banking on YouTube

I had a very rewarding week at FNB. Mostly because something I learnt became a reality - again. When I set up my blog and got twittering, I also learnt to set up a YouTube site for the company I work for - First National Bank (FNB). So I took this basic knowledge and asked Jan at WebWorx, a digital unit in FNB to advance it into a more sophisticated reality. Now we have a YouTube site for our bank. Pretty simple, but better still, we leveraged this site to do some good this week, which was even more rewarding. I work for a company which contributes purposefully to South African society. Apart from spending millions on social investment projects, they also have a will to ensure that South Africa is a great place for people to live in. When the Xenophobic violence broke out in South Africa three weeks ago FNB took the initiative to donate R 2 million to victims of the violence. However it did not end there. The bank created a television advertisement, radio and press ads to communicate the importance (at this difficult time) of values and humanity. It implored South Africans to remember what a great nation we are. We used this advertisement Afrika Phambili as a key driver of traffic to our YouTube website, bought some Google adwords, and now we have close on 7000 channel views in less than a week. We also loaded video footage of our brand director Derek Carstens who visited refugee camps on behalf of FNB. Watching those channel views rise daily has been a really rewarding experience and again validates to the importance of www as an uber powerful communications tool. Our site is just in its infancy, but we have plans. We've set up a relief fund at FNB for our bank account holders who wish to donate to the victims of Xenophobia and are making it simple for FNB customers to donate if they would like to. So it's great not just to be able to experience the speed and ease of digital media, but also to see the benefit it brings when you need to get out a message of hope. And here's to http://www.youtube.com/user/FNBTV.