By , Head of Digital Marketing

Missed the last month’s Precedent Digital Finance Forum? To our delight, the roundtable discussions quickly sparked participants swapping success stories for overcoming compliance restrictions and old fashioned thinking towards social media and blogging.

Here are just a few of the tried and tested solutions cherry picked as highlights from those roundtable talks. Have a read through and let us know your own experiences in the comments.

1. Thought-leadership and social media: the perfect match
Rather than use social media and blogs to push products, offering helpful and impartial information hasn’t just proved an effective strategy for major players like City Index or Lloyds TSB, it’s also bang on trend.
Stats from Google Insight reveal that DIY-style searches are significantly on the rise as users discover that adding ‘how to’ to a search string lets them skip the sales pitch and get straight to the content.

2. Softly-softly catches management approval
If you’re working at a less digitally forward-thinking institution, members of the forum found starting with a small and easily approved by compliance piece of digital activity gave them the stats and evidence for management to green-light larger initiatives.
The bottom line being if you’re speaking to management, talk return on investment and not blogs or Twitter. This means setting up the right tracking in advance – whether it’s Google Analytics for your website, buzz monitoring for the web as a whole, or bespoke tracking for your social media profiles – and knowing what metrics to track and how to interpret them.

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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’.

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By , Head of Strategic Research

In the Trends section of the London Evening Standard on Monday, Joshi Herrmann (@JoshiEHerrmann) wrote an interesting, and in places amusing, article about his and others’ attempts to cull the number of friends they have on their social networks. He mentions David Shing (@shingy) from AOL who last month said that ‘the age of treating the web as a popularity contest is over’. Shing apparently ‘predicted that the next phase of online usage will be unfriending and unfollowing, as people try to reduce the noise of their social networks and make them more relevant again’.

So what criteria do people use when deciding to cull? Herrmann, in getting rid of 300 ‘friends’ used ‘the social pint formula’. Would he enjoy sitting down for a pint with this person? If not – the chop! On this basis one must assume that Herrmann doesn’t have any brands as his friends, and if this trend is in fact that, and not just a journalistic aberration, then it seems feasible that not many other people do either. This appears to be the case according to a recent ‘Digital Life’ survey by TNS; nearly two-thirds of Brits don’t want bothering by big-name brands on Facebook, Twitter etc.

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By , Head of Digital Marketing

As highlighted on Mashable, artificial intelligence (along with some truly remarkable voice recognition technology!) is coming to the iPhone 5 in the form of iPhone assistant and it’s going to mean big changes for businesses who aren’t already actively engaging in their wider web presence.

The iPhone Assistant has an eerily smart ability to take verbal, casually worded requests and turn them into search terms it then sorts and rates for you based on existing criteria. To see the old version in action, check out the YouTube video by Siri, a start-up acquired by Apple last year, who’s original app has been in development ever since in preparation for today’s iPhone 5 unveiling.

Because the assistant feature uses user generated web content to assess search results, whether or not someone liked your business on Facebook or put a favourable review for it on Qype will suddenly have the power to determine whether the assistant feature even bothers to show your listing to its human master.

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In this, the fourth of a six part column contributed by Precedent to PSMG magazine, talks through some deadly sins of social media, while giving three simple rules to help you succeed in the social space.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of how to capitalise on social media, I’ll do the obligatory ‘why social media?’ for any remaining naysayers: put most simply, social media is where your users live online. For anyone still questioning this, look at networks like LinkedIn and its growth rate of 100% per year, or Twitter and its over-representation of professionals, politicians, journalists, and generally high-profile, influential people tweeting and conversing every day.

Essentially, not engaging in social media is now the business equivalent of skipping your next 500 networking events.

Deadly sins of social media
Firstly, please put those press releases down and back away from the Twitter feed. Posting press releases to social media is like walking into a cocktail party wearing a sandwich board of your services and shouting your latest achievements into a megaphone at the buffet queue.

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By , Head of Research

It is with a sense of relief, and not a little gratitude to my colleagues, that I can formally announce the launch of our latest sector report: Integration or isolation? – The digital landscape for UK financial services.

I have been producing big reports into various sector websites for over ten years and the title of this one had me reflecting on the process that we undertake to get these reports ‘to press’.

As always the research and data collection is really the easy bit. It can be done in isolation. Just put me in front of a computer, leave me alone for a few weeks with a spreadsheet and ‘the job’s a good ‘un’!

It’s the concept, design, proofing and coordination of the people who help me bring the reports together that presents the biggest challenge – the integration.

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In this, the second of a six part column contributed by Precedent to PSMG magazine, looks at the best way of learning from you users and their needs.

You know that Friday afternoon feeling, when the To do’ list has been completed (or moved to Monday) but there are still a couple of hours left in the day? Do you get the guilty temptation to nosey on Facebook, Twitter etc? Well go right ahead – in fact make this part of your weekly routine! When your boss asks what you are doing, it’s ‘Digital Ethnography’; the art of hanging out with your customers and prospects online.

Many professional service firms obsess about the design of their site without building any real understanding of their users. Firms expend disproportionate energy on their home page, ignoring the fact that only 25% of users who arrive at their site see this, whilst the rest deep-link to content direct from search. In fact, a user may be making decisions about whether to hire you or your competitor without ever reaching your website.

So how do you better acquaint yourself with your users? Monitor the ‘buzz’; at its simplest this means visiting key forums and social communities regularly and seeing what’s being talked about. Ideally, it means structured review. Free tools such as Social Mention, Social Seek , Boardreader and Klout allow you to monitor keywords across a wide range of social networks and measure your current influence, or deploy one of the heavy hitting enterprise tools such as Sentimetrics or Radian6.

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