SPURspectives

The saying, “all good things come to pass,” is probably falling on the lips of more than one CEO at a financial firm these days. No, I’m not talking about market events; I’m talking about social media. The financial sector’s reluctance to use social channels is officially over. FINRA, the regulatory organization that provides rules and enforcement over securities firms to protect investors, has issued its stance on social media. Yes, the financial services sector can now use social media. To that end here are a few ideas for Financial Advisors to consider as you start your social life:

In previous posts, I pointed out that women are underserved by the financial services sector and that women are huge social media adopters. Among their biggest concerns are a lack of educational information and products designed for women. I also mentioned that they control roughly $18 trillion.

1.    Use social networking to listen and learn about the unique financial needs of women.
2.    Use social media to provide access to interactive educational materials designed to meet the needs of women. Use the social aspect of the channel to provide a feedback loop to improve the materials.
3.    Take a high profile, public approach to providing customer service through social channels. Quality of customer service is the number one issue for female customers of securities firms.

The door is now open and an exciting new opportunity awaits the firms that act quickly. Tomorrow, we’ll look at some of the rules and discuss what they mean.

Illustration by TouchTheStars09 on Flickr, licensed under the Creative Commons.

Tags: financial services, marketing, social media, social network

Late last year I wrote a post wondering what would happen to social media as the economy recovers. Well, the pundits say that the economy is starting to recover and other pundits say that social media is changing. Twitter adoption is flattening out pretty quickly. My question to you is, why?

Have you personally changed your social networking habits? Is work playing a factor? Are you busier at work now? Do you have less time to devote to your online activity? Or is it that your not getting the results that you hoped to get? Is social media ending up as nothing but a giant time suck for you? That’s not the case for me. I get a lot of value out of my relationships, exposure to material I otherwise wouldn’t see, and access to people I otherwise wouldn’t meet.

However, I’ve noticed a significant change on Twitter. It’s much harder for me to spend time keeping up with it now. I’m too busy with work. A lot of the people that I follow are using it a lot less as well. They also say it’s due to their workload.

So, do you think I was on to something in my post last year or not? Is real work getting in the way of social media? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? The floor is yours.

Tags: facebook, social media, social network, twitter

A couple of years ago I fell and cut my head. It wasn’t a little cut, it was a 300 stitches plus 36 staples and getting a good look at your own skull kind of cut. So I got to spend some time in a hospital. I had an MRI, a couple of CT scans, a bunch of x-rays, and all manner of monitors connected to me. It was a technological tour de force. I was very lucky. I had some smart, calm friends who kept me in one piece until help arrived. Help came in the form of a team of Air Force Search and Rescue scuba divers with all of their equipment and training. I was taken to an outstanding ER with a fantastic team that put me back together. All of them used a phenomenal range of equipment throughout the ordeal. Even with all of the technology, it was the monitoring done by the people that mattered the most. Everyone had access to more technology than you can imagine. But it was one-on-one watching and listening between each person and me that gave them the information they used to make decisions.

Social media monitoring strikes me in the same way. All of the listening is important. It can get you to the essential data very quickly. But it is human contact, one-on-one, that is what’s needed to make good decisions. It’s a social network; it needs to be interpreted by people. Yes, you should use the available tools. I think they’re great. But don’t forget to use the most sensitive tool that you have available — you.

Photo: Andrew Ciscel

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Tags: marketing, metrics, social media, social network

Edges matter — ask any first grader. If you color outside the edges you’ve got a problem. Edges matter in marketing. That’s where you win. Brand leadership is attained by owning an edge among the four major points of differentiation; price, product, performance, and placement.

Jackie Huba, author of the popular blog, Church of the Customer, introduced a fifth P during a webinar from MarketingProfs titled: Brand Detractors and Brand Evangelists: How to Connect with Influential Citizen Marketers. Her fifth P is Participation — social interaction with or between customers and prospects. I agree that this is an extremely important opportunity for differentiation in any marketing effort and should be included on the list of Ps. Social media and social networking are exploding, radically changing the face of marketing and shouldn’t be ignored. But it raises a question. Where are the edges?

The other Ps have polar extremes where it’s possible to clearly differentiate a product or service to gain ownership of a market. So, what about participation? I think it looks something like this:

• Price: Lowest price / Most exclusive

• Product: Industry standard / One of a kind

• Performance: Total simplicity / End-to-end solution

• Placement: Ubiquitous / One source

• Participation: Exclusive / Inclusive

To lead in participation I think the extremes of differentiation are to be inclusive or exclusive. Being inclusive through social networking is easy to understand. It’s why and how most of us use social media — we meet people, make friends, gain referrals, and grow our networks. Exclusivity seems a little less intuitive given the current state of social media. But if you use the analogy that social media is a cocktail party, it makes perfect sense. Exclusivity is the red velvet rope at the door. Are you on the list? No? Sorry.

Exclusivity isn’t used much in social media, yet. I think that may change. It is a powerful motivator. Is it something you can use in your marketing effort? Is there a way that you can create a red velvet rope experience with your brand? Have I missed the mark on this one? I’m interested in your thoughts.

Photo: http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Tags: branding, marketing, social media, social network

This is the tale of two banks. They both started at about the same time. One of them began as a remarkable idea and the other as a great way to make money. The remarkable bank spent a lot of time during their formation figuring out how to make a significant positive impact on their customers’ lives. The other bank made every effort to keep their overhead as low as they could and to open as quickly as possible.

The remarkable bank developed a strong mission statement that they lived by and used to guide their vision for the future. The other bank pulled their mission statement from another bank’s website. As you can guess, the remarkable bank grew very quickly and was very profitable. It was recently sold at a tremendous premium and the founders were handsomely rewarded for their efforts. The other bank is currently spending a lot of time explaining their actions to federal regulators and the bank is not expected to survive.

This is a true story. The remarkable bank was customer centric and had a very unique value proposition. They had a vision for how they could help their customers and made it their mission to make it happen. Yes, they documented everything in a mission statement and vision statement. But, the documents aren’t what made the difference. They understood the importance of the idea and process of developing them. The result was a unique and very valuable business plan that was executed to perfection.

Take a close look at your organization. If you could put your mission and vision statements on a competitor’s website and it wouldn’t matter, you have a problem. You aren’t remarkable. You have no differential advantage in the marketplace. It’s probably time to look in the mirror and ask some very hard questions about why your organization is here. Don’t stop until you have a good answer.

Image: “Ani and Ani” by Flickr.com user lokate366, under Creative Commons Attribution License. Thank you for sharing this picture, lokate 366.

Tags: business plan, market differentiation, marketing, mission statement

The Winter Olympics will take place in Vancouver, Canada from February 12th through 28th. I love the Olympics. I truly enjoy the range of sports and all of the amateur athletes gathered together to represent each country’s best. It’s invigorating, motivating and I believe has a lot to teach us about business and life. So, for the next couple of weeks SPURspectives will include some Olympic themes in the posts. This is one of them:

I used to be a fencer. From about 4th grade into my early 30’s I fenced at a club level. I was never good at it, but I enjoyed it and got a good workout. During my freshman year of college I was fencing with a club in Cincinnati. My intentions were pretty straightforward — I was on a mission to get a decent workout with the vision of becoming a semi-competent fencer. At least that’s what got me in the door one night. All of that changed when I saw a new girl across the gym. She was hot. So, I went on a new mission — I hit on her. Somewhere along the way she asked me to fence. I realized something was amiss when we were walking to an open strip and she asked me if I preferred Russian or Polish steel blades. I had the blade that came with my foil. I think it was French.

It turns out she was good. How good? She was an Olympian, a veteran of the U.S. Pentathlon Team. She proceeded to slice me to ribbons and leave me in a crumpled, cramping heap, desperately gasping for air while my lungs incinerated. I deserved every aching moment of humiliation. I was a jerk. We both came in the door with a shared mission and vision for the evening. I changed, she didn’t. I blew a perfect opportunity to learn and get better. I wasted her time in the process. This was the first time I had met an Olympic athlete and I was a complete fool.

So, where’s the business lesson in this fiasco? Sharing your customer’s mission and vision may get you in the door. But it’s your dedication to helping them accomplish their mission and realize their vision that will keep you in the game. If you change your mind along the way you could get cut to ribbons.

Photo: The French Olympic Fencing Team, Athens, 1896 (Probably using French steel blades.)

Tags: marketing, mission, values, vision

Have you ever been so delighted with something that you called the provider’s call center to tell them? Yeah, I haven’t either. Have you ever called for help because you’re having a problem? I think we all have and it usually isn’t pretty. Working in a call center is a tough job. Lots of companies invest massive amounts of money trying to make it better. But, sometimes bigger isn’t better.

We helped a large, west coast bank improve the use of their CRM system in their call center. No matter how much they trained their staff, their response rates remained the same. You can imagine the scene — angry bank customers in your ear while you try to dig through the CRM system to find their account, solve their problem, and document the event — a very high-pressure situation with equally high turnover. It was a big problem and they wanted it fixed.

After watching the process we realized that the process never got any faster because the call center personnel never had a clear view of the overall system. They were navigating screen to screen as if they were running through a building room to room trying to find a something without having a floor plan to guide them. The search function worked fine. The user interface was fine. What was missing was a big picture view of how the system was structured. So, we made one — a simple map in the form of a decision tree that a person could use to quickly understand where they were in the system depending on the situation they were facing. It was a poster — inexpensive, easy to update, easy to distribute, easy to understand. We put one up at everyone’s workstation and their response rates improved dramatically. The pressure lowered. Turnover dropped.

Whoever first said that a picture is worth a thousand words was right. In this case we didn’t spend a fortune on programming and development of a new system or an overlay or add-on. We made a picture. Sometimes there’s a lot to be said for simplicity.

Tags: CRM, customer engagement, customer perception, marketing

Seth Godin’s recent blog post, “Too much data leads to not enough belief,” accurately asserts that we become skeptical when facing a lot of data that has been offered to prove a point. He goes on to say that the real mission of marketing is to make an emotional connection. I couldn’t agree more. However, that’s not the end of the issue.

I believe having a large, accurate supply of data is the very best way to create an emotional connection. It’s the core driver in one-to-one marketing.

How do you create an emotional connection with a wide audience of completely different individuals? Each one has a personal belief about your organization. Is it reasonable to assume that you can effectively connect with each of them using the same message? No. We all know that the best way to connect with someone is to meet them on their own terms. That requires a large supply of accurate data. It also requires using the data to drive the content of the message to make an emotional point that is relevant to the person being addressed. It’s what we do in a one-on –one conversation. That’s one of the reasons why social media is so popular — it enables relevant conversations.

Relevance is the key to making an emotional connection and motivating action. Because no two people are alike, it makes sense to understand and record how we are all different. That’s why you should collect customer data. Are there similarities between us? Yes, that’s why we use segmentation in developing marketing messages. One-to-one marketing is a process of using customer data to drive massive segmentation to an individual level. It enables you to make an emotional connection that is relevant to each recipient motivating him or her to take action. Too much data leads to not enough belief if you simply show the data. It leads to sincere, widespread belief if you use the data wisely.

Image: ViaMoi at Flickr under Creative Commons License

Tags: customer centric, marketing, one to one marketing, social media

You’ve seen the look — the patronizing nod when you suggest using social media in your marketing mix. You know what they are thinking. Where’s the tangible benefit? We use accepted financial measures; sales, margins, profit, and return on assets (ROA). Rather than turn with your tail between your legs, tell what you can deliver — brand equity measured by price premium.

It’s a long-term investment, so you’ll still have an uphill battle. But you will be speaking truthfully about the value of individual interaction delivering an accepted business metric — price premium.

How do social media deliver premium pricing and brand equity? By listening to your public. Everyone wants to be heard — we each have our own goals and dreams. Excellent sales and customer service people are great listeners. They know that it’s more important to listen than to talk. They understand that the best way to get someone’s attention, acceptance, and loyalty is by listening attentively. Likewise, listening drives social media and one-to-one marketing. They have the added benefits of automating and recording a lot of the listening function as well as radically extending the reach of each person in your organization. The result is that you can clearly demonstrate to each person that you have heard and understand his or her goals and dreams — repeatedly, individually, personally.

Will people invest more in themselves if they feel that they have been heard? Yes, 32% more according to Pam Popp, CEO at J.P. Morgan Retirement Plan Services. She was recently quoted in Pensions & Investments saying that, “plan participants of client sponsors that have adopted J.P. Morgan’s Audience of One — an educational program on retirement saving for participants — contribute, on average, 32% more than those who haven’t.” The Audience of One program is a one-to-one approach of listening, recording, and responding to customers about their individual retirement goals and dreams. It personalizes and humanizes the investment process. The result is a 32% increase in share of wallet. That kind of business driver justifies a price premium.

There’s no question that social media and one-to-one client communications in the financial sector pose potential problems in the form of risk and compliance. But the rewards far outweigh the risks and the risks can be controlled. The risk that cannot be controlled and that poses the greatest threat is to do nothing and miss the opportunity.

J. P. Morgan Retirement Plan Services is a client of Spur Communications

Tags: financial services, investment, marketing, social media

Rebranding is a wonderful thing. The process enables you to fine tune your brand promise to your brand expression. It gives you an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. It is the ultimate corporate fresh start. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to do, especially if your quiver of marketing tools has the same arrows that you used last century. Why don’t those arrows work? Because there’s a new critter that you need to bag and arrows don’t cut it.

The new critter is the elephant in the room — the Internet. What’s the problem with elephants? They don’t forget. The Internet doesn’t forget either. Like it or not, your old brand will live on and 20th century marketing tools won’t do much about it.

There was a time not so long ago that an organization could develop a new name, identity, brand promise and brand expression to emerge as a new entity in the market. That’s no longer the case. All of the old references to your brand that are currently online will still be there tomorrow. Everything from your old website to articles, press mentions, reviews, list sites, blogs and even former employees’ resumes. The sheer volume of many years of mentions on the Internet can’t be overcome with a traditional rebranding effort.

The only way to overcome the volume is to overwhelm it — you need a lot more arrows. You can make more arrows by joining the future and enlisting the social web. Traditional marketing is pushed in a controlled manner from a centralized organization. You’ve been doing this for years and need to keep doing it. However, it is being distributed in a decentralized network with an outstanding memory and ability to spread information. By embracing the decentralized nature of the network and supplying it with great content via social media you can very effectively make your previous brand an afterthought. It will take time, effort and money. Your new brand has to actively be a part of the online conversation. If you have sufficiently fine tuned your brand promise to your brand expression in the mind of your market, you will very quickly become a hot topic and your loyal customers will make your new brand a reality. More hands fire more arrows and it takes a lot of arrows to take out the elephant in the room.

Photo by: Exfordy / www.flickr.com
License: Creative Commons License (By 2.0)

Tags: branding, marketing, social media, social network