FreshNetworks Blog

Last month, First Direct, an online bank in the UK, launched an online community, Little Black Book. Like British Airway’s Metrotwin, the First Direct online community is designed for customers to share recommendations and tips. Both of these sites rely on the concept of recommendations from ‘people like you’, be that other people who fly the same airline, or other people who bank with the same bank.

For First Direct, the site is a way of building a sense of community, as Jenny Southwell, their Head of e-Marketing at First Direct, said when it was launched in November:

We place the customer experience at the heart of everything we do, and with the internet remaining such a fundamental part of our business, it was important for us to embrace new methods of creating value for our customers. Little Black Book is a way for us to give something back other than through direct banking.

There is a definite benefit of building an online community that capitalises on any peer relationships that may exist. People do trust ‘people like me’ and so emphasising this relationship can only help to create the community feeling and bonds that are one indicator of potential success.

The evidence from First Direct’s Little Black Book is also that members like this kind of personal recommendation community. The community only launched in late November and already has 17,000 registered users according to Mark Mullen, Head of Marketing at First Direct. This is more than 1% of all the bank’s current account customers and is certainly a successful start to this online community project.

I’ll be watching how the community develops and would be interested to know how many of these 17,000 registered users become regular, active users of the site. Whether, long term, they will continue to feel that the other members of the community are ‘people like me’ and so continue to gain benefit from the site.

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Some more reading

• Personal Touch: Engaging through social network
• Banking buddies? The limits of how far brands can tap into social networking
• First Direct launches social networking site
• First Direct launches user-generated content site
• first direct bank: when social means business