Daily Poke

Putting the social back into banking

By Greg Taylor April 1 2010, 8:53 am 1 Comment
Tagged: Community, finance, Online, Social media

first direct has become the first UK bank to embrace social media with the launch of its new social media newsroom http://newsroom.firstdirect.com.
The move comes following the successful launch of the company’s presence on twitter.com.
The social media newsroom borrows considerable amounts of its functions from the world of blogging, using social media sites such as Flickr and YouTube to “serve” content to the site and allowing users to share text, images and video across blogs and social networks.
Increasingly, people are turning to online methods of media consumption and as a brand first direct have to go where the audience is. With the social media newsroom they wanted to create one central hub for their communications online and to make those communications as portable and shareable online as possible.

Ref. http://mobileinc.co.uk/2009/11/first-direct-sentiment-tracking-site-measures-customer-feelings-across-the-web-almost-does-it/

http://www.crowdsurfing.net Martin Thomas

The newsroom appears to have been designed more for media than customers, so it isn’t as consumer-friendly as it could be, BUT at least First Direct (unlike all of the other major banks in the UK) has realised that the way to rebuild trust is to open up and be willing engage all stakeholders in a debate.