I am in the process of creating a table for the next issue of Online Banking Report, our 13th annual planning guide. The table (see draft below) is designed to show the wide variety of blog types available to banks and credit unions (see note 1). It's a tabular update to the "45 Reasons for Banks to Blog" article in our Bank 2.0 report.
Many (most?) blogs could be classified in two or more categories. For example, Royal Bank of Canada combines student marketing, event awareness, and recruiting at its RBC p2p site where the bank is soliciting entries for six college-student bloggers to create video and text content for its student site (screenshot below; note 2).
Here's the list so far. Am I missing anything? A $5 Starbucks card for anyone who comes up with a new blog type for this list or who provides an example to fill in the ??? holes in the table (please leave in comments below):
| Type | Financial Institution Examples |
| Contest | RBC's (Canada) Next Great Innovator Challenge & RBC p2p |
| Recruiting | Quicken Loans What's the Diff? |
| Product focused | Student Loandown from Wells Fargo |
| Community building | Piedmont Credit Union |
| Community service | Vancity Change Everything |
| Board report | The Boardcast from UFirst Credit Union |
| Students/kids | Stagecoach Island from Wells Fargo; RBC p2p |
| B2B | Wells Fargo CEO (Commercial Electronic Office) |
| Special interest | Bank of Internet MyRVBank.com |
| General | PayPal, Tech CU, Verity CU and 30+ others |
| Single employee effort | Mobile Banking from Huntington Bank's Brandon McGee |
| Credit education | Credit Bloggers from Credit.com |
| Shareholders | ??? (see note 3) |
| Real-estate owned, repos | ??? |
| Branch manager | ??? |
| Real estate | Zillow, Redfin |
| CEO/exec blogger | Tinfoiling by Gene Blishen, Mt. Lehman CU (Canada) |
| Events/sports | ??? |
| Online banking tips & tools | ??? |
More information and links to the above blogs can be found in the "blogs" topic here.
Notes:
1. For a thought-provoking editorial on how blogging can be incorporated into financial institution websites, check out Ron Shevlin's latest here.
2. Hat tip to Colin Henderson for posting about RBC p2p here.
3. ??? means I don't know of banking or credit union examples for these blog types; $5 Starbucks cards for the first commenter to fill in the blanks.