Social Web: The Technology

This is the third in a series of blog posts laying out CU Village's plan for using the social web. In the first two posts I talked about the people we want to reach, our objectives and our strategies. In this post, the last in the series, I'll hit on the technologies we'll be using, for what purpose and why.

Technology		Purpose	Why
Twitter		Stream of ideas, resources, trends and topics of interest related to web strategy and execution. Also, share quick updates on CU Village initiatives, accomplishments and promotions.	In response to customer focus group input for CU Village to help clients keep on top of web innovations and ideas. Our Twitter feeds focus on the best-of-the-best provided in bite-size chunks.
Blogger		Thought leadership, best practices and big idea promotion.	In response to customer requests for insights and resources that can be used to perform better and help credit unions continue to innovate. If Twitter is a raw feed of ideas, our blog is the place we provide analysis, context and guidance
Facebook		Relationship building and sharing of the more visual and design oriented aspects of what we do.	Because many of our clients cannot access Facebook at work, this one is a bit tricky. But like Twitter, it is a great place to share ideas with a network of people that have something in common. We hope that our "fans" will use our fan page as a place to network with us, each other and share ideas of their own. Dell's social media Facebook page is a good example of a successful community in action.
YouTube		Educational videos and showcase of our multimedia work.	Still very much in the early-stages, but we do a lot of great video and multimedia (see http://mcul.cubetvonline.com, which is technology we developed and videos we produce). YouTube is a great place to distribute media because of its large audience and reach.
LinkedIn		Company information	Maintain a presence and be part of a large audience of networked professionals.

There are other technologies we are and will be using, like Picasa, and our own web site and own technologies. But what I've listed above hits the key ones. We'll also be looking for ways to improve how we provide customer support online. Our partner Constant Contact, mentioned in one on our recent Tweets, has a great model we'll be looking at to possibly emulate.

On a related note, the other benefits that we are hoping to achieve with our social web plan are to continue to position CU Village as a leading credit union web site developer, improve our search engine rankings, and build awareness of who we are and what we do. So while first and foremost, it is about helping our clients and credit unions get the most out of the web through collaboration, it is also about marketing.

The marketing elements of our social web plan, in fact, are one of the reasons we are using third-party technologies like Blogger and Twitter. This is important because search engines determine rankings, among many other criteria, by the number of sites linking to your site and the content you have. The social web helps with both. (Check out Mark Arnold's blog post on search engine optimization, he is senior vice president for Neighborhood Credit Union.)

The writers of Groundswell tell readers to "concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies," hence the word "social" in social web.

From there it is not too big of a leap to make the connection between credit unions with fields of membership and common bonds, and the communities and networks being built through the social web. Using the planning process defined in Groundswell (People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology), I'll be exploring how credit unions can use the social web to connect with members in future posts.