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.
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
Common Wealth Credit Union (Groundswell Award Winner, 2008)
To positioned itself as a progressive and transparent financial institution with heart, Common Wealth Credit Union launched an online community for Alberta’s Generation “Y”. A lifestyle platform for youth to self express and support called Young & Free. Its a fully integrated marketing campaign combined with a spokesperson search to find the voice of Alberta’s under 25 crowd.
Common Wealth embraced the power of the social web by tapping into popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter to create an immersive experience where compelling user-generated content takes centre stage. To position it as a democratic, transparent organisation they launched a yearly campaign to find “Young & Free Alberta Spokesperson”.
The winner from the contest became a paid employee of the credit union, working full time with the job description: talk, type and tell good stories – essentially a full time blogger for the credit union for one year.
The Open forum is a very interesting way that American Express is using to share information and start conversation with small business owners. Some of the key highlights of the OPEN Forum initiative are: building brand equity, acquiring new customers, and building loyalty of existing customers.
It’s a excellent example of how to develop a vibrant social media community around a target segment.
Schwab Listening community (Groundswell Award Winner, 2007)
Charles Schwab launch a private online community “Money and More” made up of 350 25-to-40 year old Generation X non-Schwab clients. Idea was to listen to a focused group of Gen-Xers that was brought together on a community platform to better understand – how to become their investment service provider of choice 10 or 15 years down the road. What they learned was so powerful that they were able to create new products and services to meet the needs of this target group— resulting in a 56% increase in GenX customers vs. a year ago Based on insights from the community, Schwab lowered account minimums to $1,000, introduced Schwab’s high-yield Investor checking account with a high yield, and developing an online landing page specifically for the Gen X target.
Barclays Bank – 100 Voice Community
The 100 Voice community is student focused community where students can share their opinions on money management and student finances. Its a marketing driven program to create visibility and conversation around the benefits of the Barclays Student account and enable students to share their experiences with others.
Bank of America : Small Business Online Community
This Small Business Online Community includes a ‘Forums’ section, where SMEs can post questions and seek help and advice from others in the community. Registered users can also post their stories of business success and share tips for overcoming business challenges. The community-generated content will be supplemented by a range of expert articles.
Change Everything is a project of Vancity, Canada’s largest credit union. The Change Everything web site was spurred by the spirit behind Vancity’s new campaign. ChangeEverything.ca is an online community targeted (but not limited) to residents of Vancouver, Victoria and B.C.’s Lower Mainland.
Once Registered, the user start blogging about his progress toward making that change. But the real substance of the site happens when someone comes across the user blog and gets inspired; they can join it. Now both of them are blogging, discussing, and potentially collaborating on making the change happen. Its one of the best community engagement program I have come across.
I intend to update regularly this list of Banks and Financial Institutions on social media. So, if you know of any other Bank or FI with social media presence, do send me an e-mail or leave a comment below.
Cross-posted at Mohitvermablog.com
How to leverage Social Technologies to Build Online Talent Communities
Posted on 12. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides
Some thoughts I put together – on how the Recruiting function can leverage Online Talent Communities to build a pipeline for future workforce.
I know there are no great examples of “real” Talent Communities – and that is why I think the first organization that gets it right would benefit the most!
Thoughts? Send me an email ! View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh
What’s happening in social media on climate change
Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by Achintya in Trends
Background
I follow Indian Express and almost everyday when I pick up the morning daily I see something being written on Copenhagen 2009 summit. Then there was the Blog Action day on Oct 15, 2009 when thousands of bloggers wrote about climate change the same day. Hence no prizes for guessing but a lot is happening over environment in social and traditional media. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to see how specifically social media is helping us make our planet a greener place to live.
Scope
Honestly social web is seeing a lot of activities on climate change and a greener planet. There are a bunch of facebook apps, many websites and applications on organizing events and creating petitions, online communities targeting environment and wild life etc but I would specifically like to focus on social applications targeting aggregation of environment related news and influencer platforms. The reason for the preference is that some of the most popular efforts in social media for environment have gone in these two directions.
News Aggregation
Various websites are using different models for aggregating environemnt news. The most popular of them is using the digg.com model for aggregating news. Users bookmark the environement related news they like and others curate/vote for their favorite news. The most popular news gets features on the homepage. Ngopost.org is using this kind of model in India. Then there is care2.com which is also the largest environment promoting online community and uses this kind of aggregation model. Care2 in fact does a lot more than this. It has a online petition site where people can start their own petitions and sign the petitions they support. Members can donate, read expert’s views on healthy living etc.
The other popular model is importing stories and news feeds from top news websites and blogs. Greenedia.com for example, aggregates blogs, podcasts, videos by experts on green living, climate change, global warming and other topics who have been vetted by Greenedia. Experts can submit their credential for contributing to the platform or users can suggest popular blogs to be tracked by Greenedia. Alltop.com is another popular website which uses this model for many topics like food, photography, health etc and it has a separate platform for aggregating news on climate change.
The third news aggregation model is something that was adopted by change.org for Blog action day where they asked everybody to register and write on the climate change. Presently their homepage features the link to the most popular web platforms that participated in the event and also gives links to all the participating blogs.
Influencer Platform
Influencer platform are a great way to generate opinions, gain traffic and trigger word of mouth. Presently the platform getting most attention and traffic is change.org which has an influencer platform called ‘Changemakers’. Users can nominate influencial people whom they want to see as the changemakers and others vote for the nominees. The selected changemakers will then be invited to write on the platform and their opinions will be pushed through change.org’s network of partners, bloggers and activists.
The other types of influencer platforms are ecorazzy which aggragates news about what celebrities are doing for environemnt. With news like ‘Brand Pitt to donate various hats to charity’ and ‘Roger Moore continues his battle with the Foie Grass Industry’, this brings another way of getting influencer’s say. Similarly Huffington Post has a environemnt news category called ‘Green’ which showcases celebrities taking about various environment related issues.
Using social technologies to build Organizational Culture
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Case Studies, How To Guides
BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE
The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)
Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.
Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.
Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.
When Gautam met Sumit he said “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years – if we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights… my question is how can I help help them to tap their full potential and connect with each other?”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Gautam tells Sumit “You have the right approach, however before jumping into an initiative like this you have to think through certain aspects”
“What are those?” Sumit asked, intrigued.
“The first thing is you have to understand such an initiative will mean disrupting existing power structures – are you sure you want to do that? Will the rest of the management team support this initiative?”
Sumit pondered on Gautam’s question “Maybe not, but I am prepared to push my way through – as this is what will enable us to break to the next level”
“You can’t push an initiative like this Sumit, it has to be owned by all the leadership.. however what you can influence is by leading the way – and influencing others to follow your lead. Let’s assume over all your objective is to increase the engagement of people with the organization and with each other, would that be right?” asked Gautam
“Yes true” agreed Sumit
“You need to build a community that will congregate around areas of work, levels and other areas of interest”
“You mean like a Facebook for the whole group?” Sumit asked.
“Well, it would look like that, and have rich features to encourage people to connect with each other – however there would be features that would encourage a mix of social and business interaction. What would really help this would be the softer aspects of the initiative”
“Such as…?”
“It would encourage people to connect with others, discover people across organizational silos, understand them beyond their roles as individuals – and trigger overall encouragement. It has been proven that having friends is a sign that people will be more engaged at work.”
“Really…?”
“Of course, people like to work in a place that enables them to bring their whole selves at work”
“How do we know that people won’t just goof off? Keep chatting?”
“You’ve got to give them guidelines, Sumit. We can help you in evolving these guidelines. Many large organizations have such guidelines. However, you have to remember that the ‘how we use it’ will become a process when people realise that they have to work with people, not to do things to them. People like you and your senior team will be instrumental in creating that mindset – which is why we’ll have to collaborate with them extensively to make this a success.”
Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies
Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides
Shared in the flow workspaces to enable Team Work Effectiveness
THE STORY SO FAR
(scenario 2 from here)
Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.
Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, is concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seem to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the delays are caused by the serial processing nature of the work: a mis-communication in the to-and-fro chain of emails would stop everyone else’s work and cause serious delays.
Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.
“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Gautam reassured Sundar that many organizations shared his dilemma. The nature of our work, especially knowledge work, has dramatically changed while our communication toolkit hasn’t.
“The model for email is offline filing systems,” Gautam explained to Sundar. “The system of Inbox, Outbox, Drafts? They spell the “I do my job, and now the ball is in your court” – There is little sharing of contexts – people don’t really write about the attachments they send or what people have to work along with.
So I’d tell Sundar Raman that what Alacrity Legal Technologies that what they need is for groups to work together in “Shared In The Flow Workspaces” – In The Flow to signify a natural way of working and not something that has to be done externally or in addition to ‘regular work’.
The Governance aspects of such a system would adhere to workflows, have access rules and align to the team roles in the group.
Some of the features that would be needed, and the behaviors that ALT would enable in such shared workspaces are:
- Wikis - these are shared pages which anybody who has access to can add and edit text, images and even video. People can add links to internal and external sites and keep a track of changes made by people. So one can say goodbye to confusing version numbers when more than 2 people are working on the same document.
- Content Repository – This is a shared drive/folder where all relevant files are tagged by the group and it is possible to search them
- Microblogging / Status Updates - helps people keep others informed of what they are working on, what issues they are facing and therefore
- Project Management – Helps people to assign roles, tasks and in calendaring timelines of when they are supposed to get back with work
Using these tools, and understanding how to manage the change process from current ways of working – ALT can make its teams work faster and more effectively.
Community Platforms: What makes a good one?
Posted on 18. Nov, 2009 by karthick in Reports, Reviews
How do you categorise and cherry pick the best community platform? What would be the baseline that you would target? This the purpose of the post and what follow sis an analysis of what we have put together.
The breakdown.
First a definition is in order. What is a Community platform?
A community platform refers to the community platform “tool”. This is a tool (open source or otherwise) that enables people to build their own community networks or groups. So if I wanted to start a community for Kawasaki Bikes or Micheal Jackson dance moves club, what is the community platform tool that I should look into?
That’s my purpose in the series of blog posts that will follow. I plan to analyse a bunch of various tools, each bringing it’s unique features to the table, and then see what would broadly fit your (and well mine too) needs.
The Methodology of Analysis.
When one looks at a community platform, there are a range of things that comes to mind almost immediately. The first and foremost guiding principle in all of these platforms is the vision of the platform. To allow for user engagement and to do it seamlessly. That’s the broad picture, however , there are a lot of things that have now almost become standard (thanks to the large social networks like Orkut and Facebook) for communities in terms of features and new companies entering the market (for community platforms) as well as the ones already existing have to introduce them as basic options. So these features would be bundled in one area and then we have some features that we need to look at. Without further ado the 10 points that we are looking at.
1.User Features
This would be a no brainer. If a community cannot provide features that allow for sharing within a group of people, there’s not much to look into. Features I would say are important to look at? Here’s a quick check list of other features a community platform should look at incorporating.
* Detailed profiles (adding avatars and information)
* Formation of Groups
* Addition of friends and members to the group
* Relationship types between profiles (choose person as friend/buddy/casual acquaintance)
* Gallery option – Photos, Videos, Audios upload and download options
* Forums or Message boards for community discussion
* Blogs (individual and group authorship)
* Instant Messaging or offline messaging.
* RSS feeds – importing and exporting from groups or profile tracking updates.
* Search – within the community and specific groups.
* Widgets to enable display of relevant information
* Wikis and collaborative document sharing options.
* Tagging of posts, blogs, communities and threads.
* Event organisation and reminders.
* File Sharing for all types like .ppt, .doc, .xls, .pdf, .zip
* Email notifications for new users registered and any personal interaction.
* Polls to curate content or discussion within members.
* Bookmarking of discussion threads, profiles, updates etc.
* SEO’ed URLs of posts or groups (to a public community)
* Embedding options for content from other social networks.
Pretty exhaustive right? I’m sure you can add to that list to let me know what I missed out on. You’d also be amazed as to how quickly all of those points mentioned above are becoming benchmarks for good community platforms.
Functionality
Every community platform should have good functionality and should be enabled. Broadly this means the framework they are built upon and the availablility of that framework. Would open source frameworks then score higher than all? Not necessarily. We need to see how functional the community is once it’s set up. How easy are the interpersonal relationships between various groups. What is the cross flow of information? Can it be scanned easily?
Admin Controls
Good administrator controls allow for moderation of groups and communities and sharing and keeping access controls that help the community to be moderated well. Broadly these are some of the features I would look at.
OpenID/Social integration – One easy access login to the community.
Facebook/twitter API integration- the rage is to use your facebook and twitter logins making the integration necessary.
Theming/design – Any good community needs to offer users the chance to build custom themes and design.
CMS extensible functions – Allowing the platform to act and enable content management.
Network privacy settings – Everyone wants a secure network don’t they?
Advertisement display control- What ads can you filter, what sizes can you display, can you turn them off?
Portable Data – If for some reason we want content to be bundled and posted elsewhere.
Cost of the package
This hardly requires an introduction and it is a reason the public has taken a love for open source platforms – because they are free. But when one would like far more options than what’s put up and doesn’t have the time to personally wait for others to offer them solutions, one has to invest in a platform that offers custom service at a price. The price should justify the features offered. The other factor related to price is the bandwidth or spacing offered by the platform. Some self hosted platforms offer limited space for files and content to be uploaded while others seem to offer large enough storage spaces for media. Other smaller factors would be what is the file size limit for sharing and uploading and whether access controls are provided to make them public or private.
Popularity
Who is using it? How many people recommend it? What is the user database. All valid questions to ponder over and consider as a measurement factor.
Extensibility.
Cross API integration/management is something that fast requires looking into. With many different functions required out of a social network and new terms like lifestreaming coming into the picture, a robust community platform would have to provide or have a vision of what the future might be like and model their platform to incorporate that. In keeping with the times and technology, one ensures users don’t migrate as soon as something new comes out.
Analytics/Tracking at the backend
Almost a given pre-requisite to monitoring member usage and traffic to a website hosting the platform, analytics give us a good flow of information, tracking and statistics on user behaviour. This also lets us know what features are relevant, what aren’t good enough, what must be enhanced and the like. While powerful analytics tools like Google Analytics are available, a custom made one measuring not just the traffic but many other things would prove very useful.
Mobile, web, desktop clients.
I predict that in 5 years time, we will have almost no need for the computer and everything we do will be in our hand held mobile systems which would be powerful mini computers in themselves. A community platform that lets people stay connected with a mobile enhanced version so it works across browsers of the mobile OR allowing for a mobile version of the download would most definitely push them up the points ladder in the community platform rankings.
In the course of the next few weeks, we’ll take all the tools we have found (a large number giving us an extensive view of the space) and categorise them broadly on these parameters. We are eager for comments as well and sharing your experiences with various community platforms too!
Community Platform Review : ELGG
Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by karthick in Reviews
In our first series of Community platforms, we are going to dwell deep into the world of platforms (and tools) that give people the power of forming communities and groups. The first part is targeted at open source social platforms. If you are thinking about forming a community and would like to know which platform would suit your interests best, then these series of posts are for you.
Our first community platform – ELGG.
ELGG gets its name from a town in Switzerland and also means Moose in many languages. It (Website) is an open source social engine that helps you build and form your community. ELGG has been in development since 2004. What does a 5 year old product (latest version being 1.6.1) have to offer us? Quite a lot of features.
Unlike a lot of other platforms, ELGG started off with a vision to integrate the best of Web 2.0 and all popular social media tools integrated into one community platform. While version 1.0 included RSS feeds, forming groups, uploading pictures and avatars a lot has been added since then. The ease with which one can use ELGG has made it a popular platform and the Education sector has particularly taken a liking to it. Recognising its efforts, Infoworld awarded ELGG its Bossie Award for the best open social networking platform.
What does it offer?
At the start, it is an open source platform freely available for download. The download is relatively small and anyone can install it on their local domain or server. To someone who wants to sample the product before using it, a free demo version is hosted online. ELGG is a feature rich platform with some of its offerings being – user and file management, multiple view and access controls for administrators, event plugin and APIs, OpenId and OpenSocial login options and use of multiple databases.
As soon as you set up your profile, ELGG offers you immediate access to various features such as subscribing to RSS feeds of pages and groups, OpenID logins and API integrated logins (you can login into the install with your twitter account for example).
Forming groups (sub communities) and updating your profile is relatively easy and intuitive. Some standard widgets are available to display various chunks of information. The Dashboard available at the start gives anyone logged in an overview of their activity, their friends activities and your bookmarks.ELGG offers customization in terms of functionality. Access controls allow you to privatize your page or group. You can also alternatively allow only logged in users to view your document or open it up to the public.
ELGG brings with a concept of Pages and subpages which are fully customizable (provided you know HTML and CSS) and this can be open to viewing by a whole group or all your friends.
Why would we recommend ELGG?
Uploading multiple file type formats: An area where they really seem to excel is giving members the option to upload files of all types. So whether it’s a .ppt, .zip, .rar or .docx you can upload them. Enabling a plugin gives you the option to auto zip the file after uploading.
Multiple Author Blogs: And a second area we see ELGG edge out competition is the ability to co-author a blog and set permissions for multi users to collaborate on one blog.
The Wire: ELGG introduces something called the wire. This is like your personal twitter messaging service. You can use this to post messages through the wire on to your twitter account or just keep it limited within the community. Tandy but not too original. They use 140 characters as a limit too.
Bookmarks are a great offering that allow you to bookmark “pages” or “groups” that you would like to visit often or straight off from your homepage.
Messaging: Private and group messaging and the ability to instant message someone online are welcome features as well.
Why not ELGG?
Installation not for non technical people: While ELGG seems to tether on breaking the cliché “something too good to be true probably”, there is a large problem to be addressed- that of the installation. A primary need is to simplify the installation on a private server. The documentation available does not offer much information on how to go about the whole matter painlessly.
Default plugins insufficient: To harness the true power of the installation many plugins are required to be installed and setup. This is easier said than done. The alternative of skipping the plugin installation leaves you with a very bare framework. The overall time spent to setup the installation is far longer than one would ideally want to endure.
Too much information on home screen: The dashboard is an information overload for a first time member. What others are doing, what you did, who uploaded what are all strewn over the home screen and navigating through all of this is tedious. We’d suggest better information cataloguing.
User specific access to page not available: The option to allow select members (from different groups or from your friends list) to view your pages isn’t an option. That means choosing a sub page on motorcycles that I want only 2 of my friends to view and not the whole group is something I’d personally like to see in its future versions.
Themes aren’t diverse: Theming and customization is not something that is easily available or is easily achieved by non-techie people. There is this green bar that can get to be a bit annoying and last we checked the option to remove it isn’t easily available in notifications.
For everything else?
ELGG is a fine choice of a software platform. Get on it, get used to it and spread the love.
Who is using it?
Being free is one of ELGGs biggest selling points. A lot of communities have adopted the ELGG platform. There are user communities that have even taken it to extreme customization like the SwatchtheClub, Budokin (martial art website) and iJedi.
The university of Brighton has over 40,000 members actively engaged in the platform and were one of the first to embrace the ELGG platform. There are lots of other academic institutions that have also embraced this platform and the list of admirers include – Victoria University (Australia), University of Leeds, Kingston University, Columbia University and Claremont Graduate University among others.
In summary
So if you want to look for a good platform that requires a relatively large investment in the installation but smoothens the ride thereafter, we’d recommend you look into the ELGG platform. We understand that there are many developments happening in the version and would be looking forward to reviewing them again in the future releases.
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