NetProspex, a sales and marketing leads generation company, recently released their Fall, 2010 Social Business Report. It uses the NetProspex Social Index (NPSI) to score and rank social networking activity by mining their large database of contacts. It's a fascinating report.
In the report, they rank the top 50 most social industries and, to my surprise, Banking ranked 3rd, behind Search Engines-Portals and Advertising & Marketing. Why was I surprised? Because, in the numerous banking conferences I attend, there seems to be few of them who are actively using social media, either personally or as a company. Recently, for example, I was a presenter at the Fiserv PIP Conference on Social Media in Banking. This was a followup to the morning session when Fiserv CMO Don MacDonald spent an hour talking about this very subject. When I asked how many of the 30 or so people who attended my session used Twitter, for example, only 2 attendees raised their hand. And yet, according to this report, Banking also ranks number 3 in the use of Twitter.
So why the disconnect? Perhaps it's because the people who attend these sessions at conferences are looking for help and the active users are back at the office, tweeting away like madmen. Anyone else have a theory on this? I'd love to hear from you.
Mr. Lynch, I find this interesting as well. Our bank, a small community bank in Kentucky, has both a Facebook and Twitter account, and we post important financial facts and local bank news, but we are not using social media to its full potential. I think many banks are like us, other banks are using Social Media, so we should too.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the "volume" comes from pockets of staff within the bank...marketers, investment reps, mortgage lenders, etc. are more than likely heavier users. Banks,in general, are still taking a "wait and see and how do we stay compliant" approach that will soon leave them entirely disconnect (at the company level) from the GenY group. The young staff and the areas mentioned previously will be the only savior!
ReplyDeleteAs a digital marketing firm, we see regional banks being much more active in the social space than the larger banks who seem paralyzed. With that said, Bruce pointed out that the individual staff members are active. The report measured Linkedin connections in addition to Facebook and Twitter. I would imagine that client side bankers are extremely active on Linkedin which could be the main driver.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments. It does lead one to assume that there are some real "super users" of those organizations who have chosen to paarticipate.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post, Kevin. Good information and I'll be checking out that report. I too speak in the banking industry, primarily at state associations, talking about social media and online marketing and finding that the community banks that I speak to are "starting to get it" but there are some very progressive folks in the industry leading the charge.
ReplyDeleteI just subscribed to your RSS feed and am looking forward to reading future posts from you. Of course, it was a "twitter stream" that brought me here. Good stuff...
Eric, appreciate your commnents and following my blog. I think you are absolutely correct about a few leading banks being ahead of the curve. I'm looking forward to seeing how things have progressed as next years conferences roll around.
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