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I just want to spend a few moments telling you about Live, which is
First Direct’s latest social media and marketing campaign.  For those of
you who don’t know First Direct, we’re a direct bank known for
recommendation by our customers, but also, great levels of customer
service and, embarrassing as it may be, we’ve had quite a bit of award
winning this year, which has been fantastic.  We’ve also got very loyal
customers, which is relevant to us talking about Live.  They’re very
evangelical and they talk about us a lot and recommend us, which is
fantastic.  But we also know that they’re more likely to be tech savvy
and also use social media.  And as this slide shows, ever so slightly more
than the general adult population.  So, we knew it was an important place
for us to be.

So the backdrop to Live, obviously, frightening slide here, but trust in
banks has decreased by sixty-nine percent.  So we had a big job to do
to try and build that trust back up again and show that we’re different and
differentiate in the market, and that we have happy customers at the heart
of our business.  It’s a big challenge, big challenge.  But our customers
have always been our greatest advocates.  And so, we needed to look at
how we can use the comments that they made to leverage the brand in
the current environment and give us some endorsements that we could
use in new and different ways to try and position First Direct in a new
and dynamic way, and one that, sort of, puts trust back at the heart of
people and their banking.

And whilst there was a massive amount of enthusiasm in the organization
to do this, it was a difficult decision to make, because, I think, if you take
this step, you have to be completely transparent and it has to be about
the good, of which there was a lot, and the bad.  So, you know, we knew
that we had to embrace this.   So we kick-started the process by just
doing something really, really simple and looking at the last six months
reviews of First Direct and, really effective, sticking them in a [?].  Just to
start to look at what the messages that were coming through, it became
instantly clear that the service messages were being talked about by our
customers.  We then compared that to some of our competitors.  This
one is Halifax.  And you can instantly see there’s a bit of a difference, if
I just whiz back to First Direct, there.  And this one is Lloyds.

So, we felt it was the right thing to do, that we could set ourselves apart
from our competitors.  Naturally, the customer journey that we were
going to take people on was really, really important.  Our campaign
elements had to provoke people enough to engage with whatever it was
that we did.  That they would act and that they would then go on and
share this content.  So from all of this digging around and head scratching,
Live was born.

And, hopefully, this hyperlink should work and take us to the site.

Well, who knows?  We’ll see.

…Well we were hoping to get into the actual Live site…

Sorry, we should have rehearsed this, shouldn’t we?

Oh.  You’re on it now.

There you go.

Obviously, it’s a bit bigger than the page, but, basically what you can see
is, we had all this information.  We knew it was out there.  We needed to
know what to do with it.  And how would we visualize it, that was going
to be engaging, informative, easy to understand, but most of all, above
everything else, very First Direct?  And this essentially…see quite a few
boxes.  The bubbles which are going up and down are the positive and
negative sentiments that have been said through the sources that we’re
looking at.  On the right hand side, the keywords that are coming out of
the sources.

And just to explain where we’re getting our information from, we’re
pulling together any site online, so that could be a blog, comments on blogs.
It could be newspapers online, Twitter, Facebook, as long as it’s in the
public domain.  Basically, eight million sites have the RSS feed that
we’re pulling in.  So, we’re looking for comments about First Direct.
We’re sifting through the ones that are irrelevant to First Direct, we get a
lot of first direct flights, first direct film, whatever, first direct message,
and then filtering again for profanities.  And then it’s fed in, and this is,
essentially, how it comes out.  So it’s showing, live, exactly how the
sentiment of First Direct is looking online.  Now, I know that we’ve had
comments, such as, you know, why isn’t there a live Twitter feed?  And,
you know, if I was perfectly honest with you, I personally feel it was a
brave step for us to do, to actually use customer commentary, live
commentary, general consumer comments in this way and host them
online.  And as it went through the, sort of, compliance and legal side of
First Direct and HSBC, we were advised, really, that in case of any
obscenities, or anything like that, that might appear on Twitter by using
incorrectly we should leave it for now, and it’s not to say it won’t come
in the future, but I think for now I’m pretty happy with the way the site
looks.

So, what do we do to try and encourage people to go there?  Well, we
provoke London commuters by using all of the digital methods available
on the underground and any, sort of, live panels, TV in the train stations
and underground had these type of ads on.  So they were moving and
sharing in real-time exactly the sentiment of First Direct at that point.

Also, to provoke debate and provide some content, we spoke to over
two thousand people about their attitudes about openness online and also
about businesses and transparency.  We asked them about, you know,
which businesses they thought were particularly open and transparent.
Internet businesses did really well.  Google was top of that.  But the
banking sector, unsurprisingly, didn’t do well at all.  And so, all the time,
it just started to feel right that for First Direct, as a brand, this was the
right way for us to go.

And what did we do about engaging customers?   Well, Talking Point,
which is in the bottom left-hand corner.  And, we led them four, sort of,
provoking questions and asked people to give their comments back.
And, to be honest, they have done, which is exactly what we wanted
them to do.  And we asked for the good and the bad, and I can safely
say, we’ve had both.  But that’s great.  That’s what we wanted.  And,
you know, I wanted to show you those, because if we’re going to do this,
we have to be honest about the fact that, you know, not everybody is
going to have a good experience in their everyday banking.  And the
great thing about Live is that it’s really being looked at, both within
First Direct and HSBC, sort of, very seriously.  It’s being held up as a,
you know, great piece of work which will help take the businesses
forward in their social media thinking.

So, the results.  Well, twenty-five thousand unique visits since launch.
Amazing.  Two thousand five hundred comments.  They come in all the
time….consideration…brilliant…leading category for being different….
Over two hundred tweets.  So, essentially, what was a brand campaign
as well.  I think it’s been tremendously successful for us.  There’s been a
huge amount of commentary and debate online and in the media as well.
So, a huge success.  But, obviously, more to come from Debra.

So, I mean, you know, PR and getting people to talk about the campaign
was really important to us.  And, it seemed to capture the imagination of
people like you.  It got, and we did purposely just target online influencers,
who, you know, on the one hand are our target audience, but, also, we
wanted to see how people respond.  And I think, you know, the PR story
for Live has only just begun and there will be more stuff that will come
after the back of that.  But, really well, you know, responded to on the
likes of Twitter.  It was described as brave, a good move, et cetera, et
cetera.  You know, some great coverage from our influencers and media
sites and a fantastic reach.  So, it spoke volumes to us that, you know,
what we were doing was being embraced and appreciated by people.

What next?  Well, we started at the beginning of the year, sort of, first,
looking at social media.  I had a social media newsroom built, which was
fantastic, I was very excited about it.  And that’s been a great success
for us.  It’s allowed us to get stories and messages out about the
business that wouldn’t have either got the time of day in the media, or
I probably wouldn’t have even thought about writing them.  So that’s
been brilliant.  Live has obviously been the next step on this journey and
now we’ve started we’ll obviously keep on going.  But it’s not a quick
move.  I think we all have to be very honest about the fact that it’s one
step at a time.  We’re learning all the time from Live.  You know, last
week Matt Colebrook, our chief executive, put his first comment
back on Live to start responding and joining in the conversation with
customers.  We’ve had new technology put in, which means that we can
now start commenting back to customers on Live, which is fantastic.  So
it means we’ve started that conversational journey.  So we’ll continue to
learn with Live.  But, also, moving into next year, we will start to work
with social media more and involve customers more in, sort of, building
the business of the future for First Direct.  So, we know it’s out there.
We’re learning to live with it.

One Response to “Deborah Copeland & Amanda Brown”

1. Xehmer Says:
   August 11th, 2011 at 11:25 am

   Great One…

   I must say, its worth it! My link, http://beckyre.blogdiario.com/,thanks haha…

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