With the increasing demand on Governments and related bodies to be transparent, we are taking a look at how some of the leading bodies in this area are dealing with the demands of the new media landscape. We were delighted to talk to Dan Williams, from the Marketing Team at Jersey Finance, to understand how they are integrating social media into their communications strategy.
Tell us about Jersey Finance’s remit.
Jersey Finance is a non-profit making organisation formed in 2001 to represent and promote Jersey as an international financial centre of excellence.
When did you decide to adopt social media as part of your online marketing strategy, and why?
We have been experimenting with the use of social media since 2009, however have significantly stepped-up our social strategy from April 2012 onwards.
Were there any barriers to entry when it came to using social channels as part of your overall communications strategy? e.g. Internal or external, perceived risks etc.
Social Media is often perceived as risky, particularly in sectors such as financial services, but if harnessed correctly, the benefits can far outweigh the risks. It was challenging to find the correct balance of usage within such a highly regulated environment so we had to really consider the tone of the messages which Jersey Finance would like to broadcast and spent several months researching the best way to go about this. I think we have struck the perfect balance by taking different approaches on different channels and really tailoring messages to suit the audiences of those channels. For example, we decided to create a corporate twitter account for Jersey Finance, and then accompany it by a personable Twitter account for our CEO. We are very lucky to have such a supportive executive team who really encourage and champion the use of new technologies, which I believe mitigated some of the internal risk and gave our social strategy a real head start.
CEO’s Twitter Screen.
Which social channels have you implemented and how are these complimenting your traditional efforts?
I don’t think it is a case of implementing any one stand-alone social channel, but rather shaping a strategy which allows the seamless integration with all social channels but also with the company’s existing systems.
Twitter: Mainly focused on enhancing the speed and reach of our regular media communications, supported by additional personal profiles for our Senior Management Team.
Facebook: Focused on enhancing our current Education Programme to engage and interact with students by posting relevant content, running targeted advertisements and encouraging interaction with our content.
LinkedIn: we are using this platform to generate additional leads through targeted adverts and sending of ‘inmails’ and also pushing out our news and relevant information through our Linkedin channels. We actually ‘trend’ on Linkedin when we share major announcements via this channel which are then shared by our members.
I really wanted to integrate Jersey Finance’s data strategy with the social media strategy, so we setup our CRM systems so they integrated with all of the above social channels, allowing us to assign and track follow-up tasks for any of the team at Jersey Finance as a result of an interaction / post on any social media platform.
We have the ability to link our CRM systems with professional social networks, for example, if Joe Blogs changes from Company A to Company B, he will most probably update his Linkedin Job Status before informing Jersey Finance, however we are alerted that he has changed companies and a follow-up task is automatically created for a member of the team to follow-up on. This is just one of the ways our whole team has up-to-the second information at their fingertips through seamless integration of social media with existing company systems. In addition, this entire system can be used via mobile devices which means up-to-the second information is truly at Jersey Finance’s fingertips!
Are there any opportunities that have been created as a direct result of incorporating a social strategy e.g. live tweeting of events?
Social media helps us propagate our communications messages to larger audiences more quickly (members, intermediaries and the media). One example of this is that we live tweet from our own events and also major events around the globe which Jersey Finance has representatives at, our online coverage then often propagates around the world, gets picked up by the media and very occasionally goes ‘viral’. We often have just one representative at these events sending back live information. If it is a major event, there are often several audience members at the event who will be tweeting; our hardware allows us to search these people out and live monitor what they are tweeting about. We can then use their information / photographs to form part of our own coverage. We often manage to send out live photographs from over 5 locations in a room, with just one person sending coverage directly to us, but by ‘crowdsourcing’ the rest of the information and accompanying media.
At our own events, we setup hashtags and display live twitter screens which really encourages Tweeting (if a delegate starts tweeting at one of our events, it is displayed on screens at the venue and naturally immediately shared with all their followers which means we have dramatically increased the exposure of our event) Social media also helps to increase interest in our education programme by engaging young people with our content. It boosts how we promote and fill our events, which in turn leads to more and better quality contacts for our member firms.
It also provides a significant boost to both the volume of leads we can generate (which in turn leads to benefits for member firms) and the efficiency with which we can process them, for example by integrating social media and mobile devices with our CRM systems.
Live Twitter feed at Jersey Finance’s International BRICs Conference.
Do you resource the management of social media internally, and if so, has this resulted in any in house training for your team, or reliance on support and consultancy from a third party supplier?
The majority of our social media resource is managed internally by myself, I work very closely with our events, communications, business development, education and executive teams. We took the decision to invest in hardware from the outset and have created our very own in-house social media command centre.
Our CEO personally manages his own Twitter account and has a permanent Twitter screen in his office!
The training that we have invested in so far is very specialist training based around our CRM systems, allowing us to better manage the configuration and linking of our social channels and CRM systems.
We do outsource very specific, specialized and intensive social media campaigns to agencies but this is only when extra resources are required.
Would you say are innovating on behalf of Jersey’s finance industry by adopting new media platforms?
I believe we are and the feedback which we have had from our members and wider audience about our approach has been overwhelmingly positive. We believe that Jersey Finance should be at the forefront of using new technologies and our social media strategy demonstrates this very well!
Live Tweeting onto the Jersey Finance homepage from a member update event.
Have you encountered any unexpected problems since adopting social media?
Touch wood, we have had no major unexpected problems!
Are you measuring or monitoring your efforts, and if so, how?
We are continually measuring our success using various third party platforms. These are then displayed in our CRM system as a live dashboard along with other online statistics and actually sent to and reviewed by the board of Jersey Finance. We use these statistics internally to continually refine what we are doing and ensure we are always maximizing the use of our social channels.
Jersey Finance using ScribbleLive, the same technology SkyNews use to deliver breaking news.
What are your future plans for Jersey Finance’s communications strategy?
Watch this space! To continue to be at the leading edge of seamlessly utilizing new technologies to Jersey Finance’s advantage and to maintain the high quality social media communications. Going forward however, I can’t say too much yet but we are looking to do some really groundbreaking work combining responsive website design and social media!