The vast majority of wealth management clients do not use social media for their wealth decisions and interactions with their providers, but that doesn’t mean  they steer clear of social sites. 50% of banking clients use social media for non-financial purposes, and no one can ignore the future transfer of wealth to younger and more active Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter users.    

This context set up the 2012 CEB TowerGroup Financial Services Conference session, “Achieving Business Outcomes Through Social Networking Relationship Management.” We were fortunate to include Manish Mallikarjuna, Vice President of CRM Strategy at Fidelity Investments, and John Refford, Vice President, Strategic Marketing Technology at Natixis Global Asset Management – U.S. Distribution, in an interactive discussion on the current and future state of social media. We considered the relationship between a financial advisor or client service representative with an individual, as well as the business-to-business interactions between fund distributors and financial advisors and home office personnel.  

Five key points of the discussion included:

1-      Most firms focus on push marketing capabilities of social media, not on nurturing relationships and managing clients.

2-      Instead of focusing on what financial institutions want to accomplish using social media, what do clients and business partners want out of social media?

3-      Applying CRM to social media is about converting interesting and sharable content into conversations, extending conversations into collaborative experiences, and transforming those experiences into meaningful client relationships.

4-      The connected financial advisor or mutual fund wholesaler understands what is happening in the lives of clients through social media before meetings and phone calls.

5-      Companies are moving from experimentation and treating social media as a separate channel to encourage interactive dialog, monitor customer conversations to know them better, provide help, identify and enable brand promoters, and solicit feedback and new opportunities from the community.

The session offered industry perspective and an engaging Q&A session, but to learn more, we’re providing recent data we shared on social media usage and recommendations for line of business executives, technology leaders, and technology providers.