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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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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