Listening: A Key to Social Media Strategy

Posted on 25. Mar, 2010 by Mohit in How To Guides

Listening Provides Actionable Insight

With the rise of self-publishing on the internet, the Brand monologue (PR, Advertisement, Below the line activities) has become more of a multilogue: a many-to-many conversation. Your customers, investors, supporters, and detractors talk amongst themselves and share their views on you to anyone who is interested. They share their voice in different formats and on different platforms. The question is: Are you listening? Are you listening to their views/ opinions/ suggestions? Are you responding?

For all brands that want to leverage Social Media to reach out to its consumers and build relationships, listening (Social Media Monitoring) is the first step. Some important objectives brand can achieve from listening are:-

1. Tracking Brand Mentions: This certainly improves the self-awareness to track volume of information, but it’s like normal PR “clip tracking service” which ends at number of mentions and share of voice. 

2. Measuring Success of a Marketing Campaign: Listening during different phase of campaign (pre, during and post) can provide the marketers some useful insight to define and manage campaign more accurately. It can also help in identifying the success and failure of different elements during the campaign and to make course corrections nearly real-time.

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Social Community Efforts From Banks & Financial Institutions

Posted on 22. Jan, 2010 by Mohit in Reviews

Banking and Finance Industry is very competitive. Customers are becoming impatient and loyalty for brands is decreasing. Slowly brands are realizing that they can no longer appear monolithic, imposing and they need to find new ways to engage customers to retain and build relationships.

Web in its new avatar (Social Media)  facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration, has given consumers the power to make or break reputations, enhance or damage brands, create winners and losers in the marketplace, and do so with lightning speed. At the same time, social media offer unparalleled access to unfiltered customer opinion, opportunity to understand  the real influencers,  and opportunities to leverage user-generated content.

Note: There are many popular blogs, forums, and review sites around Banking and Finance. But in this post I am focusing on how large banks and financial institutions are adopting social media to reach out to customers, prospectus and Influencers.

Community efforts from Banks and Financial Institutions.

HSBC Community for SMB

This online community HSBC Business Network is for SMB and entrepreneurs. The focus is to empower new start-up companies to succeed by enabling them to network and form relationships with each other, as well as leveraging the expertise and support of HSBC’s business specialists

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