It’s incredible how quickly the social media revolution has taken hold in just a few short years. With 750 million active accounts, if Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country on our planet. Social media is not merely confined to Facebook – Twitter has made a similar impact in micro-blogging, while in the business world LinkedIn has become a big phenomenon in networking.
But big corporations have realised that this is not just a platform for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues – it’s recognised as a massively effective tool for marketing products and businesses. There are already numerous success stories that demonstrate this.
In the Financial services though, there was initially some resistance to adopting social media – this article from two years ago shows the skepticism that surrounded it, especially by certain banks. They eventually woke up to the fact that they had no choice but to embrace it – even if their strategy was to ignore it, their employees use it, recommendations for their products are spread virally, and conversely their reputation can be destroyed by defamatory posts.
Now that financial institutions have started to take it seriously, one barrier remains: regulatory compliance. Using social media to promote financial products and engage with customers is a veritable pandora’s box. It’s vitally important to make sure that communications over this new channel do not mislead, mis-sell, or provide bad advice. Furthermore, employees must be accountable and stick to guidelines on how to engage with customers and prospective customers. So within these communications (or ‘Posts’) there is a clear focus on content and processes. This sounds like a job for… ECM!
Oceanus has developed a tool called SocialView that integrates IBM’s FileNet Content Manager product with the main social media platforms, and allows them to directly interface into a Company’s business processes, making it just another engagement channel. Not only that, but all interaction is logged into an audit trail so that there is a detailed history of conversations. Conversations that can be monitored and authorised. IBM’s Content Analytics is also a great way of reviewing the effectiveness of campaigns and return on investment.
There’s a great talk on social media in the financial services sector here:
