Abstract
Consumer have lost their tolerance for passive bank web sites and are
demanding the dynamicism of social networking/social media interactivity
Boston, MA. March 3, 2010 - - For banks and their customers, the
Internet is fundamentally a passive channel - banks post information and
customers go to those sites to check balances, perhaps to pay bills (through a
third-party vendor) or to read about bank products.
Social networking is an activity for banks and their customers - customers can
- talk - to one another and to their banks which creates the potential for
banks to participate in the deeper community relationships social networking
users have with one another. That humanizing-by-association can exponentially
deepen and enrich bank-customer relationships which can translate into
increased customer and account retention rates and increased levels of
cross-selling.
A new report from Mercator Advisory Group's Customer Centric Delivery Channel
Service, Social Networking Strategies: Innovation and Engagement Point to
Clear Winners, offers an in-depth examination of the challenges and
opportunities found in the deployment and optimization of social networking
strategies across stakeholder cohorts.
Consumers' future receptivity to bank's interest in selling new products and
services or even fully migrating them to social media/social networking sites
for the resolution of their customer service issues will very much depend on
the consistency bankers bring to their channel deployment/optimization
strategies.
“Can banking institutions integrate social networking into their
marketing and product delivery channels in ways that create brand
loyalty/brand differentiation, product cross-sells and greater immediacy and
intimacy in customer contact” - ask Elizabeth Rowe, Director of
Mercator Advisory Group's Banking Advisory Service and author of the report.
“They must. Additionally, there is the concurrent institutional and
industry question/challenge of how to find and then allocate the financial and
institutional bandwidth necessary to successfully participate in new media.
Even as delivery and communication channels are emerging with such staccato
frequency, banks can not shrink away, but rather, they must interact with
accountholders, employees and communities even when doing so is well outside
their comfort zones.”
Report Highlights Include:
- Hardening consumer expectations around real-time interactions and
transactions mean that banks' social media initiatives will have to absorb and
integrate the functions of bank Internet sites before those static web pages
(and their institutions) become obsolete.
- The community banking industry has lost the mainstays of its profit
generation and the disintermediation seen with credit products (car loans,
credit cards, etc.) is poised to happen with core deposit products marketed
through social networking.
- “Older” working Americans are the fastest growing group on
social networking sites. This cohort also includes banking's most profitable
customers. This only adds to the imperative to participate in social
networking platforms.
- Successfully marketing to communities-of-choice (groups with shared values
or identities) can result in members of that group actually seeking out a bank
because it reflects their own values.
- As consumers becoming increasingly comfortable using real dollars in
virtual transactions, we see it as inevitable that those same consumers will
accept the migration of banking's virtual transactions, like opening, funding
and using bank accounts, to social media platforms.
One of the 13 Exhibits included in this report:
This report contains 28 pages and 13 exhibits.
Companies Mentioned in This Report:
Amegy Bank, American Express, Apple, Bank of America, Citibank, Citizens
Financial, Digital Insights, Facebook, JP Morgan Chase, Mercantile Bank of
Michigan, MySpace, PayPal, Radian6, S1 Enterprise, Sysomos MAP, Twitter, USAA,
Viralheat, Visible Measures, Wells Fargo and Zynga.
