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7 Reasons Why Banks Have Failed at Social Media

Andy Nguyen

Andy Nguyen

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A very interesting article on banking and social media.

A recent study by The Financial Brand shows that quite a lot of banks are trying to leverage social media: 46.4% of them are on Facebook, 34.6% are on Twitter, and 18% of them have an active blog. However, a presence in social media doesn’t necessarily mean success in this new and exciting emerging medium, and some of these banks are second-guessing their forays into social marketing.

Entering social media with a poor strategy can only lead to disastrous results. Take Bank of America, for example, that took down its blog redirecting people to their main website after failing to engage their customers and industry leaders in a meaningful way. And how about Chase Bank, whose name consistently comes up in hate tweets, and does not seem to get a break on a simple sentiment analysis. Instead of talking back and engaging its customers, Chase Bank’s twitter presence @ChaseBank was mysteriously closed down.

7 Reasons Why Banks Have Failed at Social Media Miserably!
 
Surely the number one reason is that banks use the content of social media websites to discriminate against applicants in the recruitment process. Had a good time on a holiday when you were 18 and have a picture of you skinny-dipping with some hot chicks on a Greek island? Kiss your banking job goodbye. Ridiculous that they can expect to do that yet have good participation from social networkings sites.
 
This article had nothing to do with recruiting and embarrassing yourself to recruiters via social media. Reading comprehension fail.
 
Some marketing people are quants.
Yes, really.
I do social networking seriously and I keep seeing people with "quant" in their profile, who work in marketing.

They will have produced graphs to show the success of the Citi project, and they won't have been going up, That's not of itself a failure. People have many gripes with banks, and a popular site will attract more negatives, but you get to have the conversation on your own terms.

But too many marketing people don't understand that social media is a conversation not a broadcast medium. That's because they're too old :)

As my photo here shows, most marketing people are younger than me, but I keep finding myself in conversations with 30-somethings who don't have a clue. We have an upcoming generation who first used a keyboard before a bicycle, and 'get it'.

As scientists, we know that data we weren't expecting, and don't like is often the most valuable kind. Marketing people see their job as finding good news and making it into a pretty picture.

Banks screw up. We all screw up. Being big means you do it many times.
If you have 5 million customers, each of whom does 20 transactions per week, that's 5 billion per year. Some will go wrong.

Since bank call centres are run by people with the intelligence of evangelicals, the attitude of Klingons, the personal integrity of Catholic priests and the customer service ethic of Somali pirates, it's no wonder that people havve issues they raise publicly.

The failure at Citi and elsewhere was they they didn't realise that social networking is a tool to interact with customers whose experience is less than ideal.

The marketing people are decoupled from customer service, in some cases CSRs don't even work for the bank, and in others neither do the marketing people. So when they got a wave of negative feedback they did not even have the email address of the person who could do something about it.


My firm (P&D) now sponsors Shakespeare's Globe in London, and part of the package is a bit of recruitment...
We're finding them a social media editor, and it's clear that although they are a midsized operation, they will be ahead of outfits that are literally 300 times bigger and who run individual marketing campaigns greater than the Globe's annual turnover.

But they use washed up 35 year olds. The age is less important that the political dynamic in marketing that social media is a bit of a fad. So the successful markers are working on big TV campaigns, or sponsoring sports stars, SM is like "special projects" where your career goes to die.
So we'll probably take on someone who hasn't been contaminated, or filtered.
 
Now, the country's largest retail brokerage, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, has become the first major wealth manager to allow its brokers partial use of Twitter.

And it is the latest wealth adviser to permit the use of LinkedIn (LNKD.N), the professional networking site that went public last week.

The change will start slowly next month with a test group of 600 Morgan Stanley Smith Barney advisers, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters. Within six months, the program will be expanded to the firm's entire force of 17,800 advisers.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/25/uk-morganstanley-socialmedia-idUSLNE74O07I20110525
 
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