Christophe Langlois was a senior innovation manager at Lloyds TSB before he left to pursue his vision for social media and digital engagement in banking. He is the author of the Visible Banking blog and has got his first book published in June 2011 “Customer Experience Without Borders: a Practical Guide to Social Media in Financial Services".

How did you end up where you are today so involved in social media and banking? 

I’m French and most of my career is in technology and financial services.  I worked in London for 10 years. I’ve worked in many areas of banking from payments to money laundering – more recently in digital and innovation. I worked at Lloyds between 2007 and 2008 where I was head of online sales in consumer banking and then the senior innovation manager in the business banking and corporate banking side.

I started using and liking social media back in 2003 building relationships all over the world and which I found had a tangible business impact through networks such as LinkedIn.  I started blogging in 2004. Then in 2007 it all started when I got the job at Lloyds. I didn’t know too much about online banking at the time, believe it or not.  I couldn’t find anything – no blogs – about banks or insurance firms and social media so I started Visible Banking in February 2007.

Banking is notoriously not a sexy industry – there’s no tangible products or there are products that people need but don’t necessarily want. [In banking] there is a lot of complexity, putting stress into people’s life. At the same time banks are involved in people’s everyday lives, they help them achieve their dreams, help entrepreneurs build businesses and create jobs so it’s very important. It’s a top industry but with a damaged reputation so I started asking how could the industry profoundly change the way it communicates taking into account the regulatory aspect; trying to help it become more transparent and engaging and more customer focused. Focus more on customer needs and goals, less on financial products.

What is social media and how do you build a business case?

Social media could impact virtually any department at the bank – PR, brand, communications, product, marketing, support, recruitment and HR. The first thing to ask is what are our business goals? Where should we start engaging with people? That’s the start of the business case.

In 2012 we should be beyond the question of “should we be doing anything [in social media]?” That should be behind us.  It’s not a matter of the business case: you need as a financial brand to have some sort of presence on the most used and popular social media channels like twitter, facebook, YouTube and maybe a blog. That is the basics.

There are probably four ways it starts. Often it starts from a crisis – someone says something online, could be a YouTube video like Bank of America. It gets traction so you need to respond so you have to be already on the channels. Second is competitive intelligence: you want to observe what your competitors are doing and how much traction they are enjoying. Then you’ve got someone launching from within the organisation – could be an individual like Societe Generale in Group HR. Fourth, a senior executive, lets say a CMO – ideally a CEO – or someone who understands the importance of social media, starts it up. Then he or she empowers the teams to leverage social media.

Start with soft areas like CSR, charity and so on. It’s not strategic. It’s something people can relate to. Hence, such initiatives like the ‘Chase Community Giving’ programme on facebook or Standard Chartered UAE’s ‘Go the Distance’.

Your twitter account has been hacked. That can be unpleasant but in my opinion it is one of the best things that can happen to you in social media. It is great for your organisation because with social media you’re not being judged on how big the problem is but your ability as a brand to react and counteract as openly and timely as possible.

On the business case, let’s take the other side of the organization – let’s say HR and recruitment – you don’t go to the headhunters, you’re going to use LinkedIn, you use twitter to post your openings, identify talent and eventually shorten your recruitment cycle. That’s quantifiable.

B2B – you organise events (online or offline), you increase their visibility – hence the size of your audience – by promoting the events via social media channels like LinkedIn and twitter.

To take two hot areas. First, customer support. What’s the value of winning back a customer who is about to leave the organization? What if you manage to save that relationship through dynamic and active listening on twitter or facebook? You can easily quantify the long term value of this relationship. And at the same time you drive customer advocacy.

Voice of the customer (“VOC”) and brand ambassadors. Let’s say I’m a marketeer I’ve got a budget but we know that people don’t trust marketing messages any more so we need to find better ways to increase sales or drive adoption of a service like online banking. What if I can use the real comments and feedback from my real customers to do that?

You suggest in the book that it’s not a necessarily a massive commitment of resources…

That’s correct.  Usually there’s a lot of inertia in banks and the question is “who owns social media?”  There’s the question of who owns it and who is doing it.  So it’s about action versus just planning. You can easily spend 18 months putting together a framework and postponing any social media activity, and that would be a mistake.

You create your own assets – twitter, facebook, YouTube. You do the basics better than your competitors and you’re already winning. Then you need a content strategy. And here’s where there’s a huge misconception in social media – that you have to create new content all the time. So you have all the agencies knocking at the client’s door saying “Mr Banker we’re going to help you create new videos every day. We’re going to write new articles every day”. Step back! You’re a bank or insurance company, you already create gazillions of content every day – presentations, videos, analysis. So your first job is to use social media to distribute that content better and link the right content with the right people. To that extent, yes, it doesn’t require too much resources to start with. It’s all about processes. So long as you plan you don’t need a big team.

So it is better to “make” rather than “buy”?

Social media is important because people’s expectations are changing rapidly and you need to connect with your customers online so for that reason I believe you shouldn’t outsource things like community management and content. It should be in your DNA. You understand your industry like nobody else but you need to meet current and future client expectations.

Having said that you probably need some partners to help you understand how to get the basics right – maybe in benchmarking or best practices. You don’t reinvent the wheel and you want to leverage internal resources – empower them and turn them into ‘rockstars’ (as Wells Fargo call their bloggers).

On platforms you need to white label something that exists – many are free. I would advise a vast majority of financial institutions not to build anything bespoke. Currently, very few banks are integrating social media data with CRM systems. The time will come, but there are a few significant challenges to overcome.

One word that crops up a lot in the book is “authenticity” whether in terms of the organisation’s message and the feedback from outside. Is good and authentic social media practice in conflict with PR and does it ignore the sales imperative?

Social media is all about voice so authenticity is critical. Social media is not about driving sales directly, it’s about increasing the propensity to do business with your brand. It’s about changing people’s perception of your organization.

You launch a blog about students, try to identify people in the organization who have graduated not so long ago and who know what it’s like to be a student. The more your target audience can relate to your contributors and find your content valuable, the more successful your social media initiative.

We’re in an ongoing financial crisis. How big is the potential for social media to restore banks’ reputations?

Big, very big. But of course social media is not everything and if your products are crap it won’t help you. I’m surprised in the UK because the crisis was the best case ever for social media in financial services. We should have seen much more in social media because people don’t trust the marketing messages any more. People talk about their satisfaction on twitter, facebook etc… so you need to be there. Give the power to the customers and let the customers rate you. New entrants in the UK like Metro Bank have done very little.

What are the most exciting and innovative recent examples in social media in retail banking?

In customer support, banks like Bank of America or America Express on twitter. On facebook a few banks have started doing customer support on their walls, like Absa (part of Barclays Bank) in South Africa. 

Then there’s crowdsourcing: launching innovation labs and inviting customers to share their ideas and comment on their products. I would flag Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Last August, they hired Andy Lark as their CMOO – Chief Marketing and Online Officer. Andy comes from Dell where he built social media so expect more innovation from the Australian banking industry.

In France there are some good marketing initiatives – like BNP Paribas, allowing you to ‘open a bank account with one tweet’.

To me Amex is the best example of social media being integrated with your business strategy. Amex’s twitter and facebook presence is outstanding in terms of community management and content strategy. Remember, you want to become an ambassador for a sector. The genius of American Express, which is targeting small businesses, is that they asked themselves “what can we do for that market? We provide cards and facilitate payments, but what else? We’re good at social media so we’re going to share that with our business customers and help them build a stronger online presence and grow their business.” They built a strategy on social media around that.

The key is to find the right way to reward the customer – giving them an incentive or a reason to come to you, to share and contribute. You must Know Your Followers (‘KYF’). You need to understand your communities. It’s not about size anymore. You need to know “who are those people?” The more you know about them, the better your content strategy, the higher your ability to engage with them and drive business.

In the banking industry people don’t really like us. Nobody wants a loan but they want a car, get married or send their children to university. So we need to shift from the financial product to the goals, dreams and objectives of the customer and social media helps us do that.