FreshNetworks Blog

When I head out to conferences and seminars, the value for me often is not so much in the content of the event itself, but more with the surprising people you meet and their great stories and anecdotes about social media.

One such person that I met was Roberto Hortal Munoz, the eBusiness Director for RSA Emerging Markets.  He has a great interest in social media for financial services and over a brief lunchtime chat he told me about Poland’s first financial services social networking game, “National Driving Test”, that was created by  Link4 – part of the RSA group and the market leader for direct insurance in Poland.

RSA’s National Driving Test game was launched in February this year on Poland’s equivalent of Facebook, Nasza-Klasa. Nasza-Klasa has 14 million active members and 16 million online users.

The Driving Test  game works by asking players 10 questions about driving habits and their knowledge of  car insurance. Players are allocated a driver profile depending on the response to their question. The six different driver profiles are inspired by, and aligned to, RSA’s consumer segmentation. The driver profile badge is displayed on their page for all their friends to see:

Depending on the player’s answers at the end of the game the player is then directed to relevant, targeted RSA insurance product information that relates to the answers they have given during the game.

So in a fun, engaging way the game serves to highlight the benefits of Link4′s driving insurance.  It’s obviously working as Link4′s  social driving game has achieved some great headline results, including 10,000  users requesting an insurance quote during the first seven days of going live.

You can read more about the campaign, as well as find more information about Roberto Hortal Munoz, on his blog at www.hortal.com.

Interested in social media case studies? Want to get practical advice about corporate social media use?

Why not attend the Corporate Social Media Summit Europe on 17th -18th November 2010 in London and get exclusive insights into how brands like Vodafone, Cadbury’s and Nokia are using social media for real business benefits.

We recently held a senior executive round table for a small group of financial services brands in order to debate the future role of social media in financial services.

As we’ve developed the social media strategies for several financial services organisations, including business divisions of  LV=,  Royal Bank of Scotland, LloydsTSB, American Express and SNS Bank, our aim was to facilitate an open discussion about the future direction of social media among senior level decision makers from the financial services industry in a relaxed, informal environment.

Registered attendees included senior executives from American Express, Credit Suisse, Friends Provident, Homeserve plc, ING Direct, Investec, Lloyd’s of London, Moneysupermarket, More Than, Simply Business and UBS.

On the day 11 people turned up to join in what turned out to be a very lively discussion about social media.

Charlie Osmond, FreshNetworks co-founder and Strategy Director, kicked off proceedings by introducing some of the  leading social media case studies in the  industry in order to assess current social media activity within the financial services sector. The discussion then turned to the main issues facing financial services brands and also future predictions for social media.

The event served to highlight the various themes and concerns facing senior level decision makers in the financial services industry including:

• The rise of niche online communities
• Customer driven markets
• Transparency
• Regulation and risk
• Resourcing

Over the next few weeks we’ll be visiting these topics in detail and will share with you the discussions and insights that occurred on the day.

I have just typed “How do I” in Google today, and the fourth suggestion that it proposes is “…delete my Facebook account.”

There’s clearly some discontent out there. What’s the cause of these rumblings? Well, it was reported last week that there has been a significant review of security policy at Facebook HQ. Facebook user profiles are publicly accessible by default, and it seems that a growing number of commentators such as Jason Calacanis, chief executive of the question-and-answer website Malaho, are calling for a boycott of what is now a “not trustworthy” site.

And yet, this is against the backdrop that Facebook will shortly announce over 500 million users, and that’s 40% of everybody on the internet.

So, the dichotomy for businesses that have online security as a top priority, such as in the financial services or pharmaceutical industries for example, is how they should engage in social media when Facebook, the most popular of social media tools, is so open. And this question is always most loudly voiced in the Boardroom of the banks and insurers, where the decision-makers for a social media strategy will be immediate detractors because they consider the simple equation is “Social Media = Facebook”, and they can see no further!

The important resolve at the Boardroom must be that the social media strategies for banks and insurance companies should not focus upon social media tools. Instead, the message for the Boardroom is that the best uses of social media will demonstrate that it can yield amazing results without compromising security or the confidence of your customers. And to achieve this it can be better to think of more creative ways to engage people. We’ll be looking at some of these in the coming weeks.

Read all our posts about social media for financial services

There are many opportunites for the insurance industry in social media. Afterall, it’s the ultimate experience good – you can’t judge the quality of what you have purchased until you claim, potentially years after payment.

As a result, it’s well suited to storytelling and sharing of experiences. Ratings and reviews have the potential to be an especially powerful tool for the insurance industry.

But social media marketing isn’t the only game in town. The insurance industry has another opportunity – using social media as part of the actuarial process. Insurance firms prefer to cover people who are less likely to claim. Social media may provide ways of helping to qualify in or out some people.

Have a look at Please Rob Me. A site that aggregates people’s check-ins on Foursquare and their GoogleBuzz locations to tell you who is away from home. Right now.

It is just a bit of fun, but the site makes an important point and should provide food for thought for armies of actuaries up and down the land.

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PS for an insurance-related social media case study, here’s an example of a research community that we built for a client

At the E-consultancy Future of Digital Media conference last week the focus was on two magic words “relevance” and “engagement”. In Ian Jindal’s stimulating and lively talk he correctly pointed out that marketing hasn’t actually changed much, even though where we choose to communicate our messages may have. Consumers are at saturation point so the only thing left is for companies to get better at attracting customers from their competitors. The ‘How’ was the focus of the day. There were three themes:

1. engaging customers around content using publishing techniques
2. how to add a layer of social discovery around your brand
3. finding ways to manipulate data to do our marketing for us

Many Intermediaries, product manufacturers and retailers are developing strategies around multimedia content to engage customers. Thomas Cook showed a particularly impressive video of their new 360 degree marketing strategy, complete with store front touch screens, co-browsing between customer and agent and every conceivable video clip you could imagine to show you what your resort will be like when you get there (which somehow I felt took the discovery out of it). The issue for most companies with this approach is the sheer cost of it and the skill sets needed to become programmers and publishers, as well as focus on your core business. The other issue was that there was one viewpoint that appeared to be missing from the strategy – the customer’s! Thomas Cook is still in broadcast mode.

The jury was out when it comes to engaging customers effectively using social network sites like Facebook. Brands are just not managing to attract the levels of fans they would like and I believe that it’s because people are, well, hanging out with friends and simply not in buying mode. Companies that have developed non intrusive, useful and engaging tools like Mydeco’s Roomshare seem to be having more success. Considering 56% people go to a brands home page to check out information first, it might be better to find a way to encourage people to stay there. For sectors like Insurance, where aggregator sites like Confused.com and cashback sites like Quidco.com have contributed to a reduction of customer lifetime value from 3-5yrs to 1-2yrs, the focus has to be on finding better ways of retaining their customers once they are delivered to their door.

Understanding data is essential to running any business and more importantly what action you take from looking at it. The new kid on the block is APML or attention profiling markup language. It is a common standard to describe your interests, likes and dislikes and how much each means to you (weighting). The idea is that your attention profile is owned by you and is portable so you can decide which websites you want to share it with for more relevant surfing. Currently Amazon is the only company doing a good job of recommending to us what we’re interested in but they own your profile and the process isn’t transparent. In theory it’s a great way to reduce information overload but it feels like a very long way off, if at all feasible. When I think about how I tag my del.icio.us bookmarks with words like ‘cop’ (which to me means community of practice, not policeman) and when I think about how often I change my likes and dislikes, it feels like someone is going to have to do a lot of work to maintain this profile (either me or a very clever programmer). I would love to hear your thoughts on this whole area!

Don’t get me wrong, as data fragments into smaller, accessible pieces, there are many innovative ways to play it back to your customers in really useful ways. Some good examples that add a valuable social layer for customers include the new AMEX Members Know community where members can see the most popular hotels and restaurants based on anonymous purchase data and Flickr’s use of the Exif data hidden in your digital photos about which camera was used to take a photograph which is the served up as a league table of the best digital cameras. We’re going to see a lot more of this.

I tend to agree with Simon Waldman of the Guardian who commented that sometimes qualitative measures like “Why are you on our site and did you get what you came for?” are equally important. Having conversations with your customers might just reveal what they actually want from you!