Chris Brogan and I have recently met with a number of clients in the Financial Services industry - in particular some Mutual Funds. They are looking for the strategies to capture customer (investor) value and enable their Financial Advisor distribution channels using social media. The opportunities are significant as more and more of their audience is engaging day-to-day through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and other collaborative and social networking environments specific to the industry. One key challenge is that current regulations severely restrict the free and transparent flow of information between the financial services firm, their distribution partners and their end investors. All communications are captured, recorded and searchable for potential future litigation.
So, how can Financial Services organizations best leverage new social media opportunities?
We think there are some good opportunities to pursue. Here are 3 ideas:
1) Build and enhance the velvet rope community.
a. The “velvet rope” is a Broganizm and refers to the private “members only” area for social networking.
b. An effective collaborative platform can enhance communications with the distribution partners and independent financial advisors. These “facebook behind the firewall” applications are gaining traction, but there remains a great deal of opportunity to enhance these services
c. Make content more relevant to the end user (rss feeds, rating rules engines and social bookmarking elements)
d. Engage the audience in a dialog about what they want – forget the old focus group approach – use social media to capture audience desires, values, ideas. Our example approach is Project Dogfood
e. Improve the richness and relevance of content. Build a relevance engine for content. Content is still king. This could be a service to help Advisors find the content they need and surface what is most relevant to their interest and focus. Content could be ranked by popularity, but that is not enough. Add key word relevance, ratings and rankings, and the recommendations of “trusted colleagues” and contacts. Careful – the you need to determine whether your own content is sufficient to draw a sticky audience – you might need to syndicate a wide range of content with RSS technology
f. Enhance the social interactions that the collaborative site can foster – particularly around events. Enhance your face-to-face events and conferences with new social media technology, collaboration and also event registration technology. Financial firms use events as a key forum for key account management, education and communications. Turn these events from a one-time event to a 24x7 365 day education and insight source – put in social software to help Advisors meet each other pre-show and at show. They will love it.
2) Enhance your listening and response strategies across the social media ecosystem (the various social media sites like Facebook and the forums where your investor and advisor audience are participating) –you can use an independent agent to listen and help influence messages like how you are described on wikipedia
3) Enable your print-to-web e-newsletter strategy with RSS technology and automated template management. So much of marketing and communications content is in elegant print and PDF form today – it is time to unleash it into the syndicated world of RSS
OK, but how and who? The how and who question comes up often – is this a marketing thing? A PR thing? Or a Communications thing? Who are the stakeholders. The answer of course is all-of-the-above. New Marketing changes the way traditional silos of marketing, communications and PR work together.
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