Banks should be Banking on Social Media

April 19th, 2012 by Greg

Banks Fail to Use Facebook and Twitter Effectively

A survey recently conducted uncovered that 50 of the nation’s leading private banks hadn’t effectively utilized social media to reach customers. In fact, if any efforts had been placed into social media at all, it was amateurish at best. Many banks set up token social media profiles that contained no updated content or value for their fans.

Assetinum, a marketing firm, tested many of these banks to ascertain whether banks were active in responding to Facebook messages. Only half of the banks surveyed responded - clearly indicating a low rate of bank/user interaction.
Banks using Twitter fared much worse in surveys. Out of the 50 banks with active Twitter accounts, only 26 responded to follower postings. Additionally, only 13 tweeted about relevant financial subject matter.

Social Media and Online Presence Integration is Lacking

Banks scored low on integrating social media with their websites. At least of half of the banks surveyed didn’t effectively integrate social media channels with their online presence. Apparently 19 banks did have blogs, but only 6 of those banks made an attempt to address reader comments or interact with users.

Survey results are surprising. Most major banks have adequate resources and personnel to exploit social media channels to their advantage. Banks are simply choosing not to pursue this option. Of course, since 50% of the higher-net-worth customers younger than 50 view social media channels as a vital resource in communicating with their banks, it’s obvious that most banks are missing the mark.

Banks Fear Testing Social Media Waters

Reputational Risks and Social Media

Banks stand to lose more clout and reputation by being absent from social media than from making social blunders. Any risks in using social media can be mitigated by becoming more aware of banking consumer needs and expectations. Banks should concentrate on getting to know customers. Social media helps organizations with this effort.

Customers are talking about their banks via social media channels already. Banks have no choice but to enter the conversations in a meaningful way. Either way, the conversation will continue with or with bank participation.

Social Media is Serious Business

Big name companies have already entered the social media arena and proven that social media offers benefits to larger and smaller companies. There is no reason this shouldn’t be applicable to banks, as well. Banks must interact with customers and win their hearts and minds in order to secure their business. Social media marketing strategies can make this easier for businesses and banks.

Customers Respond Positively When Engaged Via Social Media

Banks who have implemented social media marketing strategies have discovered that once an online presence is developed, customers take advantage of opportunity for easy communication. Banks are learning that all customers, including higher-net-worth individuals want to interact with banks via social media networks. Establishing a social media presence seems to engage customers better and inspire banking brand evangelism.

It’s time for Banks, both large and small to get serious about Social Media or get left behind.

10 Tips on Enabling and Managing Two Way Dialog for Pharma Companies

June 2nd, 2011 by Greg

Social Media has revolutionized the way companies connect with customers and prospects by enabling two-way, online public conversations between brands and customers. Brands are quickly transforming from big, nameless institutions to approachable, valuable and trusted sources of information, content and connections.

So where is Pharma in this revolution? For the most part, they are still on the sidelines. Given the uncertainty of the rules and regulations related to social media in pharmacuticals, many companies have decided to wait. That’s a mistake.

Given proper preparation and planning, it is possible for Pharma companies to conduct open, public two way conversations that can go a long way to rebuilding trust and brand favorability with their target audience. Here are some steps to consider:

  1. Clearly define your process for both proactive and reactive conversations. Make sure to consider the nature of the social media platform and understand the type of control you have over comments.
  2. Define your terms and conditions for each social media platform and make sure people can easily find them and reference them. When Woodhouse first launched a campaign for one of our Pharma companies and industry blogger picked it up and examined the terms and conditions in detail. You can see her post here.
  3. Create a cross functional team from legal, marketing (or corp comm.), medical and safety. Train them on the process and the social media platforms so they know their role and have the proper knowledge to make decisions.
  4. Beg, plead and beg again for legal to commit to turning around approvals within a day. This is crucial for reactive conversations. Things like commenting on a wall post from one of your Facebook “Likes” become irrelevant when they are posted a week later.
  5. Plan content and updates well ahead of time. Develop an editorial calendar and submit blog posts, Facebook updates and Tweets weeks ahead for approval to ensure you have a library of approved content to be posted each day (we recommend multiple times a day). Content should reflect the interests of the community and not the interests of the company. Think of yourself as a magazine publisher planning a new magazine targeted at your niche community.
  6. Hire a community manager that is an expert in both online conversations and the dos and don’ts of the Pharma regulatory environment. In most cases you will need to look to outside resources for this hire.
  7. Allow for open commenting across all social media platforms. Monitor each platform 2 to 3 times a day and quickly remove and post or comment that violates the defined terms and conditions. This one scares most Pharma companies with concerns of Adverse Events and improper mention of drug names. Woodhouse is lucky enough to work with a progressive Pharma company and we have allowed open commenting for over a year now. There has been zero Adverse Events to report and rarely any mentions of drug names. When a community member breaks the terms and conditions (by mentioning a drug name or using foul language) we quickly remove the post and send the community member a message of why we removed the post and ask them to repost.
  8. Buy a Social Marketing Platform tool. These new breed of tools sit on top of all your social media accounts and enable resources to approve content and comments easily before it can get posted. Some also offer the ability to create a “Black List” of words and then work with Facebook, blogs and the like to automatically restrict users from posting if they use a word on the “Black List”. We have done an extensive analysis of the tools in the space and highly recommend Shoutlet.
  9. Be proactive. The community manager should be actively reviewing the blogs in the disease area relevant to your product and comment on others blogs. This establishes trust and relationships. A relatively new development is the ability of the admin for a Facebook page to use Facebook as the page. Community managers now have the ability to go to another page and comment as the brand (or name of the Facebook page you created).
  10. Know your influencers. Do the research at the beginning of the project to find the bloggers who write about the disease that is relevant. The community manager should reach out to them individually and introduce themselves. If you have done something interesting, point it out and ask them to write about it.

Unsolicited Advice for Kodak Regarding Social Media Strategy

May 15th, 2011 by Greg

Kodak and Social Media

Kodak’s Tom Hoehn (@TomHoehn) was recently interviewed in the social media maven series on the Viral Garden blog. In the interview, Tom shared the Kodak social media approach and strategy that he co-developed along with Kodak Chief Blogger Jenny Chisney (@kodakcb). After reading the interview I had a few thoughts and decided to share them openly. First, a few disclosures:

1. I am a big admirer of what Kodak has been doing with social media. They have a great blog, their chief marketing officer is highly active in Twitter and is leading an effort to use social media to continue a successful brand turnaround.

2. I am not associated with Kodak in any way. I have never worked at the company nor have I ever had them as a client

3. My understanding of their social media strategy is limited and based solely on the interview in the Viral Garden blog and with a few Twitter exchanges with their CMO.

What I like

There is much to admire in the strategy shared.

First and foremost it’s a strategy and not a bunch of tactics and / or tools tied together in some loose fashion. Tom and the rest of the team have clearly thought through the various aspects of social media and created a framework that has actionable goals and associated tasks/ projects. The notion of proactive and reactive is a powerful way to organize work streams.

Tone takes a big place in the strategy. Many companies miss this very important guide post. Social Media is the most powerful tool that marketers have to truly activate their brand and bring it to life. Tweets or Facebook messages that do not properly represent the company brand and culture can do serious damage. On the flip side, a consistent voice regardless of who is conversing helps fully establish the positioning in peoples mind. Kudos to Kodak for bringing that front and center.

Cross functional team. I’m guessing here, but it looks like a cross functional team has been established. This is crucial. Customers do not think in internal organizational silos. One moment they might have a new product idea and another moment they might be pissed off because their digital camera broke. If they spend the time to write about it online, it is a major opportunity missed if a company does not respond quickly and accordingly. This takes coordination and a team of people across marketing, corporate communications, customer service, product development, sales and the executive suite.

What I think is missing

Passion points. These are the subject areas that connect brands to a wider audience. A fundamental question that every brand should ask, “If social media is about conversations, what conversations should we have and initiate?” It is a crucial question because the conversations that brands initiate and engage in says a whole lot about who they are as a company. It also establishes them as a member of the community that is passionate about a subject area.

I’ll make up an example for Kodak to help bring this to life. Let’s pretend that after doing a thorough review of the Kodak brand, the social media team at Kodak decides that they will focus on 5 passion points, the first being independent films (I have no idea if this fits with their brand but I don’t think it’s a stretch given their products aimed at film makers). With that passion point in mind, Kodak creates new presences in social media platforms (for example@Kodak_Films). It then uses tools like Radian6 to search for people talking about independent films and to discover and follow the influential bloggers and online press. Kodak then staffs a team of people and experts to dive into the subject and discuss it wherever and whenever they can. To help establish expertise and to add value, new content is created and posted frequently.

Why would Kodak do this? Because it serves a business purpose. It becomes a very powerful way for Kodak to associate itself with independent films and establishes itself as a leader in that community. The more that Kodak posts content and converses about independent film, the more followers and fans it will get that share that passion point. Brand awareness goes up in the community, brand associate happens and the next time one of their fans or followers is out looking for a video camera, they will most likely place Kodak in the consideration set.

Most people do not realize that Kodak is so much more than just digital cameras. Much of its business comes in the form of B2B sales. In checking their website, they list 18 B2B verticals. This might have been done or is in the works, but each and every one of those verticals should have it’s own social media strategy and approach. Although each vertical is tied to the same brand, I am sure that they have very different sales cycles, target buyers and competitive pressures. These factors need to be taken into account.

Wrap Up

Kodak seems to have fully embraced social media and the notion of sharing. I have found that when you share things openly with people you usually get something back in return. Hopefully my comments have provoked some additional thinking.

Don’t Leave Social Media to One Person

May 5th, 2011 by Greg


Arthur Germain from the Communications Strategy Group posted a piece called “Does your brand have a front man”. It’s well thought out and he makes the argument that brands should encourage a strong personality within the company to be tightly associated to the brand, a front man if you will. You can find his post here.

I disagree. Making one person a core element of a brand is very risky. It can be powerful, yes. People love to connect with other people, especially those they admire. But what happens when the person falters, has health problems, dies, retires, acts like a jerk, or screws up? Martha Stewart comes to mind. Arthur mentions Jobs and his health problems. GE struggled when Welch retired.

In the past when most, if not all, communications were one way, the notion of a single person as the core element of a brand were few and far between. For every Jobs there are thousands of nameless CEO’s.

Social Media is changing that. Social media is a two way conversation and increasingly, individuals are becoming the know entity for a brand. Frank from Comcast. Jeffrey W. Hayzlett is the strongest voice on twitter for Kodak, @JeffreyHayzlett. More and more companies are placing incredible power in the hands of one individual. Big mistake.

Barry Judge is the CMO of Best Buy and has become a strong voice of that company in twitter. His twitter name is @bestbuycmo. He had an exchange with an influential blogger in twitter and he came off like a real jerk.

That hurt the brand. I watched it unfold, made a judgment (Barry is a real jerk) and then my judgment and perception transferred over to Best Buy… what kind of company hires jerks like that to run things?

This will become a larger problem as more and more companies empower an individual with the power of being the brand through conversation in social media.

What my company recommends is that a well thought out engagement manual is created that clearly spells out the dos and donts and establishes the brand voice. We also recommend that several people represent the brand in social media. A cross functional team is best. Brands are much too important to leave in the hands of one person, even if that person is Barry Judge, Steve Jobs or Jack Welch.

Checklist for companies new to social media

April 23rd, 2011 by Greg

Get going already


In a recent report from Marketing Sherpa, close to 50% of marketers reported that the lack of knowledgeable staff was the biggest barrier to adopting social media for business purposes. Even though the idea and practice of online social media has been around since the beginning of the internet, new technologies, platforms and rules of engagement have many brands perplexed. And it’s not just brands. Agencies are struggling as well. If you belong to one of the brands or companies that want to jump into social media but don’t know where to start, here is our checklist:

1. Define your objective. Social Media is not a strategy but instead a tool to help companies achieve strategies and objectives. A common mistake many companies make is to jump into social media without a clear understanding of what they want to accomplish. The top objectives that social media can help advance include:

Improve trust and brand perception

Improve customer service

Sell products or services

Improve inter-company communications and collaboration

Improve communications and collaboration with partners, vendors, re-sellers

Recruit new employees

2. Develop a strategy. What conversations do you want to have? Why those? What will those conversations do for your defined objectives? Who are the most influential people in those conversation areas? How will you approach those people and develop trust? Don’t try to do all at once. Prioritize your objectives and then start with the highest priority.

3. Learn the tools. There are thousands of resources available online to improve your IQ but the best, by far, is mashable.com. Go to mashable.com and read the articles and posts, subscribe to their RSS feed, follow them in Twitter and become a fan in Facebook. Your IQ will increase rapidly

4. Watch others and learn from them. Other brands are using social media, some very effectively. To start, follow Wholefoods @wholefoods, Kodak @kodakcb, and Dell @delloutlet in Twitter. In Facebook, become a fan of RedBull www.facebook.com/redbull, the NBA www.facebook.com/nba and Volkswagen www.facebook.com/vw. For a great niche B2B Facebook page see what IBM Research is up to at www.facebook.com/ibmresearch.

5. Listen to what people are saying about you. Conversations are happening right now about your brand. Make sure you fully understand the subjects being discussed and the sentiment of the conversations. A good free tool to start with is social mention www.socialmention.com.

6. Allocate resources. Engaging with people in conversations is not a part time job. To be successful at least one person should spend 40 hours per week. Create the position and source it with someone who has experience. If obtaining approval for a new resource is difficult, then look to outside companies that provide this service. They are few and far between but they are out there. For competitive reasons I am going to mention only one, Woodhouse Agency…

7. Find experts. Depending on the conversations you are going to pursue, an outside expert might be required to add credibility and to establish trust. For example, a technology company that specializes in data security might want to recruit a lawyer that is recognized as a compliance expert.

8. Take stock of existing content. Content is critical to add value to the community being engaged. To quote the guys at TippingPoint Labs www.tippingpointlabs

“Social media boils down to the marriage of two main concepts — content and conversation. Without content, conversation is mere networking. Without conversation, content is dead. It goes nowhere.”

After a thorough inventory of existing content determine what makes the grade. Ask yourself, will people find this valuable and is it relevant to the conversations that will be pursued? Can we / should we break it up to be more bite sized?

9. Create new content. There is a good chance that you will have big holes in your content. You might be missing entire subject areas. Create a plan to develop the content and the schedule of when you will share it. The good news is that content does not need to be an expensive proposition. User generated content is free. Blog posts do not cost much. Even online video can be had for significantly less than their broadcast cousins. Because the stakes are not nearly as high as content developed for traditional media, you can create a lot more of it. Frequency is one of the most important aspects of social media so make sure you are loaded with content on an ongoing basis.

10. Establish your policies and procedures. Depending on the company you work for, the notion of engaging with customers can be a scary proposition. What if people say bad things about us? How do I make sure employees don’t share proprietary information? Won’t competitors check us out and steal our ideas and thinking? These are just a few of the questions we get from companies consider moving forward with social media. They are all great questions and they can all be handled with a policy and procedure manual. This is also a great time to bring in the ever dreaded legal department to get their buy-in.

With this check list in hand, a healthy passion for making it happen and, if needed, an outside company to help you along, you will soon be recognized as an innovator within your company and several promotions will come your way…