Management knows the story is factually wrong – maybe the situation arose from customer error or misfeasance, not a bank error. But privacy regulations prohibit it even from confirming that the source is a customer. Lubetkin advises that the proper guidance is not “no comment” but rather, this: “You can report that, but you would not be accurate when you do.” If a company doesn’t respond when the media calls during a crisis or in response to a customer-service dispute, “they’ll fill the void either with misinformation or input from other parties that don’t know what you know. If you have nothing about your brand to compare what you are with what people are saying about you, third parties are going to be speaking for you and misrepresenting your brand to the public,” he says. North Jersey Community Bank, a midsized community bank with $600 million in assets and seven branches, is just in the beginning stages of monitoring social media. So far, its experience has been limited but good, says Chairman and CEO Frank Sorrentino, III. “I’m sure as we grow, we’re going to get people who like to rant, so I’m sure we’re going to be subject to it as time goes on. But some of what you need to be doing is showing people how you respond. Everybody expects there to be mistakes and issues. In a way, sometimes it’s good to have a mistake or a problem, because it allows you to define how you will respond. People want resolution.”
Breaking down walls The Facebook litmus test of whether a financial institution is willing to have a genuine two-way conversation is whether it allows negative postings to remain on its wall – or whether it allows wall postings at all. “I go to so many corporate Facebook pages where you can’t post to their wall,” says Lubetkin. “You’ll never find out their concerns if you don’t let them post stuff.” The ultimate message a financial institution should seek to deliver is this, he says: We are so confident that we will ultimately satisfy you that we want you to tell us when we fail. Companies that want to improve service invite customers to tell them what it is like. Then, there are employees. If your bank blocks employee access to certain websites, someone in your organization probably thinks there is good reason to do so. “There has to be a level of trust with employees,”
Lubetkin says, and it should have been established in the hiring process. That’s a management issue, not an Internet issue. Social media speaks in a human voice, but that voice ranges from the well-informed to the proverbial barbaric yawp. The impact of many bloggers, says Lubetkin, “is out of proportion to their importance in the real world.” Additionally, much of the discourse in the blogosphere is aimed at generating attention, that generates more clicks and links, in order to go to the top of a search-engine page. It’s not all that different from reality TV.
Something of value So, how does a financial institution determine what’s valuable? “There are tons of online tools to mine the data and make some sense out of it – depending on what you want to mine,” says Ken Greenberg, president and CEO of NJBankers Associate Member Austin & Williams, an advertising/branding agency that addresses social media. “A bank should positively be monitoring the social network conversations about them,” he says. Tools such as Radian6 and GeeYee listen for the conversation topics and alert users, much like Google Alerts, he says. “Think about the articles that appear online with comments below,” he says. “The bank wouldn’t know without these monitoring tools. They’re kind of like the old clipping services – but on steroids.” Responding to this communication takes work, Greenberg says. “Initially, people thought this would be easy – and free. ‘Just’ set up an account on Facebook, post a couple of things, and people will ‘like’ you. It turns out to be a lot more work than that. People
are looking for valuable, helpful content in the social arena. That means constantly posting useful, helpful information. North Jersey Community Bank uses social media to give potential customers a way to get to know the bank before they ever walk in the door. Sorrentino notes that prospective bank customers have walked into a meeting, reached into their briefcases and pulled out a copy of his blog, particularly a post titled “Winning the Ties.” “They say, ‘I enjoyed this, I thought you were spot-on,’” he says. Social media also makes it easier for the bank to differentiate itself not only from the larger banks, but from its community-bank peers. “If you are more tech savvy and live in the blogosphere, not only will we allow you to make a decision prior to walking in our door – you’ll know what we are about, you’ll know our business plan and our product mix. We’re pushing that stuff out to you, so that in a minute or less, you’ll have a sense of who we are.”
Follow the market in order to lead it The two-way marketing conversation is here to stay. The one-way interruptive marketing message has been replaced with the interactive message, bringing with it the hazards of the viral message and the Internet echo-chamber of interest-grabbing posts, forms of overleveraged communication that many in banking find intimidating. Social media is not about being hipper than your competition – it’s about going where the customers are. ■ Christina P. O’Neill is custom publications editor of The Warren Group, publisher of New Jersey Banker.
Winter 2011
New Jersey Banker
25