Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders

The finance industry has a unique challenge, hindered by government regulations and often a conservative culture, they have a real challenge embracing the online conversation that’s already happening between customers.

Criteria: Although there are many finance startups and consumer review sites, this list is really about the financial institutions, large brands, and banks that are adopting social media to reach customers.

Ongoing list of Social Media in the Financial Industry

Wells Fargo
The first and greatest case study to date is of what Wells Fargo has done with their multiple blogs, starting with the Guided by History blog, Later, they launched the Student LoanDown blog, and a virtual world called Stagesoach Island Community that lets members learn and experience financial management.

H&R Block
This company has done quite a bit with blogs, virtual worlds, Facebook campaigns, and social media programs and campaigns. During tax time, there was a significant upswing of activity from Facebook applications, and they engaged in online dialog in Twitter by first monitoring keywords and directly responding to members.

Intuit
Online communities are nothing new to Intuit, this customer-focused brand let’s customers self-support each other, as well as communicate to them using blogs. Quickbooks (financial software) has extensive growth for SMBs who want to connect to each other.

Chase +1
This credit card company used Facebook to find out about what customers desired, laying the foundation for delivering a customer-focused product

Ernst & Young
This large accounting services and consulting firm is anxious to reach new hires fresh out of college, by creating a sponsored Facebook group, they have online dialogs with graduating students starting the interview process online. Smart way for each party to learn for each other.

Royal Bank of Canada
Launched this ongoing blog called the Innovator Blog, which goes back to October 2006. Link via Trevor Cook. Also, they’ve a Facebook page, (link from iljazz)

ING
Trevor Cook has more details, listing that ING has an Asia / Pacific blog, My Cup of Cha, a microfinance blog, and a Chinese blog. They’ve also created a microsite called I need to go, that has a spreadable widget.

Fidelity
Using map mashups and podcasts, Fidelity is reaching to it’s customers using new channels. (from Benjamin Ensor, Forrester)

Genworth
Springboardforum – From Genworth – you need to get an account to see it (free) “Genworth has partnered with Dow Jones, Time Inc., Bloomberg and Source Media to provide you with tools & resources that may support your business”(tip from Jay Bryant)

HSBC
This online community from HSBC Business Network is for SMB and entrepreneurs (tip from Jay Bryant)

Alberta’s Commonwealth
Online community for Alberta’s Generation Y provides a lifestyle platform for youth to self express and support called Young & Free.

Discover
This lifestyle portal provides helpful content for Discover customers, called Discover Edge, it delivers expert best practices for money management. It’s difficult to see if this has social features.

American Express
This website called OpenForum provides a dialog for customers, Chris Brogan has the details.

Capital One
This social network for small businesses, called Slingshot, allows people to connect to each other, promote their services, in this ‘yellow pages’ type of marketplace.

Canada’s Largest Credit Union, Vancity, launches blog
This blog, called Change Everything, is intended to spread feel good messages and videos to attract Vancity’s community, and interesting project.

MyVault by Scotia Bank
This ‘dashboard’ style interactive application allows members to manage their money, gather feeds, and communicate with community members via forums, called MyVault.

IT Counts by the Institute of Chartered Accountants
This community site ION, yields blogs by thought leaders on the topic of technology, sponsored by Microsoft.

When Social Media Marries CRM Systems

I realize that we’re just at the early days, as many of these systems are deployed by marketing units with little interaction or support from IT. In many cases users are forced to create a new user ID, as these systems are not tied to existing enterprise software.

Thinking towards the future, I realize how important it will be for IT departments to think holistically about social media, especially large areas of customer and prospect congregation. For many marketers, they are graded (paid) based upon the amount of qualified leads that are generated for their efforts, online communities, blogs, and other tools are examples of this. I can already imagine the big consulting shops moving into Fortune 5000 companies with another Enterprise Resource Planning for Social Media projects underway (ERP-SM).

Exactly what would success look like? For one, brands will be able to track, manage, and monitor who enters the community, determine if they are a prospect, customer, partner, or even inactive. Secondly, brands will be able to develop intelligence on how effective communities are for bringing customers closer such as integrating existing social networks like LinkedIn to the corporate intranet. In a theoretical sense, brands could determine which customers have the best reputation, and how to keep and reward them. But perhaps, most importantly, customer experience will improve as companies now have a better understanding of them throughout their life cycle –and beyond.

Caveat: The key to success isn’t just about building systems to ‘capture’ customer registrations and information, it’s about building real relationships empowered by these tools. Any corporation who attempts to enter social media just for the sake of holistic data, or for lead generation only will fail –and perhaps become a case study analysts tout in our powerpoint decks. First recognize the power shift, then understand how this is different that other marketing activities.

The following is a list of companies or vendors that are starting to tie their social media software into CRM systems:

Leverage Software/SalesForce
CEO of Leverage Systems proclaims: mwalsh Leverage Software is integrated with Salesforce.com – has been for 2 years. The integration is currently light, but will deepen. June 3, 2008

SalesForce for Dell/Starbucks?
SalesForce offers IdeaExchange, which powers Dell Ideastorm and My StarbucksIdeas. Being that they are a CRM software vendor that now offers community insight tools, I can only assume that their data is being shared. this is just my assumption, they have not confirmed this for me. June 3, 2008

Hivelive for Serena
Serena’s Mashup Exchange (powered by HiveLive) is an online customer community that is being integrated with lead/CRM systems. Specifically, HiveLive’s LiveConnect Community Platform is integrated with MarketBright’s lead management system and Salesforce.com. Submitted, June 3, 2008 by HiveLive CEO John Kembel via comments

Submit in comments, provide links to qualify
Hoping to see an example of a company that has automated it’s community tools to tie with it’s CRM tools, I’m expecting you to link to a credible source of information, or identify yourself as an employee of a vendor or client. Leave a comment below, or email me if you want to stay confidential or anonymous.

At some point when this list becomes to difficult to manage, or this goes mainstream, we’ll just have to read the comments. If you know of a company that has integrated it’s social media data with a CRM system, please leave a comment.