In mid-October, at BAI Retail Delivery in Chicago, I went to one of the most widely attended sessions of the conference. It was a Q&A style interview of Randi Zuckerberg by Ron Insana, Senior Analyst, CNBC. Zuckerberg is the former Head of Marketing at Facebook and Founder and CEO of R to Z Media, so Insana asked her about her thoughts for the future of social media, the future of banking and where she thought the two should intersect.
Today, everyone realizes that it takes more than face-to-face relationships, more than Internet banking and more than great mobile apps to get customer service right, but what is it? So, Insana led with the question that is on every CEO and CMO’s mind, “How can you integrate social media to drive engagement with your customers?”
“Customer service is probably the number one thing that social media can be good for,” said Zuckerberg. “I’ve talked to a lot of business people who are scared of posting on social media because they are so scared of the potential for negative or mean comments. But those people [customers]are a comment away from loving you.
“The only reason that they posted is because they are passionate about your brand and passionate about wanting a response. Often, if you can just respond to those people, there will be three to five positive posts following the negative post. That person can turn out to be an absolutely huge evangelist for your brand.”
What is the future?
Like any revolutionary idea, social media started slowly and has now taken off. Blogging, perhaps the first element of social media, began with a very few seeking an outlet for personal expression and has grown to millions of community and professional journalists. It’s even moved corporate: 50 percent of US CMOs at Fortune 1,000 companies have launched a corporate blog. And the growth can be seen elsewhere: In 2010, Twitter users posted 25 billion Tweets per day. By 2011, that number had quadrupled to 110 million tweets per day. Today, 65 percent of US adults use social media. Insana asks, “Is there an end game? Where is this going?”
As head of yet another social media startup, Zuckerberg is banking on a long run for social media. “If I had to predict, I think it is looking increasingly mobile dominated,” she said. “There are countries and continents that are skipping computers altogether and moving directly to mobile. I think geo-location has great possibilities for delighting customers.
“The value-add for businesses and banks is that – for some reason – there are tens of millions of people who want everyone to know where they are at every minute, “ Zuckerberg said.
Businesses are beginning to cash in on geo-location with coupons, but banks can do much better. According to Zuckerberg there are huge opportunities to provide customer service when customers are traveling: Tell them where your branch offices or in-network ATMs are located in the new city; remind them that you don’t have out-of-network ATM fees; or let them know what the exchange rate is in the country they are traveling. Banks can apply some of the same tactics in the local area by mining customer transactional data and social media data to cross-sell products that relate to time-of-life needs.
A mobile revolution
The question then for bankers to wrestle with – a largely bricks-and-mortar business - is the one that Insana asked next: What do you see as the future of branch banking?
“I would say that a year ago people weren’t really ready for mobile banking, but they liked the cool features. Today, I do most of my banking - probably 80 percent - mobile and online,” she said.
According to Zuckerberg, mobile provides her with a feeling of physical security that she doesn’t feel when she has to withdraw money from an ATM. “The other day, I saw a woman - in broad daylight in Palo Alto, California - get mugged at an ATM,” said Zuckerberg.
She said that she feels that most people would still handle major transactions through the branch office for a while, but would begin to apply more and more pressure on banks to make everything more accessible via mobile. (She echoes BAI consumer focus group findings presented during another panel.)
And Zuckerburg is very positive about mobile security. “I think mobile apps are starting to get savvier about having you put your pin numbers in before accessing the app…I think these were probably the same concerns when credit cards first came out: ‘What if I leave my credit card on the table? What will stop someone from taking my credit card and racking up lots of charges?’” she suggested. “I actually think there are more fail safes and safe guards in place on mobile.”
How do I do social right?
The audience was huge and completely engaged with the conversation on stage, especially when Insana got to the line of questioning about doing social right. Everyone was here to find out how to do it right – after all, they didn’t even want to start because they were mostly sure they were going to do it wrong!
Zuckerberg said that social media offered a huge opportunity to those brands that do it right. One important tip that she gave was to focus on engagement rather than eyeballs. Although there is a lot of talk right now about getting a million likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter, Zuckerberg says that the smarter strategy is to concentrate on getting the right likes and followers. “Those will be much more worthwhile and valuable to your business than quantity,” she said. “
To get those quality likes and follows, Zuckerberg says that you have to show value through your content. “The good news is that people are starving for content around finance. Talk to students and first-time home buyers. Everyone feels like they are in the dark, and you guys have a huge opportunity to position yourselves as an expert,” she said.
According to Zuckerberg, social media gives banks an opportunity to create trust akin to the traditional banking relationship. “Remember the time when tellers knew your name? They knew that your parents banked at this branch? You can have that again through a Facebook page or social media experience, and I think it’s pretty exciting.”
