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Hopefully I haven’t already lost half of you creative-types by uttering the word “programming.” Stay with me – this is a chat for right-brained folks. I’m convinced that the business and marketing worlds need to be listening to nerds more often.

Like the Open Source Movement (of which we’ve already sang the praises), Agile Development is more philosophy than technical practice. It spotlights people, communication, and action over bureaucracy and red-tape.

The Agile Manifesto emphasizes:

Individuals and interactions (over processes and tools)

People are more important than processes. Marketing will always work better if it is build around people instead of a product.

Create more people-centric campaigns by

• Listening closely (mine CGM such as blogs, comments and forums, and use Google Alerts to stay on top of keywords).
• Asking the right questions (with tools like the Net Promoter Score).
• Acting on what you learn. And
• Making your message accessible across the media people are using.

Working software (over comprehensive documentation)

Do more and speculate less. Gaggles of would-be great campaigns have been maimed beyond recognition because of focus-group-choke.

Why do you see so many web apps in beta? Because Agile Programming says “Put it out there, let them play with it, listen, and tweak based on what the users say.”

Customer collaboration (over contract negotiation)

It’s not uncommon for a developer and a non-techie customer to sit in a room and co-create a product together. What an incredibly frightening and awesome idea.

South African winery Stormhoek joined the blogging community and let consumer bloggers carry their brand with them. As a result, they’re about to hit a five-fold sales increase in two years.

Denise Wymore once said that if a credit union wants to appeal to Gen-Y, they need to elect one to their board of directors. I couldn’t agree more.

Responding to change (over following a plan)

If you create a plan that cannot shift down the line, you’ll end up hitting a dead-end. Digital and interactive marketing are the best plays here because they allow you to react in real-time to the people you’re speaking with.

I just returned yesterday from another trip to Seattle. This time I was up there to co-pitch the next round of the Washington Credit Union League’s cooperative advertising with Daniel Thorpe and the rest of the Boom Creative team.

Their brand research focused in on a target demographic of value-conscious females ages 21 to 37. They’ve even named her “Kate.” Their aim is to promote credit unions as caregivers, which is right on the money in my opinion.

Although the creative brief hasn’t been released yet, and it is irresponsible to pitch any creative concept without understanding the research, I’ve decided to unofficially put out a few ideas I’ve been tossing around.

The following are only “what ifs,” but I would love to see some credit unions run with the broad-strokes concepts behind these, with or without us.

The main idea I’d like you to take away from this is – engage your market, be relevant, and use interaction to talk with them instead of relying solely on mass media to talk at them.

So you want to make yourself more visible and relevant to Washington’s Gen Y, value-conscious maternal figures? What if…

What if you started a podcast on motherhood?

And I’m not talking about “Financial Tips for Young Mothers Like You!” What if you created a show dedicated to parenting tips, stories, interviews with young working mothers, single mothers, book reviews, and so on.

This way you produce something your members will actually enjoy checking out, position yourself as a care-giving resource, and ideally grow a community around your ideas. Need inspiration? Check out the Mommy Bloggers.

Set up a blog around the podcast too, invite appropriate members to write guest posts. Encourage comments.

What if you released a suite of products and services dedicated to easing the transition into motherhood?

The transition into parenting, just like other large life events, is one of the most financially stressful times in woman’s life.

Offer a free financial planning session explaining how to invest for their kids’ education. Offer a HELOC at a special rate for expectant mothers to build or furnish a nursery. Offer a free seminar on protecting your child physically (proper car seat installation, safety issues around the home, etc) and financially (avoiding identity theft).

What if you let your members’ own stories drive the campaign?

Picture this – you set up a website where your members call in, upload video, or even post a text-based narrative of an experience they’ve had with your credit unions? You could even use the submitted media as the foundation for the TV or radio spots.

Blend the video clips together into a tightly-woven and eclectic narrative created by your own members. If someone calls in a story, animate it in with a storybook aesthetic.

What if you monitored public opinion of the campaign in real-time using RSS?

Using Google Blog Search, you can subscribe to specific keywords and be notified as they show up in website content. No matter what, you marketers on the Washington League should be subscribing to “Washington Credit Union League,” and your specific credit unions’ name.

During the campaign you can subscribe to a campaign’s tagline (for example, McDonald’s I’m Lovin It) to keep your finger on the pulse of consumer opinion. This allows you to react immediately, instead of waiting for the polls and focus groups to hear how it’s been received.

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I could go on and on, but this is getting long. The long-short is this:

No matter what agency or creative concept you go with, demand interaction and experience … because that’s the only way to cut through the noise and build lasting relationships.

What is RSS?

I like to have pizza, the newspaper, packages, girl scout cookies and the phone book brought right to my doorstep. I also dig breakfast in bed. I regret to have missed out on the era of “the milkman.” Does this make me a little lazy? Yes.

Now, with RSS, receiving news updates, blog updates and a variety of others is about as easy as having breakfast in bed.

RSS, short for “R*eally *Simple S*yndication,” allows you to choose the content you like and have it delivered to you instantly.

The first thing you need in order to access RSS feeds is a *news reader, also known as an aggregator. There are all kinds of news readers, some web-based and used through your browser, some downloaded and used on your desktop or PDA.

And I am happy to report that most of them are completely free.

A few RSS news readers…

Now what?

Once you’ve found a reader you like, you simply have to figure out what sites you’d like to be kept up-to-date on. To use this site as an example: notice the big blue button that says “Subscribe to our feed” on the right side. If you click it, it will send you to our feed. You can subscribe by cutting and pasting the URL (web address) of the feed into your news reader.

Each news reader will be able to tell you in more specific detail how to make the most of its features. It is also worth mentioning that some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Mac’s Safari have built-in readers. Expect to see this more and more.

Once you have the content you desire established and fed to your news reader, it’s a simple matter of rinse and repeat for each site you’d like to add.

And tell your clicking finger to take it easy for a while.