Thursday, August 22, 2013

Rising Above the Noise and Increasing Trust in Social Media

Today, I presented at the LIMRA/LOMA conference, and I wanted to share my deck.

Financial Service companies are facing a trust crisis. The industry should be built on trust--people entrust us with their financial future and people pay insurance premiums for years or decades without seeing the benefit--and yet firms in financial service and banking are starving for trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer finds that financial services are the least trusted industry among those measured, and the Certified Financial Planner Board discovered most people--most!--agree that "it's hard for me to know who to trust for financial advice."

Billions of dollars spent every year on marketing, advertising and PR in the financial service industry, and most people do not know who to trust? That isn't a data point--it's an indictment.

Today, many firms in the vertical are broadcasting carefully crafted messages and pursuing tactics to collect fans, but few are using social media effectively to build trust. In the deck below, I offer four broad ways that firms can build trust in social media:

  • Person to person: Trust exists today person-to-person, and some firms are tapping this source of trust. Ameriprise allows site visitors to use LinkedIn to find advisors within their trusted network, and Fidelity is using private communities to facilitate and participate in trusted peer-to-peer conversations.
     
  • With transparency: Customers demand greater transparency from brands, and Vanguard is doing a good job of increasing transparency by making their executives--even the CEO--available for social media Q&As on Facebook and Twitter.
     
  • With quality interactions: Some companies are creating higher-quality interactions that increase trusted relationships. Prudential has partnered with PeopleLinx to create more connections and interactions between licensed professionals and key customers, resulting in new business opportunities. And USAA brings the same responsiveness it demonstrates in other channels to social media, further increasing the trust and advocacy USAA earns from customers.
     
  • With co-creation: Consumers are 98% very likely or likely to buy a product they helped ideate. Barclaycard tapped its community to help build a credit card from the ground up, resulting in higher retention and lower complaints compared to other credit card launches.

I hope you enjoy the deck. As always, your feedback is very welcome!


No comments: