The Bankwatch

It is always interesting to look at the usage of this blog and which items are most popular, then speculate why that might be.  Any comments on this welcome, because I can try to adapt towards items that are needed.  Overall there is some consistency between the all time, and the newer stats.

Comments and observations welcome.

Most popular posts at the moment – June 2009:

• Deloitte report | “The Shift Index: Recession masking long-term competitive challenges”
• America’s largest Credit Unions
• How to web 2.0 your bank
• Japanese online shopping site Rakuten to open eBank
• Building the Bank of the Future – 2
• 6 years is too long for elimination of mag strip debit cards
• Online only Banks (branchless Banks)
• Consumer mindsets in North America have shifted permanently with regard to finances
• A new future based on a different revenue model is needed for banks
• The Great Unwinding | part 1 of 3: 2009 – 2012

Most popular – last three months

• America’s largest Credit Unions
• Online only Banks (branchless Banks)
• How to web 2.0 your bank
• CIBC Today” – CIBC Intranet P
• Wells Fargo mortgage business leaps ahea
• Forrester Research: CRM Market Size And
• Celebrating PayPal’s ‘centenary’ – Paypa
• Building the Bank of the Future – 2
• Can an “Internet only” bank work
• The power of alternative marketing – Starbucks

Most popular – all time

• How to web 2.0 your bank
• Online only Banks (branchless Banks)
• Which banks understand the web lifestyle
• CIBC Today” – CIBC Intranet P
• Building the Bank of the Future – 2
• America’s largest Credit Unions
• Can an “Internet only” bank work
• The power of alternative marketing – Starbucks
• The worlds biggest banks | Economist
• US banks likely to fail as bad loans soa

Corporate blogging is hard.   Blogs can have the corporate name but the content needs to be personalised.  Its a tough balance.  Readers have to believe and credibility must be established.  Multiple authors is another hard one.

Well ShoreBank manage both extremely well.  I came across their blog in azaraoff.com reflections on Net Finance.

The lead contributer is the bank economist, and SVP of Investments which obviously offers a broad background.  His contributions are balanced by other authors focussed on more retail oriented topics such as budgetting and mortgages. 

Not a bad start.

ShoreBank:  Lets change the world

Profile

David Oser is ShoreBank’s Senior Vice President of Investments and Chief Economist. He is also a member of ShoreBank’s senior management team. David has been employed by ShoreBank since 1976, during which time the bank has grown from less than $100 million to more than $2.3 billion in total assets. He manages fixed income investment portfolios for ShoreBank and its affiliates as well as for outside institutional clients, and has more than $600 million in assets under his management. David serves on the Risk Management Committees of the corporation and subsidiary banks and has consulted both in the U.S. and abroad. He received a BA from Carleton College and an MA from the University of Chicago.

 In this old (2005) post, Doc applauds the launch of Google Blog search, and comments on the relevance of that kind of search compared to the “non live web”.

As of today, Technorati’s traffic is #751 on Alexa, pushing 80 million page views per day.

Other Live Web search pioneers include Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, IceRocket and PubSub. The results they yield are radically different from what you get with Wide Web searches, as well as from each other. Mostly, the results are newer. They’re also more likely to come from individuals and live news services than from companies with static sites.

Source: Searching the World Live Web | Linux Journal

I was thinking about this point earlier so this post validated what I was starting to realise.

There’s a lot of buzz around the blogging phenomenon but the numbers show that there are only four million active bloggers in Europe. However, European bloggers are very attractive to marketers as these consumers are young, early adopters of new technologies, and heavy Internet users. They also trust each other and are more open-minded than the average online consumer.

Source: Forrester: Interactive Marketing All Forrester Research

There are 56 million blogs in the world. Of those 26 million +/- are real, so Europe has 20% or so.

Lets look at the blogging tools:

• Movable Type
• WordPress
• Live Spaces
• Yahoo blogs
• Google Blogger
• Technorati
• Google Blog Search

Need I go on … 100% American. There are hosts of Japanese blogger outfits, such as Livedoor. Where are the European/ British ones? I can’t locate any at all, now that I have started to look. The top British blog is some Welshman, and he is using Typepad (Movable Type hosted).

Why is that!

Technorati tags: british+blogs

I am finally finished with design changes. This one is a modified version of a new WordPress theme, ‘cutline’. I feel its closer to the clear, easy to read, professional look that I was hoping for. I’ll let this run for a while, until I get the feeling that this is working for everyone.

I liked that last one (silver is the new black), from a design perspective, but somehow the colours were not working for me.