Blog: http://blogs.gartner.com/kristin_moyer/2009/01/13/fsns-as-technology-vendors/.

Written research (available on gartner.com): New Retail Banking Vendors Bring Social Computing to the Savings Account (G00160826).

In terms of the vendor community using social media to interact with C-level and end-user clients within banks, I absolutely agree. Check out some of the work that Anthony Bradley and others have done in this area.

Hope you find this helpful.

I think that’s part of what will make this hard for banks. These are not intuitive things for most banks to do. Most banks have had an “across the counter” type attitude towards customers. This is anything but inclusive/participatory.

Transparency has also been difficult for banks. One of my colleagues, Alistair Newton, just posted a blog on why transparency, in all aspects of the word, needs to change quickly. He believes that by 2012, 25% of bank customers will know the monetary value of their bank relationships, and 10% will negotiate with their banks on product and service prices. This takes transparency to a whole new level.

He’s providing a hugely valuable service, but it’s frustrating that banks don’t see it as a negative that many people would rather go to him for advice than their bank manager – in fact I get the feeling many banks see it as a cost saving on staff resources in line with restricted opening hours and closing branches.

It’s only the fact more people don’t change banks more often which keeps this state of affairs going – certainly it’s got to the point now where I’m willing to go through changing banks to ensure I get good customer service as a priority, having been disappointed and annoyed at various points in the past.

I think it will be a while yet, but more and more alternatives to traditional banks and lending are appearing, and some are already surviving the existing financial restrictions…and with the banks still monumentally failing their customers, I can see more and more attempts to break through the red tape to offer better services…

Chicken and Egg – Does a social media strategy enable transparency or is transparency a prerequisite for a successful social media strategy? Hiring someone to start a blog and participate on twitter is not a social media strategy, but it can help as a forcing function to have the conversation. IMHO, a social media strategy requires at least an acknowledgment of the need to shift the culture towards transparency, participation and listening. I also think the organization needs to build the processes to listen and act on the feedback from the community.

Often this has to come from the top. When I was responsible for the BCC (Broad Customer Community) efforts at Microsoft, the entire executive team embraced these concepts. A great example is Soma’s blog post about transparency (he runs the developer division) http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/11/11/256210.aspx . Community participation became part of the culture, part of the DNA that defined how the organization worked and how success was measured.

Your comment just shows how totally unconnected J&J is. The only bloggers you “reach out” to are the ones bought and paid for by Walmart (hmmm… vendor?). It took 2 weeks for anyone to respond to me and I was one of the first ones to use your email form.

It’s fair for a company to say that they aren’t interested in social media.

It’s insulting to pretend like you are interested, and then behave in an antisocial manner. The attempt to rewrite history is silly AND if you understood netiquette you’d know better than to leave your URL in the comment body.

So, yeah, I’m still bugged with y’all.

Jessica

Interest in social media seems to be on quite an upward trajectory at the moment. We have had a record number of hits with our posts yesterday and today.