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Tech & TradingJuly 2 2012

Social finance needs to be trending topic for banks

Banks are embracing the online community, but do they really understand social finance?
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Everyone is talking about mobile payments and mobile banking. I was talking about it as a core strategic area back in 2004. So it took about five years to become the mainstream bank conversation. 

Now, I talk about social payments and social banking. I’ve been talking about this as a core strategic area since 2008, so it will be 2013 to 2014 when most banks get on the train. Interestingly, however, many already are, with American Express being up there on the top of the heap for social interactions. If you want to know what it is up to, then go checkout the Amex social media page and its links to its Facebook, Twitter and other activities.

Leslie Berland, senior vice-president of digital partnerships and development at Amex, spoke in depth about what social interaction means for the corporation at a recent conference in the US. In the presentation she said there were two major inflection points in Amex’s social media marketing history: first, the introduction of a Facebook media promotion in 2010 called Small Business Saturday, and then the introduction of a Twitter promotion called Sync. Small Business Saturday was designed with the aim of motivating customers who were shopping to spend more money with smaller businesses. 

Ms Berland realised this was a great fit with Facebook, and found more than 1 million fans for the Facebook Amex page in just three weeks. The page has almost 3 million fans today and, bearing in mind that the average Facebook user has more than 230 friends, that provides a reach to almost 700 million people.

Moving in sync

The second flagship moment in its social media strategy was when Amex launched its 'Sync' programme, which offers card members discounts for tweeting specific promotions on their Twitter accounts.

Amex is amazed by how successful that campaign has been, and has now extended such activity further by teaming with firms such as Zynga, which offers Facebook gaming, to extend its rewards activities.

Amex really understands this space, but it is not the only one. I have also been impressed with Visa and Barclaycard, as well as a few others. What is it these guys get that the others do not? What they get is that it is not about Facebook and Twitter; it is about sales, service and relationships. In fact, the real thing they get is that Facebook and Twitter are not social media but social platforms, as are YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare and more.

Social platforms are like Salesforce.com and the internet. They are the building blocks of the new financial firms. They are not the end goals in and of themselves, but are the enablers towards real social connectivity. That is why when banks talk about getting a blog out there; building a Facebook page; launching a YouTube channel; and engaging on Twitter, that is not the answer.

Many firms believe that having a Twitter name @MyBank and Facebook page is all you need. Some go as far as to populate their pages with links and news. But you still do not get it if you think that way.

Status update

Today the core platforms of Facebook and Twitter are being leveraged to the hilt by specialist services that offer automated structures to enable everything from content curation to social marketing management; from social adverts to social intelligence; from apps for gaming to apps for sharing to apps for commerce; and more.

The key point is that Facebook and Twitter are platforms, like the internet itself is a platform, that provide the underpinnings for far more targeted and specialist social connectivity. In other words, the kaleidoscopic world of the web – which many institutions are only just learning to catch up with – are built upon the basic building blocks: Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook et al.

This means that the likes of Amex, Visa and Barclaycard are one step beyond those that are just getting into this stuff and are 10 steps beyond those who think they have just got to get a blog out there.

Get a social life before the social life gets you.

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