What is your institution doing in regards to remote deposit? Are you focusing on mobile banking? Clearly, this presents a huge opportunity in the near future for financial institutions.

Listening

The true value with social comes when a brand listens. If you aren’t online, how do you know what your customers are saying about you? How do you know the sentiment behind the conversations that your customers and potential customers are having if you aren’t actively engaged with social? A few weeks ago, I noticed a tweet from one of my followers that expressed his frustration with a previous employer of mine. Knowing that my previous employer wasn’t active on Twitter, I witnessed a simple issue/concern go unsolved. I eventually reached out to my follower and gave him some recommendations, but this was a massively missed opportunity.

Furthermore, I had been monitoring conversation around my previous employer and a simple hashtag search pulled up countless tweets – everything from simple questions to negative comments – that were unattended and getting no response. And this was only on one platform. If it’s happening on one, it’s probably happening on others.

In regards to the article I mentioned in the beginning, if you aren’t on social platforms and monitoring conversation around your brand, you might be missing important information about mobile banking, remote deposits, branch concerns. Maybe you create a discussion on Facebook asking your customers their thoughts on your website, maybe you ask about their interest in remote deposit. But again, without being online, you’ll never know.

Building Community

Maybe Facebook or Twitter aren’t for your bank or credit union, but social media is much more than those two platforms. What about blogging or video? Last time I looked, general sentiment around the financial sector wasn’t exactly positive. One of the biggest opportunities within the social space is education. Look at what Wells Fargo is doing with their blogs, and more importantly, look at what how they took to blogging during the Wachovia integration. By blogging, not only is Wells providing valuable information about their brand, but they are also providing human interaction to their customers. They’re focused on building their community.

We’re all aware of the state of the economy. Regardless of your position and thoughts on the recovery, a systematic change must occur for us to fully come out of the recession. Finance is an area that a lot of people don’t understand and aren’t interested in learning. The opportunity is ripe for financial institutions to focus on educating their customers. This education isn’t going to happen inside a branch, it’s going to happen online.

The Issue

The biggest reason social media either isn’t working or isn’t being implemented? An overall lack of understanding within financial institutions. Banks and credit unions are still stuck in the past where they are focused on fee income and selling. Most aren’t interested in getting to know their customers. A bank’s idea of ‘relationship’ is how many products a certain customer has. Until financial institutions get away from the cross-selling mentality and begin to focus on human interaction, social will never work.

As we stand now, executives and product managers are stuck in the old business model where brands would focus on the push and bringing customers into physical branch. This model is no longer viable. The new branch banking model? It’s online and it’s mobile. Yes, last time I checked profits came from selling. Yes, last time I checked, the ultimate goal with social should be to increase sales and profit. But the path and means to consumer’s dollars…that’s a path that hasn’t been mowed and it’s not paved.

The Solution

It’s simple. Take off the tie, put the tri-fold brochures away and spare us the sales pitch. Start focusing on building a platform that integrates social with your entire business strategy. Remember, social isn’t mean to be a replacement tool, it’s complimentary. It doesn’t stand alone, it’s a part of your entire business culture.

If you show interest in me, I’ll listen. If you provide value, I’ll buy. If you’re honest, I’ll be loyal. If you show that you truly care about me, I’ll promote the hell out your brand.

Don’t be afraid of social within the financial space. Quit making excuses of why you aren’t involved. If you are active, take a step back and rethink if you’re efforts truly hit on what social really is. Whatever your situation is, social NEEDS to be an important part of your bank’s or credit union’s overall brand.

Per their info tab:

Welcome to the Wells Fargo ‘With You When’ page. When you were a kid did you want to be an astronaut, a cowboy or maybe a ballerina? While your dreams may have changed since you were a wide-eyed youngster, you’re still thinking about your future. Wells Fargo is here to help you realize those dreams. We were with you when you opened your first savings account and wrote your first check, and we’re with you now as you continue to make the decisions that make your future a reality. We are the Wells Fargo team that will be posting updates on the page and responding to your comments, as well as letting you know about releases of cool new tools for smart money management.

When I was a kid, I didn’t have any financial obligations. When I was a kid, banking was the last thing on my mind. I assume Wells is trying to make finances more fun, and is attempting to help calm the frustration and stress that comes with banking. However, why create a separate Facebook account? In my opinion, it’d make more sense to create a separate tab within their existing account for this cute approach.

A quick 30-second search on Facebook pulls up multiple Facebook accounts, yet none have a significant following. By continuing to create separate accounts, you’re segmenting your audience. As a customer, I only want to ‘Like’ one account. These multiple accounts take away the potential effectiveness of said campaign. Additionally, the reach is significantly less as you continue to confuse more and more people.

When it comes to social media, generally less is more. There are certain instances where having two Twitter accounts might make sense, but I’ve yet to discover a need for multiple Facebook accounts. Give your customers one central location to visit and direct from there.

The articled featured an interesting set of data that is surprising and encouraging:

Eighty-nine percent of the community bankers polled in a nationwide survey said they are considering some form of enhancement to their existing platform. That includes 54% looking to design a mobile application for a smartphone, such as an iPhone, and 35% planning to add some type of functionality to their existing platform. At the same time, 9% of bankers said they were going to change their provider, and 4% were discontinuing the service altogether.

What surprises me, is the overall focus on mobile within the community bank space. While mobile certainly remains an untapped space for a lot of financial institutions, I would assume that improving their online banking platform would be of higher priority at this point. Then again, if the trend is shifting toward mobile, is online banking that important  for today’s bank customer?

Some data to consider in regards to whether mobile is a smart focus for community banks:

• 66 million users in North America will be mobile banking customers in 2015, according to an ABI survey.
• 70 percent of smartphone users had used at least one mobile banking and/or payments service in the past three months, according to a survey by Data Innovation.

So what do you think? Is mobile banking worth the hype? Should community banks be focusing on mobile, or is there another area they should be putting their resources toward?

Discover has a pretty active online presence. Talk about the different strategy Discover has with Twitter & Facebook vs the Discover blog?

One of our goals is to build brand loyalty by engaging members in a dialogue through various social media channels. Facebook and Twitter are used to drive general awareness of Discover’s service, tools and promotions, whereas the Discover blog is intended to champion the customer’s stories about our rewards programs.

Clearly the most active platform is Facebook. Talk a little about how a brand like Discover can utilize this platform?

At Discover, we use social media as a way to listen and engage with our cardmembers. Facebook allows to us bring our brand to life by reacting to our fans and talking with them more conversationally about what they care about most.

Continuing with Facebook, talk about how Discover is utilizing a fun tab like Grafitti to engage customers?

This tab was created to support our Student Card Art Design contest. This contest enabled Discover Fans and visitors to share in the creation of a new student card art design in an easy, fun and interactive way. We received 6,700 entries and 200,000 votes.

Education is an area that a lot of financial brands aren’t utilizing very effectively. How does Discover approach financial education and what role does the Discover blog play in that?

We offer several tools (calculators, educational resources, financial resources like our CARD Act video on our site that we point to and reference through out Twitter feed and Facebook statuses. The Inside Discover.com blog is narrowly focused on site features and enhancements that may be of interest to our Discover.com users.

You seem to be using video and a lot of visuals – something I’ve found a lot of financial companies struggling with. Talk about the importance of these tools when it comes to an industry as important as financial services?

Visuals are important, because they help gain audience attention.  We plan to do more with video and work to ensure compelling visuals are a part of our updates when possible. However, we feel it’s the subject matter and conversation that’s most important in order to be as relevant as possible to our audience. Videos like “Straight Talk” are only the beginning.

How do create content that draws customers in? Financial services is something that affects everyone, but not a lot of people are interested. How do you overcome that?

We work to find the common pain points or points of interest like saving money, getting the best deal or avoiding fees and then introduce how some of our offerings can help provide solutions. We also invite others to share their ideas and opinions to keep the conversation going.

How has social media impacted the Discover brand? How do you use social media to educate the public that Discover is more than the piece of plastic in your wallet?

Social Media helps to enhance our online brand presence. We’re using social platforms like the I love Cashback Bonus blog to help cardmembers interact with our brand in a more personalized way. Knowing that you’re spending smarter is a rewarding experience that goes beyond being a piece of plastic.

How does Discover measure social media? How do you know it’s providing value and how do you relay that within the company?

We measure social metrics such as followship and engagement, as well as traffic and activity on our site. However, we feel the real investment is in understanding how to engage with consumers in social networks and manage user-generated content since it has such a growing impact on our online brand presence, from search results to brand affinity.
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Clearly, Discover has figured out the value of social media. Discover has always been a brand that focuses on engaging with their customers through giveaways and other promos. However, rather than simply holding contests and throwing money away, Discover actively seeks feedback and content from their community, as evident by their blog.

Overall, I think Discover is doing well with their social efforts. I think there’s some room for improvement with education, but from monitoring their activity online, they are on the right path. A great brand and a great example of how financial institutions should use emerging channels to reach their customers.

Not much surprise on the mobile performance indicies. Would assume Wells Fargo to improve as time goes on, but the major players are there.

Not everything is as rosy as MasterCard claims though, as the iPhone application – which has been available for about a year – getting mixed reviews. Some users complain of the application not working properly outside of the U.S. where it appears to be outdated.

One reviewer, identified only as Scott-USA, said the iPhone app “is just OK for use in the U.S. and Canada, but for finding ATMs in other countries this app seems to be outdated and almost useless.”  Scott, who said he is a frequent Bangkok, Thailand, visitor, said he used ATM Hunter to locate machines near JW Marriott, Sheraton Grande and Four Seasons hotels. “The app came back with no ATMs found,” Scott writes.

This begs the question of financial institutions rushing to push out applications and not focusing on the maintenance and upkeep. An idea is only as good as its execution, and this story is a perfect example of a company focusing on convenience, but overlooking critical steps.

In hindsight, the ‘ATM Hunter’ is a great resource for MasterCard’s customers. The lack of continually testing the application after its release is disheartening, as a lack of functionality is a sure recipe for customer frustration. Hopefully MasterCard will continue to provide updates to the application.