Social media: communicating more than marketing: to embrace the idea that social media should mainly be used for communications, you need to open it up so that almost every customer-facing employee has an opportunity to participate.

AuthorCook, Eric

PERHAPS YOUR BANK PARTICIPATES IN SOCIAL MEDIA but sharply restricts the number of employees who can post messages.

This approach maybe short-sighted. Social media is a form of communications that, in order to be used to full advantage, needs to be open to many--if not all--of your customer-facing employees.

What is happening today with social media is reminiscent of what happened when email was introduced to banking in the 1990s. When I look at this comparison, I think, "We've been here before."

It was 1993 and I had just purchased the first (of many more to come) personal computer (PC) for the community bank where I was working. It came with a modem and a pre-installed version of America Online (AOL), which introduced us to email, connected us to the Internet and was my first exposure to the Worldwide Web. While I'm certain that the mobile phone you've got in your pocket right now is many times more powerful, that PC started us on our way to being "connected" electronically to customers and to communicate in an entirely different way.

As a banker, you can appreciate our cautious approach to putting email to work for us, despite my "gut feeling" that this was going to be a game-changer on how we connect with others and provide information instantly from the convenience of the computer (and this was way before we even thought about email on a mobile device).

As we added more computers at the bank, we restricted access to our one and only email account. Senior management couldn't imagine letting everyone have his or her own email address. Employees would be downloading files with viruses and other malicious attachments. Productivity would suffer, as staff would surely be spending their time emailing friends, forwarding jokes and maybe even leaking important bank information, putting customer confidence at risk. Sure, email was a great business tool but not something intended for the masses--or so we thought.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I was now tasked with implementing a bank-wide local area network, along with an exchange server for email access.

While the capability for everyone to have their own email account now existed, it was still only available to a select group of bankers. For the first time, we had the ability to provide this special group of bankers with their own bank-branded email account (and that AOL account quickly became a thing of the past). Up until then, email communication had been controlled, restricted to one person and something that others in the bank could not access. Now, we were on the verge of opening it up to others, and it was a bit scary. But we were confident that the benefits would be worth it because we'd seen actual results, even with the limited use thus far.

Eventually we realized that firewalls and antivirus software helped protect the bank from malware and other threats. We provided training to employees on the right and wrong ways to use email and had demonstrated success cases where email was becoming a legitimate tool for business communication.

We had all staff members using the same system so we could archive and retrieve bank-related communication, as well as manage employee use of email and figure out ways to get everyone to use it, while still making sure we remained compliant, secure and productive.

The bank does not require employees to make such postings and does not ask them to submit these postings for review.

All employees, however, are asked to sign off on the...

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