Crowd work in an offshore jurisdiction, which means a high percentage of our client base reside within highly regulated industry. I obviously knew this when we launched in 2010, and many said to me ‘Are you bonkers? Selling innovative, social technologies as part of comms strategies for old school financial/law service providers will NEVER happen”. I knew different.
I tend to do business instinctively; I knew four years ago that this revolutionary shift in the way we communicate, both personally and professionally, was going to hit all business sectors, albeit some sooner than others. So my thinking and ethos may not have appeared logical looking at the landscape, but now we are positioned perfectly. The Guernsey and Jersey marketplace has indeed suddenly realised that business is changing forever, and change, whilst difficult and frightening for many, IS inevitable.
Why? Because it is no longer Business As Usual. This shift has seen smaller, leaner, start-ups gaining ground that took traditional business years to achieve. We are living in a post Industrial phase of new territory. Everything has been turned on it’s head, anyone can become a serious player, and the balance of power that brands once levied over their target markets has not just leveled, but positively flipped. Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals.
This has left many reeling, some literally floundering in the light of uber savvy consumers and the speed at which technology affords accessibility of information. Marketing, PR and IT Departments battle over who should have responsibility for this shift, and often nobody wants the remit of implementing such change. In many cases, heavy weight regulated businesses are having to make the transition from comms strategies that haven’t really changed for over 20 or 30 years. Even the availability of high speed access to the internet hasn’t made adoption of new communication channels a must-have for regulated operators.
There are multiple reasons I have heard cited as barriers to entry, but for the most part they are:
- Lack of internal support
- Lack of knowledge
- Lack of resources
- Fear of negative sentiment and/or loss of control of brand messaging
- Fear of regulators/compliance
Whilst most of these are very real to the businesses looking at the challenges adopting social strategy brings, many are perceived, not actual barriers, and often this is due to lack of education. Where on earth do you start when there appears to be a huge list of negatives on the table? How do you convince the decision makers there is relevance?
Internal Culture
Legacy internal culture often gets in the way of any progression, and tackling this is where you need to start before thinking about any kind of external exposure. The results of social campaigns often impact upon multiple departments – Business Development, Sales, Marketing, HR, IT…. unless you can join up the dots within the organisation first, you can’t even begin to have a hope in hell of providing brand responses across real time channels, let alone expect any return on investment.
We’ve helped many businesses spend a lot of time looking at issues such as employee engagement, client response rates and internal communication tools as the first step in understanding how the organisational culture is structured. This crucial step is the most often overlooked, but this important discovery phase often exposes critical gaps between inter department communication, that simply will not support any social activity, no matter what the objectives.
I would always, always, advocate you start with an internal audit. This should not be treated as a knee jerk – “our competitors are doing this, so we should too” or bolt-on “we need a quick response mechanism”. Take a long, hard, honest look at your business and your product and service offering. If these are flawed, the only thing social will do is shine a huge spotlight on them. Are your customer response rates taking weeks, even months? Imagine how this perception will shift if the same clients see you have a social presence and expect a real time response?
The misconception is that user friendly, accessible tools produce even easier results as part of a communications plan. Wrong. This is a slippery slope to social media suicide and where you see brands having to back peddle and fire fight their way out of disaster. More often than not, the tools get the blame, but the reality is the business should never have used the medium without the infrastructure.
Educate & Give Social Media Examples
When trying to get internal buy in, give case studies of social media successes (and fails!) from other similar business sectors. It does not make sense to cite Starbuck’s innovative social strategy to a Law firm. Context here, is indeed king. Presentations peppered with tech phrases will also loose your audience. Make business objectives relevant, just as you would for any other form of marketing.
Part of any audit before adopting social media for regulated industry should also include listening to the social web. These sectors are the later adopters, and often by mining for keyword specific phrases, you can understand just how mature your industry is, and more importantly where you sit amongst your competitors. Listening is fundamentally overlooked and should form part of any social media strategy, from research phase to project execution to measurement. Many financial services or law firms are astonished at the amount of data already out there about them, their customers and their products.
Mitigating Risk & Social Media Policy Guidelines
The threat of regulators alone is enough to make most Compliance Departments say no to the mere idea of social communications. Bear in mind that all correspondence between a business and it’s client base may be subject to regulatory guidelines. Promotions need to be clear and not misleading, there will most certainly be a lock down on confidentiality of sensitive financial information and certain levels of advice will not be deemed appropriate.
Regulatory bodies in Guernsey itself, have not yet given guidance on the use of social channels, but the broader guidelines are certainly covered at a high level by bodies such as The Law Society – Guidelines on Social Media
and the Financial Services Authority
It is also worth remembering that technology is now accelerating at a pace that makes long winded policy processes almost impossible. It is therefore vital that any regulated firm has relationships with those suppliers in the digital arena that really have an excellent grasp of the real time picture, and the potential legal implications this may have on any regulated jurisdiction.
The production of Social Media Policy Guidelines for Guernsey and Jersey regulated businesses is therefore essential. This should, at the most basic level, cover staff use (internal and external), strategy, compliance and roles and responsibilities. Your employees digital and real lives are indeed blurring, especially if you are looking at graduates and the next generation of staff you need to recruit. How are they going to adapt to an environment that does not even understand the opportunities technology offers, when they don’t know any different? Crowd’s Community Manager, has blogged about this here.
Why Change?
Taking into account all of the above, you may wonder is it worth any financial or legal institution even giving consideration to the use of social media? The answer I would always give is a resounding YES. It may well be that after the initial audit and discovery phase, your sector, particularly niche service offerings, may think there is no value in taking part. I would bet that if you fast track as little as two years, and you carried out the same audit, the data returned would present a very different landscape indeed.
Can you really afford not to future proof your business, even when there are regulatory issues to consider? The organisations that don’t allow regulations to get in the way will thrive above their competition.
Learn more about Crowd’s unique understanding of how to hand hold your business from brand audit right through to execution and measurement here.