Adrian Porter – Head of Strategic Research

As promised, here is the first of a short series of follow-up blogs on our second Digital Finance Forum. Please feel free to comment below, and let’s keep the conversation going using #PrecSem.

After our initial forum in September last year we anticipated that compliance issues would be high on the agenda for delegates attending the forum yesterday at the Merchant Taylors Hall in the City.

With this in mind, as those of you who attended yesterday discovered, we attempted to recruit two, or three people with experience of dealing with compliance to help us facilitate a panel debate on the subject.
The irony was of course that none of the people we approached could get the clearance from compliance to participate. Excuse this use of text speak but,  – LOL!

However, we were determined to embrace the subject and tryto focus on positive approaches to common problems, rather than turn the morning into a ‘compliance-bashing exercise’.

In the round table discussions some interesting approaches to using the social sphere successfully and in an ‘obedient’ fashion were discussed. Here are some tips from people who are making it work that we extrapolated from the tables, interestingly they all appear to have synergy with the advice we provided in our presentations:

1. Start Small – Taking small steps into social media can be an effective way to
   ensure that senior stakeholders and legal teams get used to the idea, and are
   more open to further development. Consider testing the water with a campaign
   that has a definite end date. Establish success criteria, run the campaign and
   use the results to either encourage further uptake, or disregard/refine your
   approach.
2. Have a cross-channel strategy – For peace of mind. Get down on paper a procedure that describes what you will do if things do go wrong in the social landscape. Identify potential escalation points and the correct channels to use to deal with them. (You might need a press release at some point)
3. Getting buy in – Senior stakeholders can be nervous about embracing social media. When proposing uptake concentrate on presenting the high-level combination of benefits rather than the detail.
4. Resourcing – As Mark Sherwin proposed in his effective digital strategy piece, identifying people within your organisation who already understand and use social platforms to become your voice is often a great way to hit the ground
   running. One major bank told us how they had pulled people from their call centre who were already keen on Twitter, trained them and now use them to provide customer service via the channel.
5. Educate your staff and your customers – If both parties in a social interaction are aware of the boundaries then social platforms can be used effectively to mutual benefit. For instance, understanding when a conversation needs to move to DM on Twitter will ensure compliance. Produce, and present clearly, carefully worded instructions and guidelines for staff and customers.

What do you think about these tips? Go on, speak your mind below

Here are yesterday’s slides:

Part One – Introduction, Research, Rich Media and Blogging
Part Two – Social Networks, Mobile and Websites
Part Three – Effective Digital Strategy