Research: The acceleration of Australian banks’ use of social media

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Financial services is one of the most industries in which the use of social media is the most relevant, not least because customer service is a critical differentiator between highly commoditized offerings. While financial services and banking were traditionally highly relationship-based, the shift to online has significantly eroded those relationships. Social media, used well, provides an opportunity to build relationships in a world in which most financial services are executed online.

In a global context, Australian banks were fairly slow to adopt the use of social media, however more recently a number have become a lot more active as they recognize its fundamental importance to their future.

Vindaya Senadheera, Prof. Matthew Warren, and Dr. Shona Leitch from Deakin University have done some interesting research in their paper A study on how Australian banks use social media.

To analyze the banks’ activity they use the Honeycomb framework of social media which was presented by Kietzmann et al in their paper Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media, which points to the key elements of social media engagement as Identity, Groups, Relationships, Presence, Sharing, Conversations, and Reputation.

Here are a few key points from the research

Twitter:

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Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the future of Twitter

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Continuing our series of conversations on the future with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency and myself, here we discuss the future of Twitter.

Some of the topics we discuss include:
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The role of informal social networks in building organizational creativity and innovation

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For the last decade I have examined and applied social network analysis in and across organizations, for example in large professional firms, technology purchase decision-making, high-performance personal networks, and other applications.

The more time you spend with the analysis of social networks in organizations and those firms that have applied the techniques, the more evident the power of these approaches. In particular for high-performing organizations, applying social network analysis is one of the most useful tools in pushing value creation to the next level. This is evident in the California Management Review paper I co-authored on Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective, in which we examined how to improve performance in sales, innovation, and execution.

Innovation is of course a particularly pointed issue today, with the increasing pace of external and industry change driving the necessity of effective, applied creativity. However this is often difficult in large, complex organizations.

To this point, the IBM Institute for Business Value has released a report on Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity.

The report has some interesting insights and findings, including this chart of the opposites needing resolution in a creative organization.


Source: IBM Creative Leadership Report
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Where Google+ needs to go: Why we need to be able to follow parts of people’s personas

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The centrality and ease of use of the Circles feature means Google+ is a significant step forward in social networking. It has been a key platform in its initial success.

The Circles feature enables people to selectively share content. Someone can send work-related discussions to their public stream, photos of their children to their family, and information about a boating event to their yacht club friends.

This effectively addresses privacy issues in allowing us to share both public and private information on the one platform, and not have to divide ourselves across different profiles.

However even our public personas have many facets. One person can be a leading software developer, music enthusiast, food lover, skier, and overall a lovable person. All of that is public – there are no constraints on sharing in any of those spaces.

Some people will want to follow everything that person shares. Many may be only interested in their thoughts on software development, and not care about the rest. Yet they have no choice – either they follow everything that person shares or nothing.

Gartner analyst and VP Brian Prentice brought this into focus in a recent Google+ post:
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DARPA offers $42 million for ‘revolutionary’ research on social media analysis

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (slogan: Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise) is offering $42 million in funding for “revolutionary” research into social media in strategic communication.

The DARPA announcement states:

The conditions under which our Armed Forces conduct operations are rapidly changing with the spread of blogs, social networking sites, and media]sharing technology (such as YouTube), and further accelerated by the proliferation of mobile technology. Changes to the nature of conflict resulting from the use of social media are likely to be as profound as those resulting from previous communications revolutions. The effective use of social media has the potential to help the Armed Forces better understand the environment in which it operates and to allow more agile use of information in support of operations.

The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi]automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

The New York Times comments:
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How large professional service firms are shifting to networked services and open innovation

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I recently ran a workshop on the future of business at the strategy offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firm.

During the evening I had a very interesting conversation with one of the regional directors about how professional service firms are tapping external networks.

For over a decade I have written and spoken about the rise of networked professional services, looking at the trend for independent professionals to collaborate in order to compete with large firms. As I wrote in Chapter 9 of Living Networks:

Professional networks, although hardly a new phenomenon, are rapidly rising in importance. Their evolution is being driven by both the new ways of working enabled by connectivity, and the swift shift to professionals working as free agents. Corporate clients are increasingly happy to consider independent professionals as service providers, and in some cases actually prefer effective professional networks to expensive global firms with cookie-cutter approaches. The bottom-line is that for many types of business, professional networks are increasingly viable competitors to large, established firms. This is already apparent, but will become more obvious in coming years.

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The dilemma for professionals: How do you respond to anonymous leaks and slander?

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Today’s Australian Financial Review has an interesting article titled “Watch out for the spook in the navy blue suit” which looks at how professionals can respond to anonymous slander, quoting me and a few others.

It looks at FirmSpy, which is a site that provides gossip about Australian professional firms, notably law firms and the local arms of the Big 4 accounting firms. FirmSpy provides insights into internal issues such as bullying, sexual harassment, and staff satisfaction and turnover, resulting in Australian Financial Review calling it “Australia’s own Wikileaks for lawyers and accountants”.

For those accused of wrongdoing, there are limited possibilities for response. The article says:
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Integrating social media into cross-channel customer relationships

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Una giornata di pioggia e di sole
A week ago I was in Sanya, China, where I gave the guest keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference.

NICE Systems’ history is in providing voice recording and analytics to companies with many customer interactions, such as banks and telcos, for customer services and security. From there it has morphed into providing a series of broad-based platforms to improve customer interactions across channels.

In the world of Customer Relationship Management, an increasingly important and now dominant issue is effectively managing relationships across channels. The critical ‘single customer view’ becomes more difficult yet ever more important as new channels such as chat, mobile apps, and a variety of social media are added to existing customer communication channels.
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The state of expert networks and the rising role of LinkedIn

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It is some years now since ‘expert networks’ have become a significant force, linking subject matter experts in science, technology, and business to clients, largely in funds management and finance, usually at very healthy hourly rates. Clients such as hedge funds that are investing in particular sectors or companies want to know more about issues such as the viability of drug development processes, or when they can, about internal issues like staff turnover. A survey showed that over 40% of institutional investors found that expert networks were an “extremely” or “very important” aspect of their company research.

Clearly there is the potential for insider information to be made available if people are currently, or even possibly recently, employed by the company in question. The expert networks, most notably Gerson Lehrman Group, which is reported to control two-thirds of the market, have strict clauses in their agreements about what can be discussed by experts. But sometimes things go too far. An FBI probe into a consultant working through Gerson Lehrman Group was launched in December. The New York Times recently reported that after their success convicting Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon of insider trading, federal authorities are turning their attention to expert networks.
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Google+ may miss the big opportunity: spanning internal and external social networks

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I was delighted to get an invite to Google+. Then amazed when I was told I can’t use Google+ because we use Google Apps.

It seems that Google is expecting to make Google+ available to Google Apps users “in a few months” with some .edu users possibly trialling it sooner. As many others have expressed, it is very frustrating to be delayed several months into the hottest new social space because we are more dedicated Google users than others.

Andy Pattinson kindly pointed me to the following video and form for ‘entities’ (companies, brands etc.) to apply for a Google+ profile.

This is fair enough, but it is coming from exactly the same mindset as Facebook. Individuals build social networks around their Profiles, and companies, brands, media etc. build Pages (in Facebook) in which there are slightly different parameters on how you communicate with their network.
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