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Our very own Matt Dean was included in a recent CU Times article highlighting five sassy young entrepreneurs. The article is titled Gen Y Entrepreneurs Shake Up CU Industry, Helping to Reveal Authenticity.

Here are two snippets from the article, which is chock-full of some great points and insights from the interviewees.

Matt had some great thoughts on CUs engaging young people without necessarily having to wear a backwards hat and drop hip-hop references.

“The best business decision a credit union can make is rekindling the focus on the membership and reigniting their evangelistic feel to encourage passion and empower younger staff, ... These are our future leaders; they need to be engaged. People are more willing to stick around if they feel that the value of what they are a part of is bigger than themselves.”

(Who knew he was so smart? Me.)

Creative Brand Communications CEO Jeff Stephens made some bang-on comments on the practice of a CU hanging it’s hat on better service over different service.

“It is a cliché. So you define this great customer service as knowing everyone by name, friendly, pleasant staff, being responsive to member’s needs, and those attributes are all good and positive, but those alone won’t differentiate that credit union. ... Being nicer is not different, and the more credit unions succeed at being nicer the more they all seem the same. You build a position only you can occupy.”

Amen, right?

I don’t want to spoil any more of the article than I have. Get over there and read it.

We’re a company based in Indianapolis, so we are very influenced by Peyton Manning. We don’t often win Super Bowls, but we do often call audibles.

Matt and I were preparing for our presentation tomorrow (March 18, 2008 at 9:45 a.m. PDT) and decided to change our presentation. We know the handouts are printed and nicely bound, but we felt it more important to make changes now and deliver a great presentation.

With my apologies to Diane and the rest of the staff at the California and Nevada Credit Union League, here are our slides for the presentation:

Download the notes in PDF here

Download the slides in PDF here

View the slides here

Enjoy!

We launched a micro-site for the National Credit Union Foundation’s REAL Solutions last week. The site is a media dashboard where we’re covering CUNA’s Governmental Affairs Conference through video and audio interviews with industry thought leaders, photos, and microblogging.

Visit the REAL Solutions GAC site here.

We used YouTube for video, Odeo for podcasting, A Flickr Group for photos (if you’re here, feel free to join and add photos), and Twitter for micro-blogging.

The site is a simple one-pager that automatically adds content based on updates from each RSS feed.

Here’s REAL’s Lois Kitsch kicking off the conference (hat tip to Chaz for the cool intro idea), followed by Scotland’s Capital CU CEO Marlene Shiels discussing Britain’s fight against predatory lending:

In Q2, we’ll be launching a knowledge and resource center for REAL Solutions to distribute research and innovation products directed as serving low-income households.

Learn more about the work REAL Solutions is doing here.

Planning for the 2008 Symposium is well under way. If you keep up with industry blogs you’ve undoubtedly heard about some of the awesome things in store for this year.

• Ron Shevlin will serve as the host for the event.
• An Idea Exchange Session, BarCamp style, is in the works.
• The speaker list is outstanding and so are their presentation topics.

You can register for the Symposium here.

Last year we used Twitter to keep those of you who couldn’t attend in the loop during the Symposium.

We’ve tossed around several ideas for this year including the following:

• Ustream.tv for live video of sessions, interviews and more
• Coveritlive for live blogging of sessions

So, our question for you is how would you like to consume the Symposium if you can’t be here in person this year? Any ideas? Any pointers? Anything we shouldn’t do?

Last year, marketing bloggers Drew McLellen and Gavin Heaton brought 100 marketing bloggers under one book called “The Age of Conversation.” They‚Äôre doing it again, and you can help. Today is the last day to sign up as an author of The Age of Conversation 2.0.

If you want to contribute or vote on the topic, click here and get in touch with Drew.

Now’s the specific call-out time. I’d love to see contributions from: Trey Reeme, William Azaroff, Shari Storm, Tim McAlpine, Terrell Meek, and Ron Shevlin.

Ron wrote in the first Age of Conversation, and just because I enjoyed it a lot, here’s a piece from his essay, “Behavioral Conversations” -

To succeed in the Age of Conversation, it’s not sufficient for marketers to engage customers in verbal conversations on social networking sites. Instead, they must develop a new marketing competency — a sense-and-respond competency — to sense consumer needs and intentions based on their behavior, and to respond with appropriate advice, guidance and offers. And in a broader sense, this capability is about understanding trends and directions about the customer community based on their collective actions and behaviors.

I’m excited to be contributing to the second book. You can order the first book here. All proceeds go to Variety – The Children’s Charity.