7 insights on social media in banking

I had a privilege to take part in a great discussion about social media and banking on the 1st BarCampBank Melbourne un-conference last Friday (thanks to www.thebankchannel.com for organizing the event). Since I was fortunate to have worked in a bank that used the social media since its beginning I had an opportunity to share some of my insights. I took the liberty to put down some key take-aways from that discussion:

1. Make conversation part of your internal culture. I can’t stress that enough. If your bank/corporation/company/partnership is not really allowing for an open and on-going conversation to take place inside the organization than how do you expect to maintain a genuine conversation outside it? In my experience, if the conversation within your company is mature and open to anyone who wishes, than gradually it spreads over to your clients, and in fact you don’t need to worry about “loosing control” over it. Of course the conversation has to be…
2. …relevant. Keep it relevant for your community. This really is old-school traditional marketing rules. Main guidelines of communication strategy haven’t changed. Brand is still what people feel about you. Loyalty is still built on basis of interactions with your brand. It’s the frequency of those social exchanges that increased. That’s why every time an employee engages in a social interaction online, it helps if he or she remembers the values of your brand. And making sure of that is  part of the job of contemporary marketing and advertising.
3. Engage everyone in the company. I can’t count the number of times I saw a forum thread being used in an internal discussion between teams across the whole company. Social media provided us with a stream of ideas and feedback into our product that we collected giving us a significant edge over our competition. Forum and blog statistics should be an integral part of your weekly executive catchups.
4. Increase productivity through direct contact with customers. For many people nothing is more motivating than public exposure. And nothing is more demoralizing than being one out of 5000 employees hidden in cubicle world, losing touch with reality. Make it possible, bah obligatory, for product managers to engage with your customers online. Don’t block Twitter, make it work for you… it’s still for free
5. While giving a lot of freedom on the “how”, make sure that you know “what” and “what not”. Each channel is different, and your teams will learn that with time. Make sure you have lawyers check your guidelines, there is certain things you shouldn’t do online, especially concerning your clients privacy. Don’t freak out over it, there are mistakes made in all the other channels by your employees as we speak. But customers will thank you for being human and listening, but hate you for ignoring them and retracting into your shell.
6. Don’t forget that banks are in relationship business. 2.60% of all sites visited weekly in Australia are run by retail banks, that’s as much as Yahoo!7 and more than mySpace. The rest are mostly search engines, media and information portals (source: hitwise.com). Yet banks’ websites are boring and lack interactivity. And I don’t mean pushing flash buttons, but engaging in communities. If you have 500k unique visitors daily and all they do is click “login” than you are not really doing your job at engaging in the relationship. What really stops other providers to offer a better online experience in accessing your clients financials? Nothing: in fact they are doing it already (have a look at wesebe.com & mint.com) using your client’s data… and taking over your relationships
7. Embrace change. That’s the hard bit, but the most important. Internet is a tool, so is telephone. Strategic thinking is still important. Ability to change and evolve is even more important, and perhaps that is the main issue here. Because you will never keep up with the so-called “internet revolution”. Soon 3.0 is coming out, so it’s not really about dealing with the technicalities. Make sure that your company can embrace change. And by the way: your clients will help you with that if you listen…

In fact that last point always comes back in all the discussions about what big businesses are facing. And it’s very often one of the hardest to tackle. Perhaps that’s why I prefer working within smaller teams.

My belief is that it would be easier for some banks to engage their niches through proxy brands with small teams… modern technology certainly makes it possible… but that’s an idea for a separate topic.