for the King County Chapter of Credit Unions at the beautiful Bell Harbor Conference Center. The KCCCU has even more enthusiasm than their name has C’s.

Trey and I gave two talks. The first was a half hour on the importance of knowing what people are saying about your business on the social web.

We opened up with several credit union member quotes from the blogosphere. Here are a few favorites (I’m not going to link to the actual posts, because I’d rather not deal with the drama. If you really want to know where they’re from, email me.):

“Dear XXXXXXXX (formerly known as XXXXXX XXXXXX Credit Union), I hate you.”
- Rebecca

“If you can get into First Tech Credit Union – do it.They are wonderful.”
- Greg

“XXXXXXX XXXXX Credit Union sucks. Their website is riddled with blank/error pages.”
-Becky

“I have been a member of BECU since 1970’s..it is the absolute best place to bank…they have great service are so much cheaper than a bank.”
- Linda S.

Our main point was that although business blogging is not for everybody, listening is.

The second talk was really a room-wide conversation. The whole lot of us sat around and chatted about:

• Peer-to-peer lending
• MySpace, and when it’s appropriate for a credit union (rarely, if ever)
• Using consumer generated media for ethnographic research
• Wikis
• Social sites like YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn
• Pretty much anything else they wanted to ask about. If we didn’t know the answer, we Googled it.

Afterwards we put on a bib and stuffed ourselves with seafood.

Friday: The Blogging Workshop

We spent Friday doing a blogging workshop for the Verity Credit Union bloggers. It was in this workshop that Verity’s Tina Hall gave us a seriously sweet “What Would a Unicorn Do?” folder.

Here are a few blogging best-practice highlights from the discussion:

• Keep your content scannable with short paragraphs and section subheadings
• When responding to negative comments, never make it personal
• Increase comments by asking open-ended questions and commenting on other like-minded blogs
• If you have writer’s block -
  • Do an interview (let the interviewee do the writing)
  • Don’t be afraid to pass ideas along from other blogs (attribution is key)
  • And when all else fails…use the Trey Formula.

For our last night in Seattle, the Verity kids took us out on the town. I met a food scientist. We were introduced to the Stout Float, which is a delicious stout beer mixed with ice cream. Every single person at our table was highly entertaining.

Like I said – the time of our lives.