What happens to Social Media sites when you're no longer around

A friend of mine recently died after a long, close to three year struggle with Ewing's Sarcoma. She was a very brave and inspirational woman and will be missed by many close friends and family.

In addition to knowing her personally, I was friends with her on FaceBook. Which brings me to the title of this post. We continue to be "friends" on FaceBook even though she is no longer here. People continue to post remembrance's on her passing and tag her in pictures. In other instances, I've heard about people who go back to their friends page on the anniversary of their passing. It's a very interesting phenomena. It's almost a living memorial.

Suppose, however, you didn't want to live on forever on FaceBook or LinkedIn. As I think about this, I'm not sure I know what I'd want to do when I'm gone. Is it better, for those around you, to have a place that keeps your memory alive for them? Would you prefer to have it all wiped clean and let the memories fade away? Just another unintended consequence of this thing we call Social Media. Frankly, it makes my head hurt thinking about it.

Mobile Channel Focus Day at Net.Finance Conference

As I'm watching the tweets from the Mobile Banking and Emerging Applications Summit in New Orleans this week, it prompted me to highlight some of my impressions from the Mobile Channel Focus Day at Net.Finance back in May. Here are a few of the highlights:

Jeff Dennes, SVP Chief Digital Officer of Huntington National Bank (and formerly with USAA), gave the Keynote address. His presentation was full of interesting observations including:

• The economics of Mobile are compelling. Mobile transactions cost $.08 per transaction versus a branch cost of $4.00 per transaction.




• The expansion of the 4G network over the next 2 years will increase bandwidth equal to a cable modem at home.




• Mobility is driving convergence. The gap between the traditional web and related services is closing, with the increase in smart phones and the movement of the Gen Y's into the workforce.

Secil Tabli Watson, SVP of Internet and Mobile Banking from Wells Fargo discussed using ethnographic data to determine how and when customers are using their mobile services.The results will identified "convenience" as the driver of adoption and use. This will ultimately help them focus future enhancements around this approach.

Jennifer Wilson, SVP Internet Channel Director, BBVA Compass shared her experience with the introduction of ZashPay, a Person to Person payments service from Fiserv. From an adoption perspective, they found that building a web page with a simple enrollment process was key. When they looked at the user base, they found a surprising number of small business customers who were using as an alternative to more expensive ACH services. Given these pilot results, they may develop a mobile invoicing service for their business customers.

Mobile continues to be a hot topic among financial services providers and may prove to be the most signficant game changer in the next couple of years.