How are banks, financial services leveraging social media

I was reading the latest blog post on 2020 Social blog by mohit on Social Community efforts by banks and financial institutions and realized that I might have something interesting to add here. In my view the thing worth noticing about the social media efforts by these BFSI institutions is the difference in the way their communities are architectured when they are targeting different segments of customers.
Background: When it comes to investing & saving ones own hard earned money , people prefer researching, asking others, going for tried and tested methods and moreover playing safe. Investments and savings are something that are although done by almost everyone but then not everybody has an expertise and hence people generally prefer taking expert advice, ask peers, research, read news just to keep themselves informed and updated. Many banks, financial institutions, trading and brokerage companies have realized this behaviour and are using a social web presence to solve their problems.
Scope: In this post I have covered three types of social media efforts by the BFSI sector. The first category represents the social media efforts by banks & financial services towards personal banking, the second category of efforts are towards targeting corporates, SMEs & entrepreneurs while the third is towards targeting the investors into stocks to make them smart traders. You will see a fundamental difference in the way these institutions use social web to target these three different categories.
Illustration:
a) Social media efforts towards personal banking: A large no. of BFSI institutions have realized that providing a platform to people to talk and learn about their business needs helps them multifold. Firstly, it helps them position themselves as an institution which cares to enable people to make smart savings and investments. Secondly, it helps them listen relevant conversations and establish conversations and relationships for business development. Thirdly, it helps them understand the current needs and feedback of customers which is like the best market research ever. In this a very inspiring effort has been made by the Young&Free Alberta community powered by the Servus Credit Union to give a voice to the young generation. Y&F launches annual contest where the community chooses its spokesperson. This spokesperson then participates in the community as Y&F ambassador and educates and converses with others through blogs, videos etc. Y&F also oganizes many events for its commuity which include year round online contests and offline events. (For more details see mohit's post at 2020 Social blog).
ING Direct is also making several efforts in wooing savers on social web. They have a Saver's Blog and a community for publishing feel good news about markets and investment called Savings feel good. The news is either submitted from press or by community members. The community also runs timely contests to build interests.
Another interesting effort in this direction is by mint.com which is a maney management and budgeting software company. They have a tweet aggregator platform with tweets from various experts on savings, budgeting, retirement, loans etc.They also have an official blog on similar topics.
As you must have realized that all these communities are architectured around people expressing their financial needs and helping people make smart savings and gain important informations about investments.
b) Social media efforts for corporates, SMEs and entrepreneurs: In such efforts the focus is to help the SMEs and entrepreneurs network and gain valuable information and aid related to their business. For example the Visa Business Network helps you find out businesses in your locality, related vendors, partners, suppliers and customs. It also helps you discuss important information in your work related discussion group, set up business related goals and get help from others to achieve them. A possible goal can be 'to same some xy amount of money by year end. The person can get interesting article links from the community on savings. Or a goal can be 'to find business through referrals'

Effectively you can see that the aim of the community is to help businesses communicate, learn and network. It helps the financial institute powering the community listen about the financial needs and ideas among entrepreneurs. Also it sends across the message that the bank reaches out to help businesses which helps them bringing in more business. Amrican Express, HSBC and Bank of America also has similar business networks the details about which you can get from mohit's  last blog post
Another interesting effort here is by Kiva which is a one to one micro lending community where entrepreneurs submit their business idea. For this kiva partners with micro lending institutions. The community helps the entrepreneurs reach financial targets.
c) Social media efforts focussing on stocks and trading: There are a bunch of trading communities which are helping people become smart investors, invest in right direction, communicate with expert and get relevant market information. Also these communities help professional traders gain reputation as influencers. A good example is Covester where members can follow other members investments, read and write information blogs and if they see a trader making very good investments, the can align their investments with him and give him a share in profits for sharing his data.

There are other online invester's communities like Zecco, Moneyrec, Stockhouse and Trade2win. Tipd gives a stock and financial news aggregation platform and news community. People consume, curate and create news articles on a model similar to digg.com. The value for these stock related conversations can be estimated from the face that certain corporates like Berkshire Hathaway have discussion forums for their own stocks.
Visiting these communities are worth it. We would love to have some such India focussed communities by large banks as there are many people here who because of dearth of good investing knowledge  and lack of trust on private banks go for safest government investments like FDs and RDs giving very low returns. Also there are many who do not understand the financial jargons of the large investment products given by these banks. Banking communities can definitely help there.

5 things you need to know before making a direct call to an interested prospect

In my company we get 3 kinds of clients/propects. The first are the large B2C targeting clients which are multinational technology, FMCG, Automobile, Beverages companies etc planning to establish a presence on social web. The second kind of clients are the large B2B targeting companies in similar sectors. The third kind are the small and meduim sized companies, startups and miscellanous sectors (which sometimes include SaaS, movie directors, game developer companies, product marketplaces etc). These three sectors effectively look for presence in social media for purposes like marketing, operations (support, innovation, increasing productivity etc), establishing relationships among a target group of clients, vendors & prospects,  HR (enterprise 2.0 and internal collaboration) and similar others.

As I look after the third category where CXOs, promoters of such startups either contact us via mail/ contact form or simply call us; I have learnt that these cases involve a lot of direct calling to understand business needs and objectives before taking things forward to meetings where there is a higher investment of time and resources. If you are looking after client engagement/pitches in social business consulting you get to face the following challenges:

1) Who is the prospect: Whether the client heads the business or is a middle manager. Is he a 55 year old coming from a company culture that might demand to be called 'sir' or whether he is a 25 year old entrpreneur guy who might be thinking that since you do something online you might come pretty cheap. ( As a disclaimer a large part of things we do have online-offline integrations)  This can anyways be found out from basic searches, linkedin profiles etc.

2) Where is the prospect: You never know how much the client knows about social media and social technologies. He might be following your company/consultant blogs and completely understand what you do or he might be very naive to social media and end up asking you to explain facebook!!  But then most of these interests fall under four categories depending upon how aware they are about the business objectives and benefits of a social web presence:

3) What do you present: Depending on #1 & #2 how do you present yourself. What do you tell the client? What do you need to understand from the him/her and what are the smart questions you need to ask.

4) Where do you take it from here: How do you take this forward from this first direct call. What is the next best step?

A a disclaimer I am sure that there cannot be a rulebook to guide through a client/prospect conversation. Also it is best that each client engagement manager uses his/her own way of contacting. However there can always be a mental checklist so as to find out where are you on the conversation.

I generally follow a BNPO model which is sort of inspired by the POST model described in Groundswell by Charlene Li (of course there the reference is slightly different). Here BNPO stands for Business, needs, people and objectives. The model is described below:

a) Business: In most of the cases you will be having a fairly good idea about the client's businesses before the call. This is about asking those details which generally are not clear but are required in our business:

i) What are the client's products/services

ii) What are the target clients/customers

iii) How have they targeted them in the past

iv) How do they position their brand/product (current campaigns they are running/planning to run)

v) What are their major cost & revenue heads in the business

b) Needs: This is mostly the trickiest and the most important part of the call. In many cases if the prospect is aware about social media and the benefits of a social web presence then he knows what are the business needs that can be satisfied. But there are some cases where the prospect also says, 'We hear a lot about social media and plan to explore it for our business. How should we do it?' Generally the needs can be derived from the various business objectives we explore in social business strategies:

i)  Reducing costs: Try to understand if the client spending too much on customer support, on market research for understanding the customer opinion, on PR agencies to generating a good word.

ii) Increasing sales/promotion: What fraction of the prospect's target customers are on social web, does the brand exclusively target youth, what is the existing position of their social media efforts, what are the problems they are facing in their present marketing campaigns.

iii) Increasing relationships: Is the client focussing on a niche sector of industry as clients/vendors/partners/customers. Can providing them a community or a business network  for engagement help . Do they need leveraging conversations on such communitites.

iv) Increasing innovation & ideation: Is the client looking for more ideas for his brand or product, a repositioning or customer feedback. Does it position itself as a customer focussed company.

v) Increasing internal collaboration: Are there internal communication, workflow, employee moral or productivity problems.

Of course you have to get a feel of these problems from the conversation. You won't be ticking a checklist of these large number of probable situations :)

c) People: When you know the needs you will know the people to target. Understand where are these people on social web. Are they just surfing random sites, do they have their own blog, are they on facebook/twitter/Linkedin/forums etc

d) Objectives: This is different from needs as in if needs are the starting point of your conversation with this prospect, the objective is the final outcome you achieve from the project. So for example the need might be to position your brand as a youth savvy consumer company but the objective might turn out to be a contest module running series of user generated contests targeting youth.

This came out in a discussion with Dave Evans. Generally it is difficult to understand objectives in the first call itself. In some cases when the client is clear about the objectives then you can directly move on to preparing the proposal. Or if not, then set up a meeting or the next call with more relevant people. If the prospect knows that you understand his/her needs, any time invesment is worth it.

5) Am I missing something...?:  Sometimes it might be a good idea to know the budgets or whether there is a timeline. Also you might prefer not to make the call with your company folks around just to insure if in case you completely screw up :D

What's happening in Health 2.0

While researching on health and wellness communities I fell upon various platforms worth of interest. It is fascinating to see that people understand that with changing times and health demands people are more interested in discussing out their health problems, helping each other referring the best practitioners and using similar social tools for health related purposes. When research shows that a majority of people seek the initial help of internet for any health research or related problems, it makes sense to make the entire health research and discussions social which is popularly known as Health 2.0.
There are a vast number of health related platforms running on the social web. On a broad scale they can be grouped as Health 2.0 communities, Health Applications and Health online tactical programs. I have discussed each of these platforms in detail below:
1) Health 2.0 communities: There are a bunch of Health 2.0 communities following roughly the same engagement architecture for the members. There are influencers (doctors, health experts, coaches, sportpersons) writing blogs and news articles on various health related topics, support forums on various topics various the influencers are participating and providing expert advice. The community members can interact with the experts on their blogs and discuss and find help for their problems on the support forums. Some such popular communities are Web MD (see pic) and Aarp.org's health page. There are various other communities like Steady Health using news aggregation models similar to digg.com where members submit their health related news and others curate (rate/vote) the news articles to get the most popular news on the homepage. In India similar health 2.0 communities like Bolohealth are gaining interest. Similarly Quaker oats too has health related discussion forum on its Good morning heart community.

Apart from these independent health and wellness communities, there are some hospitals powering such communities too. Mayoclinc for example supports blogs and stories from patients, relatives, friends and staff of Mayo hospital at sharing.mayoclinic.org
2) Health Applications: There are many interesting health applications on the social web. One such application is Patients like me where you can enter various communities, feed your personal health data and find patients like you and get relevant help. Another interesting health application is by Gold's gym (see pic) which is running of facebook. Here the members can set their personal health goals ( like losing weight etc.), find people like them, recruit supporters and post their progress. Other members can provide support and comment on their progress. In India saffola ( an Indian edible oil company) is currently running a health application where people can set up goals for better living, find people like them and get health tips.

3) Online tactical programs:  These include short user generated contests or advocacy programs run on the social web. An example of such a user generated contest to promote health was run by Gimme20 health community where participants were asked to submit their fitness stories in form of pictures, text or videos to win prizes. Mayoclinic Hospital runs an advocacy program where the patients can submit stories about their experiences with mayo clinic. Similarly another hospital chain Porter Adventis Hospital allows members to start free 'carepage' which are personalized web pages by/to patients and their families /friends to provide emotional and moral support.

Shifting Houses

So we shifted our house from the awesome Sarita Vihar colony to super costly Safdarjung Enclave area. The reason for the shift was that I wanted a house so near to my office that I can walk there everyday. Hence this new house is 5 minutes from my office, 25 minutes from my gym and 30 minutes to IIT (all walking) which are practically 99% of the places I spend my weekdays. However living so near to office has its own disadvantages like you cannot get out of home late and sms your boss, 'stck in a bad jam.. will b late'. Moreover such localities are very costly.
However for me the entire shifting episode was a very big learning for one reason that it was the first time I did such massive packing, house hunting and shifting together when generally I suck at all the three things. But in this case as my flatmates ( who were also my batchmates ) were helping me in the entire shifting + packing, I got insights into certain 'shifting & packaging' personas which I have mentioned below:

1) The packing 'champions': These people are so comfortable with packing and shifting that it makes you feel as if they have injected themselves with Monica Geller harmones. Such people take charge of the entire packing and know exactly what is to be done at what time. In this case one of my roomies not only did most of the packing but took care of all bills, disposing unrequired furniture, security money, net connection etc. etc. etc.etc.

2) The packing 'daunteds': These people literally suffer from packing phobia and as you can see in the piture might even forget to take a bath in the entire shifting trauma. In my case I literally kept on delaying the packing till the last moment and moreover when now I am in my new house, I dont feel like unpacking. (I just realized that I might prefer buying some basic stuff again rather than unpacking)

3) The packing 'smarts': These are rarest (and ofcourse the coolest) of the breed who will get up at 1 in the afternoon on the d- day, start packing when everybody has finished and literally outsource the shifting to the other flatmates (no costs attached of course). In this case the second biggest shock (and I will come to the biggest shock later) of the whole packing was that this flatmate of mine litreally had twice the amount of luggage the rest of us combined had and yet he was not half as bothered.


 So, all packed and done we waited for the truck which finally arrived one hour late, uploaded our stuff in another half and stood on our colony footpath for another hour and half for the 'Delhi no-entry' to open and finally travelled 12 kms in the same truck to reach our dream house which suddenly (and this was the biggest shock) started appearing an inhabitable place to live. The same house which looked fine earlier now seemed like an inhospitable and depressing jailhouse. I dont know what had made me finalize it (maybe because we had 3 day to be thrown out and I have this gorgeous habit of postponing everything to the last moment, which has actually become my core competency, but about that in some later blog). So we entered the house at 9:30 at night and at 9:32 at the same night I had decided to start looking for new houses. (Actually we got that house through a contact and hence luckily there was no brockerage involved. Moreover it will be easier to find better houses in the same area now that we have moved here and I can give ample time to the broker to look for better houses. Finally, now I know what all NOT to do while shifting houses and the first mistake came at very low costs).
And the best thing out of all is that now when I anyway have to move in the next couple of days, I don't need to unpack!!

Hi

Hello and welcome to the revamped 'Thoughtspot version 2.0'. However this time it is just called 'Keeping it simple' for the reason that thoughtspot was more about my takes on society and people around me however 'Keeping it simple' is about anything which I think is worth sharing on the blogosphere.
The main reasons for changing the blog were:

1) It gives me more freedom to write about the stuff I want to write without getting into issues like whether this would do any good to the image of my blog. As in on thoughtspot I did not feel like writing about marketing or social media. On 'keeping it simple' I don't need to think about it.

2) I changed my house, my gym, my net connection and my bai [:P] .. and hence I thought that it would be a good idea to change the looks of the blog too.

3) Change is good

You will find the following changes in the blog. Those who are here for the first time might like to know a little bit about me:
1) This is a purchased domain instead of a blogspot domain. Hence the web address is http://achintyagupta.com instead of http://achintya85.blogspot.com
2) Here you can read stuff of your choice from the tabs. As in those you want to read about society humor might just like to go to the 'random' tab. Whereas people interested in social media or marketing might click on other tabs. Hence I wont get people telling me that I have started writing about social media which they don't understand.
3)This is a new template, some new widgets and a new name

Moreover since I have not put up any proper post for the last couple of months, let me tell you what I have been up to since last 6 months.
1) So I passed out from IIT and joined an engineering and constructional major. Realized the job is not for me and left it in a record 30 days ( I don't think anybody has ever done that so soon post joining that company) I am not proud of it but then sort of keeping up the legacy of doing everything in style.
2) I was picked up by a super cool business strategy firm in Delhi. I am working with some awesome people and great projects. So mostly we are buried in work up to neck but then we also have a lot of fun. There is multi-cultural environment with people with British, Texan, south Indian and killer rock star accents, which is turning out to be a big problem for me as in I dont know what hybrid accent will I pick up hanging out with them.
Recently we launched a 'biggest loser contest' where the employee reducing the highest amount of 'his burden' from earth ( and it has to be more than 10 kgs) in three months gets a return trip to Bangkok. I was honorable outcasted from the competition but then I am fighting for my rights.
3) Life has been good since returning back to Delhi. There have been some awesome parties in the last few months with office colleagues where you realize that the sex ratio of IIT (which was 8:1 male:female) has suddenly been reversed. It's like God realized his mistake in the last 5 years and is making up for it.
4) I am travelling more and not just to the market outside IIT gate. So there have been trips to Corbett, Old Delhi and around. Not much to brag about but then then I am ensuring that on weekends I on not at my home.
5) Moreover when your work is to manage clients and projects, one always gets to meet new and some very smart people. So the last couple of months also included talking to movie directors, gaming companies, NGOs, entrepreneurs for business reasons.
6) And then how can my life be without goof ups. So the last 6 months also saw trying to ascend a descending escalator and getting hurt and remaining on bed rest for 5 days; telling an IIT senior '02 batch pass out about life @ IIT in a party (I did not know he was from my college until he told me) and then of course being seen with somebody twice on consecutive weekends by the same person in my office which I thought would definitely trigger some office gossip but then luckily it did not (looks like nobody cares!)
7) And finally I shifted my house near office so these days I walk to work. I have not bought a TV yet so that I go out more and blog more.