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Hi Brett

As an agency, I'd say the 'tell' here is that the bank very much wants to announce that they have a new website. It implies that launching the site is the main objective they are focused upon. It also implies they aren't adopting a constantly iterative approach to site refinements. If they did the notion of a launch fades away.

On positive note, when clients talk about achieving levels of utility, refining shopper journeys and measuring end outcomes delivered, these are all 'tells' that the client gets it and great work might be done.

They look quite big? Have they done any User Acceptance Testing?

;-)

Joss: I think there's a very - very - understated sense of irony at play here.

A first world country, and an industry that isn't shy of talking up its appetite for innovation, still needs a sixty year old, diesel powered solution to get the job done in some circumstances?

Then again, I may be wrong, the NatWest vans might make an appearance at the Future Money event tomorrow...

Hi James, Ketharaman

Suspect we are agreed, social channels are often (not always) a good thing to do.

But the Co-op's experience just made me reflect that us external advocates of social channels, should sometimes pause and have a little empathy with the folk inside the bank who put themselves directly in the firing line with these initiatives.

I'd love it to be true. But the fact they are only quoting %s of increase, not actual numbers, makes me wonder whether the actual number isn't that big (against the total customer base).

Nationwide would see itself as a virtuous alternative to the large retail banks - and therefore a net winner from these changes. More interesting is how it affects churn among the major banks. It might be that there are many more movers but relatively little net change among the banks.

It'll be interesting to see the results of this campaign.

In our experience, running competitions to attract followers or likes can often be a red herring. Great for noise or awareness but ultimately not great for longterm community building.

Yes, you can attract lots of RTs or likes but very often not from your target audience, and not even from audiences who can ever subsequently be converted to purchase or use your service.

So while the outreach metrics might look great in the short term, longer term having a chunk of followers who once 'liked' your brand on a whim but will never interact with it, skews your engagement data and potentially confuses the strategies chosen to get deeper engagement with genuine customers, or to draw them into a purchase journey.

Barclaycard are not novices by any means, so will have worked hard to get the targeting right and avoid these pitfalls.

Twitter is just one place that conversations take place. There are lots of other venues too (both online and offline). But Twitter happens to be public and available in a easily analysed format. I wouldn't write it off so quickly.

I'm guessing there are lots of people looking at this potential use of social data. Using Twitter (and other sources of public, conversational data) for stock trading is an issue of being confident in sentiment analysis, and the ability to differentiate between noise and signal.

Brands have been trying to apply similar technologies to determine issues of consumer perception, sentiment and real time reputation management for quite a few years now. Most are doing something with one of the multiplicity of vendors in the area. But no-one has really nailed it yet. They tend to sound good on paper but scratch at the surface of sentiment analysis, and the data doesn't really stand up in court, or it requires considerable human interpretation to be added.

I'd suspect a similar evolutionary cycle with the application of stock trading using social data. The great thing about stock trading though - as Liz points out - is that there is a definitive measure of success: did it make money? Whereas insight on sentiment will always be subject to debate and contrary viewpoints.

A scary prospect. For consumers as well as banks. Facebook hasn't the best record of managing simple opt in/opt out privacy settings, and many social network users are either confused or sloppy with their privacy settings.

Danah Boyd touches on these issues at - http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

This seems like a very trivial incident (certainly compared to Vodafone's recent problem here in the UK http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/vodafone-twitter-obscene-tweet).

If banks should be positively encouraged to engage directly with their customers, in order to communicate and ideally fix their issues via whatever new channels those customers prefer, then jumping onto trivial gaffes like this seems silly.

I don't know WestPac well, but I wouldn't be surprised if allowing the authentic voice of their employees to escape the corporate firewall (even if slightly inappropriately in this instance), has probably allowed them to score a few points for authenticity and trust with many customers.

Thanks Brett and Liz. I thought that was good value. Inevitably, a bit of a whistlestop tour when served up in 140 character soundbites. But then perhaps we'll have to buy Brett's book for the full story.

Maybe a video interview with Brett, or better still a webcast discussion with bank practitioners would be a good follow up?