In Mary Meeker’s now famous yearly “State of the Internet” presentation a chart (page 28) shows how strongly Internet users in different countries share their life via social media. Surprisingly, it is the population of Saudi Arabia who lead the ranking (60% “share most or everything online”), followed by India, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey. The US are - surprisingly - way down the list with only 15% and Germany almost last with under 10%.

Apart from the interesting question why emerging markets are so much more into social sharing compared to Europe and the US, the main point is that social sharing is BIG. It’s important. It’s probably the most important trend from a marketing perspective in the next ten years. So, we are wondering why this trend is largely ignored by banks around the globe. In our latest research on Mobile Apps for Banking and Wealth Management Websites we found that only a minority of banks of about 40% allows (some) sharing of their content via social networks mostly in a very basic version.

Social sharing comes in many different flavors. It’s simple to put a Facebook or Twitter icon below or above every article. But that’s not very likely to generate the kind of user excitement one would like to see in social networks. A bank should think pro-actively about its “sharing strategy” which contains a number of important steps:

1. Ask the right questions: What should be shared? Who should be encouraged to share? Which sharing channels are most effective - given the segment one wants to reach? Plus a few more questions of which the sharing strategists should think about.

2. Generate sharable content: Once the strategy is clear, sharable content needs to be put in the right place. It could be a host of new, engaging client tools on the website - for instance to encourage the clients to think about their financial future in completely new ways. It could be a new mobile game inside our outside the standard banking app. It could be an outrageous video campaign, targeted at a much focused client segment like wine collectors, going viral.

3. Opt for a/multiple sharing channel(s) that fit(s) the target segment: YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and/or a host of other platforms. It all depends on the user segment.

4. Test: But beware, there is always the risk that instead of benign recommendations and sharing on social networks you may get a veritable shit storm ridiculing a marketing campaign gone very wrong. To avoid this, some testing and tweaking with real users before you go live is essential.

5. Follow: Make sure you are not missing a success or a shit storm (well, you ain’t gonna miss a real shit storm). So, track your campaigns closely, track the shares/likes/pins, track the comments you get…whatever.

By the way, social sharing is closely related to another concept which will have a major impact in the coming years: “On-demand marketing”. We will talk about this in one of the upcoming blogs…

by Francis Groves, Senior Analyst Social & Mobile Media

Earlier this week, Ignites, the Financial Times publication that follows the US mutual funds industry, has highlighted some of the strengths of social media strategy of Blackrock, the hugely important fund manager that also owns the iShares ETF business. Blackrock is reported to have seen the biggest rises in the numbers of people following it on Twitter and YouTube, 15.9% and 38.4% in the month to May 11 of any of the US’s top 10 fund companies (Ignites reports). But what really drew our attention was the group’s blogging strategy. Blackrock and iShares staff are sharing the same blog - under the iShares brand - and Blackrock is adopting its subsidiary’s ‘blog-centric’ social media strategy which basically amounts to focusing on great content in the expectation that readers will it pass it on. MyPrivateBanking commend this commitment to blogging as the thinking person’s social media. Although many commentators are apparently critical of the idea of a single blog for the entire group, we wonder if doing away with dual or multiple content series actually makes content a whole lot more accessible for social media consumers. It’ll be interesting to see if Blackrock/iShares stay with their single blog approach.

Knab, the new Internet bank, that’s a wholely-owned subsidiary of the Dutch insurance giant Aegon, has an interesting approach to the provision of financial advice. The name, ‘bank’ back-to-front, has been chosen to suggest not just innovation but re-engineering of retail banking, and when it comes to providing financial advice they certainly seem to be living up to their revolutionary principles. Firstly, they won’t actually be offering any advice of their own, just offering customers the opportunity to choose from a panel of pre-selected financial advisors. However, the final touch is the most interesting idea; customer reviews of these financial experts that are publicly available. Advisors have to receive good reviews in order qualify to continue to be available for hire through Knab. With this combination of the bank vetting the advisors first and the customers’ satisfaction scores, the Knab team may have succeeded in creating one of the safest environments for retail customers in the industry. This experiment deserves to be watched closely.

At first glance, ISSUU seems to be filling a significant gap in the range of social media: providing a way for banks and other businesses to engage with the public through print publications in the same way that YouTube provides a vital outlet for corporate video content. The site passes the first test, of providing a lot of attractive content. If you want a beauty parade for publishers and graphic designers, ISSUU is a good place to go. However, the site has yet to be included among the fairly select group of Internet presences that have become meeting places on a mass scale. To achieve that status, ISSUU needs to recognize that readers (and that’s who most site visitors will be) are more concerned with finding individual articles of interest than admiring a magazine cover to cover. They need more help from the site, probably in the form of (blog-style) tags for articles. The finance industry has to accept that their material will be jostling for readers’ attention alongside competitor offerings. If ISSUU insists on always preserving the integrity of individual publications in presenting content, it won’t become the channel of choice for finance industry players to grow their readership.

ISSUU

Only a few days after publication this brandnew report has already made it into the media:

Insurance Journal: Report Finds Less than 10% of Global Insurers Using ‘App’ Strategy

Insurance Networking News: AXA, State Farm, Humana and Aegon Top Global Mobile App Ranking

CIO: Versicherungs-Apps nicht nutzerfreundlich (German)

Das Investment: Versicherer nutzen nur 20 Prozent des Potenzials von Apps (German)

Fortune is reporting that Australia’s Commonwealth Bank and Facebook are quietly building the first Facebook banking app:

“Facebook is quietly planning just such an offering with Australia’s Commonwealth Bank. Currently in an internal beta, with the first version built in March, the application is expected to launch sometime this year to customers. It will allow Facebook users who are bank customers to make payments to third parties as well as Facebook friends through the social media channel, according to the bank. Commonwealth will secure transactions with its own authentication system — similar to how payments are secured on its online and mobile banking site, a spokesperson says.”

It’s an interesting experiment and also quite logical, given the rising interest of financial services companies in the use of social media. In combination with a fundamental shift in cosumer behavior - the younger generations are heavy users of social media plus the older gernerations are also adopting these platforms - it makes a lot of sense to use social networks also for financial transactions. For the banks the critical question is whether they want to use a third party (like Facebook) or whether they will be capable to offer their own social media channels - not onlöy for communication but also for transactions.

The big Facebook IPO is history. Some people think it has been a disaster. Personally, I believe that it has been a big success for Facebook. May be the stock is overvalued. But the company has now lots of firepower to gear up its marketing engines, try out new business models and generally become a huge factor in online marketing.This means that banks should think long and hard about the role of Facebook (and other social media) in their marketing strategy. It will be an indispensable building block for every marketing and sales strategy of every bank worldwide targeting private cutomers.

Here is a snippet from our latest report on Social Media in Banking 2012:

“Our analysis gave lots of reasons to think that almost universally banks have neither a comprehensive social media strategy nor a dedicated team to serve all media in an integrated manner. Little better than having no social media presence at all, is sending conflicting messages across various channels or showing no activity for weeks. These mistakes can easily be avoided by establishing a dedicated social media team that ensures the message the company wants to send is communicated in an appropriate way across all channels.”

You can get the whole report here. Over the next weeks we will give some more peek previews of our analysis with regard to Social media.

For the last months our analyst team has been working on a new landmark report “Social Media and Banking” - this report will get published in mid April. It will be an in-depth analysis of the social media strategies of the 50 globally most important bank. We are looking  at social media strategies targeted at private customers, retail customers or general users. The banks will be rated and ranked according to a very detailed set of evaluation criteria.

It has become increasingly clear to us that banks approach social media with very different overall strategie - and many have no strategy at all. I think there are right now 3 main social media strategies of banks:

1. Customer support via social media
2. Product and service information via social media
3. Strengthening the brand via charity & community initiatives, sponsoring etc. which is communicated via social media

In many cases, more than one of the strategies are blended together. Rarely, we find an integrated but differentiated offering which brings together all these strategies but doesn’t mix them up or confuses them. In addition, we find typically communication offerings with investors or recruits.

Most banks keep their social media teams separate from their general marketing or communication department. Right now I guess this ist the right strategic step as otherwise the development of social media will develop way too slow. .

We are finding that banks struggle immensely with the issue of how to integrate social media in their regular online strategies and Internet marketing. I am not sure if there is “one best way” to do it. I guess at this stage various experiments are in order to see which approach works best. But this means a good bank will do lots of different things on their website to try out the new media.

So, stay put for our new report - there is lots more to come.  By the way, here is our  older report on Wealth Management and Social Media.

This chart summarizes a lot of our insights with regard to segmentation of wealthy customers and their usage of social media and mobile apps. Put in a nutshell, we are seeing that particularly the entrepreneurial segment and the “young & hungry” are aggressively using social and mobile media, followed by “Old Money” and the “Mittelstand”  (managerial class and owners of medium-sized businesses) segments.

It is a development that will profoundly influence the business of wealth management over the next decade. As social media are increasingly entering the financial industry, clients will demand new solutions and communication patterns from their banks and advisors. Another development shows, that recommendations from peers will become critical in the decision making process when choosing a new provider. The brand of financial players can also be heavily influenced through discussions and sentiment on social networks. In summary, social and mobile media are a strategic challenge, involving communication, sales and marketing efforts of every financial player. Be ready.

Google+ was launched 7 months ago in June 2011. On January 19 it was reported that G+ has surpassed a user base of 90 million and may reach 400 million by the end of 2012. However, these are not necessarily active users (as the 900 million reported users of FB). MPB analysts are working right now on a new analysis of social media & banking (to be published end of March 2012). The preliminary results on Google+ show that most banks have a presence there - but usually without any or with very little content. It can be described as “wait-and-see-strategy” or simply to put a placeholder on the network.

Over the last 2 months G+ has gained a lot of traction and there seems also some clear support from Google’s search services for the network. I guess that G+ as a networking platform is still technically a bit confusing (may be a consequence of the different terminology like “circles”, “hangout” etc.) but is essentially offering a similar platform as Facebook. Some innovations like “hangouts” and the search function seem even better than on FB. Yet - despite some heated discussion among tech geeks - this is not really important. What seems crucial is the point that Google potentially has the market power and leverage to push G+ to become a FB rival. The key here is the search services of Google and some existing services which - in combination with a new viable network platform - can potentially become very successful. Yes, Google Buzz was a disappointment - but probably a necessary stepping stone to the technically much more mature G+.

What does this mean for banks and other financial service providers? They should probably have a presence on G+ and also spend some resources on filling this presence with content & life. Not necessarily too much yet - as it remains to be seen what will happen to G+ over the next 12 months but don’t underestimate the marketing power of a 800 pound gorilla. If G+ can keep its speed one will have to take it seriously very soon. It will be fascinating to watch how and where G+ and FB will try to get a competitive advantage and how the will try to differentiate themselves from each other. Make sure to follow our research when our new report will come out in March with more analysis about Google+, other social media trends and how banks can profit.