I used to work for a financial planning company, so this is kind of a list of things that I would do if I had my time over…
Firstly, I would start by viewing what I do as an important service in peoples lives. With that in mind I would seek out ways to further enhance their lives and market my services accordingly. Then I would get straight into social media by….
- Listening to social networks to find out what people think of my company’s service.
- Figure out what I want to achieve with social media.
- Using social media (blog commenting etc) to ask people what they think of these goals.
- Re-assess whether my goals are what my customers want from me
- Then I’d jump in head-first!
Listening:
You could set up Google Searches, and use some of the social media monitoring tools that are available (there’s an iThnk post on these tools).There are also a number of Social Networking & News Sites for Finance & Investing Nerds (view a post on the top 10 of these sites).
Setting Social Media Goals
Basically, social media goals are really just business goals in a social media context. For example if you need more feedback about your product and services then you could set up a Uservoice, GetSatisfaction account, Facebook Page or Twitter account to achieve this. There is a great post on social media goals on DoshDosh
Great goals could include…
- Understanding – gaining insights into what customers value.
- Sharing – getting customers involved with who we are as an organisation & what goes on behind the scenes.
- Exploring – teasing out new ideas with customers to see which ones resonate with them.
- Improving – everyone can improve their service but with involved customers in the process the improvements become targeted.
- Energising – once people are involved, why not get people excited about what our company is doing?
Things I Would Thnk About Before ‘Jumping In’
- Are there any holes in the service our company provides (even hidden ones)?
- Do people in my organisation understand that social media is not going to be a magic bullet?
- Where is your value add going to come from?
- Where is the effort and energy to produce content going to come from? – if you’re going to be stretched perhaps just focus on one platform, then once you’ve got that sorted move on to other things. E.g. Perhaps get the execs in the habit of commenting on other financial blogs and then phase in other things like twitter before starting your own blog….
Challenges With Content
- How am I going to come up with decent content consistently? Do you already publish some sort of news letter that you could adapt?
- How is it going to apply to our audience?
- Who is going to be responsible for the content?
- Who is going to proof read/approve the content?
- What happens when people are away on holiday, sick?
- Where is this content going to sit? Will it be a permanent part of the company’s website or do I want to have it as a separate entity that is linked to from the main site.
- How am I going to distribute the content?
Challenges With Selling It Internally
If / when I run into internal challenges getting social media through the system, I would position the major benefits as:
- Giving our company control over our own content.
- Being able to reply to things said in the media.
- Being a cost effective and powerful way to gain real time feedback & provide customer support.
- Making relationship building efforts scalable.
So if I had my time over I’d like to thnk that I’d be able to make a big difference and I’d like to thnk that the social media ideas that I’d implement would help rebuild trust in the finance industry.
What Do uThnk?
If you were a bank or finance institution what would you do?
Oh and If you’re after some a bit more detail there are definitely many successful examples to leverage – Jeremiah Owyang has put together a wonderful list on his blog.
