One of the first sessions was a discussion about “Social CRM – Loyalty Marketing 2.0″ by Uwe Hook. He discussed first the psychological effect of inattentional blindness: When humans are focusing on a static task, they often fail to notice dynamic movement. Especially marketers have problems listening and paying attention to their customers since they’ve been trained for decades to push out messages. In the meantime, push marketing has become less effective because customers gained a voice through platforms like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation. Social CRM does not replace CRM, it’s an extension of your current CRM systems. It helps to humanize your Credit Union by being a more authentic brand and putting the customer in the core of the Credit Union’s strategy. While Credit Unions often don’t have the budget to implement fully integrated Social CRM system, Uwe Hook asked Credit Unions to pay attention to the conversation and revise their Social Marketing strategy accordingly. In the future, Credit Unions will become social businesses, fully aligned and integrating all their business divisions, requiring a new organizational mindset. The complete presentation can be found here.