social media Archives

May 4, 2017May 4, 2017

Jill Castilla: Social media is an opportunity to humanize big banks

For a one-branch bank with just $250 million in assets, Citizens Bank of Edmond is one of the most innovative and forward-leaning banks of its size — and way ahead of its community banking peers. It replaced many former branches with video teller machines, and its mobile payment and deposit products are on a par with the biggest banks.

The Edmond, Oklahoma, bank, was on the brink of failure in 2009 when Jill Castilla became its new CEO and transformed it into a leader in innovation — getting it the type of praise usually reserved for the largest banks with bigger budgets and bigger scale. Castilla put social media to work to help Citizens engage with customers, attract talent and rebuild its image.

Castilla, continuously recognized as one of the most powerful and innovative bank CEOs, is also one of the most active on social media, particularly on Twitter. She has more than 12,000 followers there and her feed is filled with tweets about goings on at the bank and in the local area, posts selfies and engages with customers. She talked with Tearsheet about how social media has helped Citizens’ brand, business and community.

There aren’t a lot of bank CEOs so involved in Twitter. What got the ball rolling for you?
I came to lead a bank turnaround. We didn’t have a marketing department; we had very little money. Social media came around the right time and seemed like an accessible way we could get feedback. It was kind of just me doing it from the beginning. It was really time efficient and inexpensive.

Compare your involvement to the larger banks. How come Jamie Dimon isn’t tweeting?
I don’t know why he doesn’t — it would be the best reputation repair management. He tells some great stories in print media. Big banks tend to use social more as problem management and financial literacy tools. But it really should be a tool to make people feel connected to the people that are running these big banks rather than just being someone that can respond to a question. Big banks are missing out on being able to humanize those institutions that can often be villainized.

Do you have a social media team today?
We have one staff member that’s part of marketing and has social media expertise. But through social media we’ve gained a reputation in the technology sector for financial services. We could acquire some technology firm to expand our outreach. But there aren’t any immediate plans.

What role has social media played in your understanding of fintech today?
There isn’t a better tool to orient you with what’s happening in fintech. I draw so much inspiration from being able to follow incredible minds in fintech unhampered by legacy technology. Twitter especially can be such a wonderful tool for bankers wanting to access the creativity, the disruption that’s happening throughout the entire world.

What have you learned from being on Twitter?
I initially thought there would be pressure to develop content and started to realize social media platforms are more about a conversation. And you develop professional relationships that could impact the bottom line of the bank.

Can you give an example?
We host a community event every month March through October, Heard on Hurd, and we only use social media to promote it. So I’ve had non-customers email our bank’s generic email address about wanting to be part of our bank just because of what they’re seeing on social media. Often they’re businesses I’ve had no introduction to other than through social media.

March 23, 2017March 22, 2017

5 ways banks are using Snapchat

Citibank Snapchat Spectacles video. — Citibank video taken with Snapchat Spectacles.

It was bad enough when your mom joined Snapchat to see what all the fuss was about. Now your bank wants to send you snaps, too.

“They feel like there’s a need to jump on Snapchat or else they’re going to get left behind,” said Mike Metzler, director of client strategy at Delmondo, a company that manages influencer campaigns and produces Snapchat branded content for prominent consumer brands, including Mastercard.

But consumers, particularly Snapchat’s largely millennial user base, have a high bar for organic content, analysts say. If the material isn’t sufficiently compelling, a user may completely shut out a brand.

“The process of adding someone on Snapchat is so cumbersome,” said Metzler. “If you’re a bank and you get someone to add you and make crappy content it’s a risk.”

Banks have been considering different uses for Snapchat, including marketing to job seekers, addressing questions from customers and generally trying to be more visible in a social media channel more heavily used by younger people. They are still trying to figure out what works best, so the approach is still cautious and experimental.

“They don’t know what they’re trying to achieve,” said Peter Wannemacher, senior analyst at Forrester. “Bank customers are not screaming out for ways to combine their financial lives and their social media lives.”

Here are five ways banks are testing Snapchat:

BNP staffers reach out to recruiters through Snapchat. Credit: Snapchat screenshot via Twitter. — Would you give them your money, though?

Recruitment
In November of last year, BNP Paribas launched Snapchat Recruitment week, where recruiters from five cities around the world gave snapshots of the company’s working culture.

American banks have also amped up their Snapchat recruiting efforts. Not long after their launch of Snapchat Spectacles, Citibank employees began shooting videos with them to offer insights of life as a Citibank worker.

“The videos provide a bird’s eye view of a day in the life at Citi, allowing recruits to follow someone as they interact with colleagues and do their job,” said Courtney Storz, head of global campus recruitment and program management at Citi.

Customer service
Dutch bank ABN Amro launched a Snapchat customer service capability (Snapchat “webcare”), a feature that’s yielded them 2000 followers since its launch a year ago. The bank posts stories to engage users who can ask questions using photos, videos, emojis and filters. Not being too serious is a lesson learned from the product’s first year, spokeswoman Brigitte Seegers told American Banker.

CIBC LGBTQ pride Snapchat filter. Photo credit: Snaphat screenshot via Twitter. — LGBTQ pride Snapchat filter from CIBC.

Aligning with a cause
Through Snapchat, banks are affiliating themselves with causes close to customers’ hearts. For example, CIBC, Canada’s fifth-largest bank, launched a Snapchat pride filter to mark LGBTQ pride festivities last summer.

In the U.S., JP Morgan Chase used Snapchat ads to mark international Women’s Day with a takeover of the international women’s day story on March 8 highlighting the firm’s female leaders.

Providing financial tips and advice
The Bank of Ireland pulled in celebrity influencers who use the Snapchat offer financial tips and advice to younger customers — a part of the bank’s FeelFree student reward program. Laura Lynch, head of youth banking at the Bank of Ireland, told the Irish Times that the bank is looking to use Snapchat “ to communicate with our student customers and share helpful tips with them on a range of topics and give them behind-the-scenes access.”

JPMCC_London — A Snapchat geofilter for JPMorgan Chase’s London Corporate Challenge.

Adding brand visibility at sponsored events
Bank of America’s Llama was used as a Snapchat lens was released last summer in conjunction with the MLB All Star Game to promote the bank’s mobile app. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase has used Snapchat geofilters for the Chase Corporate Challenge.

March 6, 2017May 1, 2017

Why Zelle is more than just a Venmo clone

When a product’s name becomes a verb, it’s safe to say it’s caught on. The popularity of ‘Venmoing’ pizza or beer money goes one step further and offers proof that mobile peer-to-peer payments have changed the way Americans interact with money. For its largely millennial user base, Venmo is a social network that lets users add emojis, have a little fun and make transferring money less transactional. For banks, Venmo occupies a peer-to-peer payments space they haven’t been able to crack — until perhaps now.

Zelle, a peer-to-peer payments system run by major U.S. banks, is rolling out this year. Last month, Bank of America was the first major bank to announce Zelle integration into its mobile banking app, and others will soon follow. Zelle has often been portrayed as the banks’ way to go after PayPal-owned Venmo. Recent headlines called Zelle’s launch a “war on Venmo,” or “Venmo killer.” But it may be just a sign that the peer-to-peer payment marketplace is now large enough to accommodate multiple players, including older customers who are less likely to post an emoji every time they’ve made good on their promise to repay a friend back a few dollars.

Zelle itself is a rebranding of the bank-led clearXchange peer-to-peer payments network, run by Early Warning and owned by a consortium of major banks. It’s a network that will let customers of 19 major banks to make instant payments to each other, and through partnerships with payment processors, Visa and Mastercard, credit union customers will be able to use it, giving it huge growth possibilities.

Beyond a new option to send money to friends, Zelle may be out for a much larger piece of the pie than just Venmo users. With $17.6 billion in payments processed last year, Venmo is a force to be reckoned with. But Zelle developers say they are aiming for a much larger market.

Zelle’s marketing strategy focuses on consistent branding emphasizing the user experience — the security and the rapidity of payments — rather than the social element.

“When we talk about Zelle, it’s about a target market that ranges from 18 to 54,” said Jeremiah Glodoveza, vp of communications at Early Warning. “When we did our research, social sharing or those types of features, sure they may have appealed to a subset of that segment, but not all of them, so what we’re really optimizing is for an ubiquitous experience and that’s why some of that functionality wasn’t prioritized.”

Although banks may be behind on peer-to-peer payments, they have a strategic advantage over competitors with control over the payments infrastructure and inbuilt trust among some users. So rather than trying compete head-to-head with Venmo, Zelle is likely to organically draw in a large customer base.

“They just have to have a viable alternative,” said Bob Meara, senior analyst at Celent.

The peer-to-peer payments market may also be a way for banks to keep customers from leaving the bank’s ecosystem, increasing the likelihood that they may use other bank products.

“This is bigger than peer-to-peer payments,” said Meara. “Every time Paypal, or Square or Venmo takes a customer interaction away from a bank, that’s engagement a bank doesn’t have with its customers. If banks can keep their users engaged, then they have more of an opportunity to cement relationships with customers while providing a broader array of services.”

Venmo, however, says new entrants in the peer-to-peer payments marketplace is a net positive.

“The common enemy is cash, which makes up up the majority of payments between friends today,” said spokesman Josh Criscoe. “There’s plenty of room for several more folks in the market, so we think that if any additional folks enter the market, we welcome it.”

Criscoe said Venmo has a loyal user base built on word-of-mouth recommendations and social sharing. While it can take 24 hours or more for money to transfer over Venmo, he said instances when people need the money immediately is more the exception than the norm. He added that PayPal’s recent partnerships with Visa and Mastercard will allow Venmo users instant access to funds later this year.

While Zelle has the prospect of broad appeal due to the ability for bank accounts to interface directly with one another without requiring a third party, Zelle could benefit from taking a page from Venmo through social media outreach.

“Banks definitely should be looking at what Venmo is doing as far as connecting the user base using APIs from Facebook connections and other social media aspects to more easily connect consumers to each other,” said Brendan Miller, principal analyst at Forrester. “That was the secret sauce for Venmo and it’s something banks should try to replicate.”

December 15, 2016March 16, 2017

‘Apps are the new magazines’: Why Bloomberg’s doubling down on apps

By Sahil Patel

Forget the mobile web or social platforms: Bloomberg Media’s betting its mobile future on apps.

Starting with its redesigned flagship mobile app, Bloomberg plans to launch several new apps in the coming year with a focus on delivering personalized content to users in a more seamless and controllable fashion than what’s currently available on the mobile web and inside social platforms.

“Apps are the new magazines and newspapers,” said Scott Havens, global head of digital for Bloomberg Media. “I know if I have brand affinity [for a publisher], it’s because I get what I need and I find it a useful part of my daily media diet — that’s the underlying philosophy for the app.”

Six months in the making, the new Bloomberg app has a completely overhauled interface. It replaces the previous app’s pared-down, black-and-white design with more color and imagery. And instead of a “hamburger”-based navigation menu, the new app comes with tabs on the bottom of the screen — similar to the current Facebook app. (This is intentional as Havens said the previous setup wasn’t working that well. “Who better to copy than the biggest platform in the world?” he said.)

There are also practical reasons for the new design. The previous version of the app did not do a good job of highlighting Bloomberg’s media and markets content — the new one does. For instance, the media tab curates Bloomberg’s library of on-demand videos, radio streams, podcasts and even its TV channel. On the home tab, Bloomberg also posts markets data as banners at the top of the screen, which users can click on to quickly access the markets page.

The ad experience has also been given more thought as advertisers will now have the option to run ads in-between pieces of editorial content as users scroll down the page. This set-up also allows for sponsored posts to be embedded within the page.

The goal of the new design is to increase usage. The app currently receives 2.5 million unique visitors per month, a number that’s remained relatively flat for some time now, according to Bloomberg. “The rise of mobile and social and our lack of investment in redoing the app over the past few years contributed to us treading water,” Havens said.

The company hopes to double or triple the audience in the coming year. One way the publisher plans to do it is by introducing so-called day-parted content. Within the main tab, users will now get a personalized stream of three to five relevant stories depending on what time of day it is — morning, afternoon or evening — and where they’re accessing the app (users in Europe will get the afternoon diet while U.S. users get the morning feed).

The app was built by Bloomberg’s 20-person mobile apps team, which includes four full-time mobile editors. This group will also work on a new video app that will “rethink” how on-demand video and live video can function in streaming environments, Havens said.

Overall on mobile, the mobile web still dominates apps in terms of pure scale. Research released earlier this year by comScore found that among the top 1,000 mobile apps and mobile sites, mobile sites averaged three times as many users as apps and were growing twice as fast. That said, apps still dominate in terms of prolonged usage, averaging 87 percent of mobile time spent in the U.S. for the last two years, according to comScore. What’s more, the same report said the number of U.S. apps with 5 million downloads or more grew by 8 percent year over year — all suggesting there’s a healthy market for publishers that choose to develop apps instead of focusing on mobile web or publishing inside social apps.

“You can’t outsource your future as a publisher,” Havens said. “We’re not walking away from social platforms; there are a lot of potential app downloads that can come from Facebook. But we want to bring users into a direct relationship. To forego that is essentially waving a white flag.”

December 14, 2016December 14, 2016

Citibank’s Julie Booth on activating customer passion points

On this week’s podcast we have Citibank’s Julie Booth. She is a senior vice president in the cards group focused on social and content strategies for North America. She spoke at the Tradestreaming Money Conference in New York City on November 14.

Her presentation described how marketers at leading financial firms can target customer passion points. Julie’s team works to create social ambassadors — customers who scream from the mountain tops how happy they are to be working with Citi. Julie describes Citi’s surprise and delight campaigns that identify social opportunities to provide extraordinary service to a customer. From there, social teams encourage happy clients to share their experiences with their own networks.

Listen through to the end as Julie fields a couple of interesting questions from the crowd.

Subscribe: iTunes I SoundCloud

Below are highlights, edited for clarity, from the episode.

From business priorities to passion points

We don’t have a large team at Citi, but we service various categories, including proprietary products, services, co-brands, entertainment, and cross franchise, with social media, content, and innovation. We pump out ten thousand pieces of content every quarter and every single one of them needs to be approved by compliance and legal. We’re trying to speak to our customers’ passion points.

Citibank's Julie Booth on customer passion points

We identify the things our customers are excited about, whether it’s travel, retail, auto, dining, or sports and we offer experiences and access for any of these types of customers. It’s an experiential one-stop shop. No matter what you have a passion for, you need money to do it. You need a reliable payment method to do any of these things. Can a financial services firm offer great value for using its card that others aren’t? What kind of experience can you offer that would get your customers shouting from the mountaintops that they’re proud Citi customers? That’s how you build social ambassadors — the access you provide to say, a Billy Joel concert, needs to be unique, memorable and community-driven (customers should be encouraged to share images from the event). Lastly, curate that community element to show everything you’re giving card members.

Data

“You can’t control what you can’t measure.” What we’ve noticed is that when it comes to bragging about corporate wins, you’re not going to dump a data set on a managing director’s desk. She just doesn’t have the time. Talk to your line of business, determine your priorities, take a cluster of metrics and construct a narrative summary to deliver to the higher ups. You need to tell a story. Hard metrics are always available but you need to control the narrative to show what success looks like. We tailor our performance narratives to different groups within Citi.

Key takeaways — surprise and delight

We sponsor thousands of events with our partner, LiveNation. We offer special access to Citi cardmembers to things like football pro camp with Rob Gronkowski. When we promote these experiences across social media, we don’t just publish dryly. For example, our social team shares images of music artists, asking our audience about their favorite songs. You have to amp it up.

We do social listening and sentiment to identify opportunities to surprise and delight our customers. When someone tweets that they want to go to a concert, our team direct messages them with two free tickets courtesy of Citi. But you can’t just say, “We have 2017 season Mets tickets.” You have to say something like “Bleed blue and orange.” Understand who these people are, so you can tailor your content and copy to the passion points of each person.

November 23, 2016March 16, 2017

When fintech met Thanksgiving

Although it might not have been what the pilgrims or Native Americans initially had in mind, the most obvious intersection between Thanksgiving weekend and fintech is payments and ecommerce. This year, nearly 75% of Americans — who can at least agree that they love shopping — plan on hitting the stores on Black Friday. If last year is any indication, online sales will be huge. In 2015, consumers spent a whopping $4.45 billion on Black Friday and Thanksgiving.

That means that, in addition to the increasing number of unfortunate humans scheduled to work on those days, payment technologies like Walmart Pay or Visa Checkout will be working overtime to respectively process all of these in-store and online payments.

While Black Friday and its payment technology accomplices may have managed to invert the holiday’s symbol of the Cornucopia, Thanksgiving weekend isn’t just about consumerism. Here are three ways that Thanksgiving weekend and fintech come together to promote giving.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding platforms enable consumers to give on the go. So even if they can’t get to a food bank to donate or serve on the holiday, consumers can to use crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo to finance the holiday meal of someone in need.

Financial Advice

Some fintechs use the holidays to help bring their customers up to speed about best practices. For instance, SMB lender Kabbage advises small businesses to offer Thanksgiving cards and to use the holiday to do employee team building. Kabbage suggests the Turkey Trot. Another online lender for SMBs, BFS Capital, took the holiday as an opportunity to publish these 8 Thanksgiving promotions.

Social Media

Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday, which is in turn replaced by #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving. And while brands can get a lot out of promoting giving, the fact is that #GivingTuesday campaigns in the U.S. raised nearly $117 million in online donations in 2015. Among the banks and fintechs that have been involved with #GivingTuesday are Bank of America, JPM Chase, TD Bank Group, PayPal, Stripe, and Prosper.

So even though payments and ecommerce might be standing in Thanksgiving’s fintech spotlight, behind the scenes fintech really is spreading some holiday spirit.

May 30, 2012July 6, 2016

How transparent is financial social media really?

Over the past few years, investors have been treated to an unprecedented level of transparency thanks to Twitter/Facebook/blogging.

With millions of people tradestreaming (the collective publishing of investing advice 24/7) out onto social networks, all an investor needs to do is just plug in and begin learning from investors much more experienced and talented than he.

Moving beyond just listening to the stream, many investors are replicating hedge fund returns by following top investors’ quarterly regulatory filings on sites like market folly and using research tools the likes of AlphaClone (affiliate link because it’s awesome).

Here’s an example of how I’ve built my own DIY all-star hedge fund.

Professional advisors and the social media pushback

But this post on Quora (if you’re interested, follow the Tradestreaming board on Quora) got me thinking about how transparent investors — particularly, investment advisors — really are online.

In fact, in talking with many portfolio managers about the merits of joining a marketplace for portfolio managers like Covestor, one of the biggest pushbacks I’ve heard has been the need to be completely transparent. It’s one reason why truly valuable actively managed strategies may not make their way to ETF format: investors can track (almost) every move.

As the Quora post describes, many investment advisors feel that their stock picks are their special sauce and wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize losing their edge.

There’s little advantage in it for them, because for most the exclusive nature is their bread and butter

Freemium: emphasis on the -mium

When they approach publishing online, these investors actually reveal very little of what they’re really doing with their portfolios. They throw a bone to investors here and there, but typically it’s just a throwaway investment idea, not something they’d stake their livelihoods on.

If these investment types are really using a freemium model to attract new clients, they’re definitely emphasizing the –mium part, not the free.

The downside risk of being wrong outweighs opportunity of being right

Of course, like financial newsletters, there’s a downside to being completely transparent — the risk of being wrong. Investors want to believe good managers (and newsletters) are infallible. All their picks go up. Returns are always outsized.

Just take look at Jim Jubak — he’s publishing away, airing his laundry for the world to see. He gets some right and some wrong. The point is no stock picker is going to be infallible.

Advisors have good months and bad ones — that’s part of the game and inevitable. It’s how well advisors limit their downside on the bad months that determines how good overall performance is going to be. Investors don’t like to think about how hard investing is (geez, May 2012 was impossible).

As Barron’s Steve Sears said in my recent interview with him:

Investors want a pharmaceutical solution to investing, a magic performance pill they pop to succeed.

But of course, for most of us, we understand that it’s not always the outcome of the investment advice. Rather, it’s the thought process, the intellectual back-and-forth to hone a thesis about what the world will look like in the future.

That’s hard but it’s also a conversation worth having. That’s why I’m betting on the tradestream as the future of investing.

photo courtesy of Fayster

December 19, 2011

11 reasons why 2011 was an outstanding year for investors

2011 has been one of the best years on record for investors.

That’s right — you heard me. One of the best years for investors.

I’m not talking about the S&P500 which is still down about 3% for the year. The jury’s still out whether the year will end up in the green or red for investors.

But performance is NOT what I’m talking about.

2011 has been a great year for investors in other ways. Individual investors have never had so much choice, low-cost investment options. This year was a break-through for investors with new investing and research platforms mushrooming up around us as we slept.

We’ve never seen such a real move of the financial industry to move to the same side of the investing table.

Investors haven’t seen content — good content — written by women for women. Data and apps are changing the way we research and invest — investing has become a collaborative process.

The great thing is that I was writing about all these trends in 2010 when I published Tradestreaming.

Now they’re a reality.

So without further-ado (and as the New Year rapidly approaches), let me get to my 11 reasons why 2011 was an awesome year for investing.
Continue reading “11 reasons why 2011 was an outstanding year for investors”