Steve Bee at Paradigm Pensions announced last week that he would be creating a Twitter style glossary aimed at defining all pensions terms within 140 characters. A challenge, but nevertheless this is the kind of activity that the digital space is enabling more and more. The need for simplicity in financial services is indisputable and the need for that to happen online is even greater.
However, what Bee's done goes further. By inviting pensions 'experts' to contribute to the glossary he can reach a fully consensual crowd-sourced definition that can be broadly agreed by the industry and become highly useful to the consumer audience. This sort of collaborative exercise should happen more within the industry.
The barriers that exist between providers have been built around the need to protect customer data, protection of IP and corporate espionage. In reality the walls have been extended so far into organizations, that simply don't require them, that collaborative behaviour is anathema. If the industry is to rebuild consumer trust some of these walls need to come down and there needs to be a far better sharing of information for the good of the industry not just for the good of individual companies.
It is coming up to 6 months since First Direct launched First Direct Live. The site has been hailed as a triumph of the open and honest sharing of customer feedback in real time. First Direct is still really the only UK retail bank that has successfully engaged with its customers online. However, in reality the online experience isn’t ‘amazing’. The persistence in using white out of black in the design is still an accessibility minefield, however because it looks different it has been allowed to pass and while the First Direct 'Retail Experience' is so much better than other competitors it tends to be regarded as highly successful. However, if you place the offering next to some other large consumer brands it doesn’t stack up as successfully.
Now this is not to say that First Direct is not a decent experience, but it could be better and it is against this backdrop that the questions around First Direct Live come. There has been little critical evaluation of the site. It does seem to have snuck under the radar with little scrutiny, so 6 months on from launch there are 5 areas in which I feel the site could definitely be improved as a true reflection of customer sentiment.
1. Ratings - The ratings widget is an automated sentiment scoring system at present. In reality there isn’t currently a sophisticated enough algorithm to replicate true human sentiment, so the scoring needs to be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.
2. Curation – the filtering of content appears to be moderated, or highly selective and you don’t seem to get a full view of all feedback. It would appear that not all comments are posted and you get no feel for the volume of comments received.
3. Live words don’t really mean as much as they could and because you can’t click through to any of the content that the tag cloud is made up from it’s difficult to understand context. There is also a mismatch between the positive and negative scoring and the overall sentiment scoring and it hasn’t really been explained why. As an additional point, the words that make up the cloud and how they are rated negative and positive bring into question the overall sentiment algorithm again.
4. The platform is still all about push and destination web thinking. There’s almost no interaction and the lack of a human face makes it feel quite corporate.
5. The fact that the site’s been leveraged with a campaign leaves a suspicion around the original motives for the site. The satisfaction proposition is indeed very strong, if a little unspecified, but again this feels suspicious.
Now I have to say that what First Direct has done is laudable. It’s certainly much better thought out and executed than many brand forays into social media to date in any category. However, it’s more controlled than other attempts and that’s where the conflict exists – control is not what you’re looking for if true transparency is to be achieved. Now maybe we haven’t reached a point where true transparency can be achieved for a corporate company and in terms of First Direct taking things forward it’s brave and still unique within UK financial services. The digital community has unbelievably high expectations of what brands can currently achieve given the corporate structures that remain in place and until businesses are modelled around social we won’t see truly social businesses, so I guess where First Direct is, is good, however we do need to consider First Direct Live with a more watchful eye.
In February Thomas Power the founder of eCademy wrote a blog entitled ‘What happens when Facebook becomes a bank?’. It sparked a huge debate around the role of social media in banking something that was firmly on the agenda at SXSWi last week with Smartypig, CreditKarma, Mint and Lending Club sitting on the panel, however while SXSWi was running Power followed his blog up with a clarification of his position on video.
His argument runs that when subscription levels to Facebook hit a billion - as predicted by the end of 2012 - that it will hit a scale and organisational maturity that will not only facilitate the sales of simple products such as loans, insurance and savings, but will mean groups of individuals will be in a position to come together to execute group purchases and lending on a huge scale. It would be a simple task for Facebook to integrate a facility such as Zopa onto it’s platform and then users have access to all the tools they need.
If we work on the basis that Facebook's 2008 poll has some validity then 13% of users would be happy to use the platform as a bank. If we then assume an average £1,000 deposit with the bank of Facebook then at a billion users that's a £130 billion business, something financial institutions would have to sit up and take notice of.
Mark Zuckerberg is an ambitious man. Scale is his goal. The product will develop itself and as Power says the person with the biggest number of names wins the game. Financial institutions need to take note.
I had a fantastically refreshing chat with a client yesterday. We were talking about the development of their online social strategy, the integration with their B2C strategy and the dovetailing of their CRM process. All good business-focused conversation, but I tacked on at the end 'We shouldn't forget to do the cool stuff'. To which they said 'oh yeah we're definitely not going to forget the cool stuff'.
There's a lot of talk at the moment about how social media strategies are often nothing more than a bunch of tactics thrown together willy-nilly and in many cases of course that is absolutely true. There is a poor integration of online social planning into overall business models - something which I plan to write about more over the coming weeks - but in the rush to create more social businesses we need to remember the great tactical stuff as well and shouldn't become too earnest in our pursuit of connectivity.
After all it's the really cool stuff which actually becomes unforgettable.
Here are 5 of my favs:
ASOS dashboard My current fav. It's effectively a great big curation exercise, but ASOS and their partners Adaptivelab have created something really engaging.
Zappos shoe map From last year the Zappos shoe map is a really simple mash-up of their real-time sales data and the Google API. Really simple, really engaging and endlessly fascinating as a small anthropological window on the shoe buying habits of the US public.
Uniqlo Try An enduring classic. How do you make a survey about bra tops interesteing? Turn it into a giant swirling, music and video driven infographic.
Qashqui Car Games - Spanner league More of a campaign this, but the Nissan Qashqui Spanner League was a great spoof of a global petrolheads competition that caught the imagination of thousands and spawned 100s of copycat UGC videos.
Sony Bravia: Balls I know, I know it was a mistake, but when Fallon happened to shoot their Sony Bravia commercial in blogger central San Fran the buzz about the 1000s of balls that swept through the city prior to the final ad. being released was phenomenal. It actually became the template for pre-ad buzz for ad agencies all over the world and soon got tumbled as just that by every savvy blogger out there (so be wary).
Now oddly enough (or not) many of these are tactics are employed by organisations that have the makings of very strong social strategies, which I guess is the point, get the strategy right and you can do as much cool stuff as you like.
If you're not a Pixies fan - or even if you're a little bit of a Pixies fan - you might not know 'Into the White'. The song appeared on the B-side of 'Here Comes Your Man' and had enough energy to power Exeter for a week. For about a year the Pixies used to open with it religiously and I saw them play it about 5 times in a row at the Town and Country club between 1988 and1989.
They used to fill the stage with dry ice, shine spotlights through the fog and kick in with that unmistakeable bass line. Each time it was utterly electrifying, unique and played just for the fans. We used to tumble out of those gigs go home and play the live gigs on Maxell 90s - bought off some dodgy goth outside the venue - at full volume for hours. Those nights are some of the most memorable of my life.
Last Friday as I got into my car to drive home from Likeminds, I reached for my iPhone plugged in the MP3 jack and scrolled to Surfer Rosa by the Pixies and turned up the volume to max. and drove 100 miles (way too fast) up the A303. That says an awful lot about how good the day was.
Walking out of Likeminds felt like you'd been exposed to something utterly unique, something special, something raw, but at the same time very slick. In short it felt like you'd seen one of the best gigs ever.
Some reasons why it's up there with the best
1. It had a string of amazing support bands and the main act didn't quite play by the rules.
Of course the term support bands is pretty derogatory in this context, but it can't have been an accident that Chris Brogan was on last.
Jonathon Akwue opened with a great story around the parallels between the rise of hip hop and social media. I think he also helped to set the tone for the entire day. His examples of how public bodies were reaching out and creating spaces for people, run by people, really added some clarity to how important it is to be available, authentic, real and empathetic. Many of the insights he shared I know I can take away and apply to highly commercial organisations.
John Bell outlined a fantastic approach to socialising an organisation and how to structure a truly far-reaching internal training programme, something I certainly need to apply within the spheres I'm involved with.
Joanne Jacobs gave everyone a master class in not just how to use new social technologies smartly and appropriately but, also how to be an engaging presenter. No matter what she thinks of Paul Clarke's photos of her, they captured the passion with which she delivered her subject.
Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) laid out the case for re-structuring an organisation around what he termed 'social communications' a really thought-provoking piece moving the conversation away from social media and towards more social businesses.
Yann Gourvenec explained how Orange had approached the social space. Refreshingly though he helped us understand that what customers are looking for is appropriate levels of engagement. It's not about the channels, it's not about sitting and pondering about social media, it's about getting out there and engaging appropriately. Listening and acting consistently.
And last but not least. What can I say.
Chris Brogan came on almost broke his mic, came very close to knocking over the on-stage table and went on to break the swearing embargo within 15 seconds (something that even Joanne Jacobs had managed to avoid). He then went on to outline his theory around guest experince design as opposed to customer service, a brilliant piece of shared thinking that has made me completely reappraise a proposal I already had in the pipeline.
2. It made you think you'd do things completely differently from now on. Little of the content was brand new, but the focus that Scott Gould and Drew Ellis had put on the theme for Likeminds - 'people to people' - really helped to refocus thoughts away from the tools and mechanics and towards the real point of social media - the participants. The real conversation is the one that happens person to person and develops real value - not just commercial value, but emotional value and that has to be central to future thinking. 3. People came away feeling they'd been part of something special, but all had a different and unique story to tell. Which have been very usefully curated by the Likeminds crew here.
4. It left you wanting more I had to shoot pretty much straight after it finished, so watching from afar, as the post-conference get togethers and satellite events bubbled away was extremely frustrating, but just went to show how productive the whole event was.
5. The venue was mysterious, but perfect Likeminds took place in a conference hall that none of the local taxi drivers realised was there and you had to get in the queues early to get the best seats.
6. It had it's very own beflowered roadies Stuart Witts picked upChris Brogan from the airport and transported him to Likeminds and according to Stuart they spent three hours shooting the breeze about comics and films. Sounds like a damn good use for three hours on the road. 7. You had to be there, but if you weren't there's a lasting legacy The whole event felt like a highly participative gathering. Likeminds is a perfect title for such an inclusive, informal but informative event, but within the framework of that intimate gathering, the lunchtime sessions allowed you to get even more in-depth. It was a fantastic way of putting something back into the local Exeter community.
By holding 20 separate events at different venues and all within 10 minutes of the venue, it put a different slant on things. My particular lunch hosted by the lovely Kate Day had a great balance of banter and sharp eyed insight. Teamspirit the company I work for has always based our internal briefing around story-telling so how that applied to social media really resonated with me.
8. It was hyperlocal, national and global all at the same time. What struck me was the number of local Devon business people that were there. I met some fantastic people for which Likeminds had ignited a completely new way of doing business. It felt that Likeminds had spawned a networked community that simply hadn't existed prior to the first event in 2009.
At the same time I was able to finally meet with a lot of the people I was following already and hadn't met in person and put a face to an avatar (by the way Avatars are confusing) and of course the buzz that Likeminds created meant it was a global trending topic at points during the day and that Twirus had it in the top five UK hashtags two days running. Successful in so many ways.
So was it the best gig ever?
It was definitely pretty close, I bust one of my car speakers as a result, so that has to notch it up in the rankings.
Really like this very simple Metpolice knife crime ad. from last year.
The opportunity provided by tabs has really transformed YouTube videos into really simple interactive sites. With Boone Oakley being my favourite example.
