Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in BarCampBankCharleston. A cross-section of bankers participated, including representation from technology, marketing, branches, and even disaster recovery groups, leading to discussion in many areas. My company, Cornerstone Advisors, was pleased to help sponsor the event along with ECPI who provided the space and ClairMail.
I won’t go into the historical origin of BarCamps, but the way a BarCamp works is that participants arrive in the morning, sessions are pitched (meaning the group decides what will be discussed the rest of the day), and the conference is off and running. We had more of a fixed agenda for this, with sessions on social media and business continuity planning already on the agenda.
Attendance was lighter than hoped but better than last year. All that attended were passionate about the work that they’re doing and contributed to the discussion. First Federal of Charleston was well-represented as usual, with George Pasley stepping up again in a leadership role in organizing the event and garnering some great press along the way.
Jared Smith of ReadWriteWeb and slick-Charleston-weather-twitterbot fame provided the highlight of the day with a discussion on how companies are using social media to engage in and monitor the conversation about them. Jared taught the group a new trick on how to use geolocation in Twitter Search to narrow search criteria–just use the “place” in advanced search. He also discussed another tool that can be used for real-time blog, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media site monitoring called Collecta. Charleston has a great technology community, and Collecta is yet another example.
Adrienne Cobbs of First Federal of Charleston did a nice job of boiling down the salient points of what makes a good disaster recovery and business continuity plan and where the holes typically are. During the presentation, the group discussed Yammer’s potential as a tool for getting mass-notifications out to employees during an incident using its ability to send SMS messages en masse.
I had a chance to close out the day with a discussion of some of this year’s technology trends, including payments evolution, mobile banking, delivery channel renewal, and improved technology risk management. There’s lots of action around payments right now, and for those looking to fill the holes left by overdraft legislation it’s a good time to look at those POS Network contracts. My one plug to the group was that EFT spending has easily eclipsed core spending in many institutions, so let us look at those contracts.
The bottom line: it was a great way to spend four hours with people genuinely excited about their craft, and I left looking forward to the event next year and possibly trying to organize one in Columbia.