How Banks navigate thru the social Terra Incognita

Altogether, it’s probably good news, one just wonder about the way HSBC is measuring the ROI of its Facebook campaign, which totally amounted 120,000 £, distributed among the 8 young awarded students.

My point is that the HSBC student page, which sponsored the video contest, had by yesterday 21th October 6932 Fans and one day later 6,949.

By doing a quick survey for Banks, one can notice that Facebook still is unknown for almost all of them. Biggest European Banks like UBS count with 712 fans, Credit Suisse 2,908 and BBVA 8 fans. Only the French BNP – Paribas counts with an impressive 117,462 flock of fans.

Of course compared with the almost 3 Million fans from Nike or the 14 millions from Coca-Cola, the 97,000 fans from Visa look paltry.

Opening a corporate fan page at Facebook is free of charge; therefore I don’t think there are budgetary issues involved with the decision/no decision to be active in the biggest Social Network of the world.

On the antipodes of this situation: yesterday, at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, it was announced the creation of the sFunds Although Facebook and Zynga participate in the business, the biggest share of the sFund's $250m (£160m) will come from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

"We think that every industry is going to be fundamentally re-thought and designed around people." That was a view backed by KPCB partner John Doerr, best known for investing in Amazon, Google and Netscape.

Reading and comparing these articles let me think on some middle age maps, I used to admire during hours in the Zurich University library during my student life: these maps showed certain coins called “terra incognita”. These corners of the world, according to the scientist of the time, were supposed to be populated by dragons and other kind of terrible creatures. Ironically, at that time these maps were the foundation of the geography studies in many monasteries and universities.