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It’s easy enough to set up a company Twitter or Facebook account, but Richard Bassinder had to answer a tough question first: What would people want to see in their social feeds from a 152-year-old financial services company?
“We’re not a Red Bull or a Disney,” says Bassinder, social media manager for Yorkshire Building Society, the UK’s second-largest building society, with more than 3.3 million customers.
Yorkshire Building Society, a member-owned financial services provider, uses Oracle Social Cloud to connect with customers.
A building society is a member-owned provider of financial services, with a big emphasis on mortgages as well as savings products. So Bassinder and his colleagues have worked to find creative ways, within the confines of a highly regulated industry, to focus on the reason people really want a mortgage: to have a home.
“We’re asking that question of what ‘home’ really means,” he says.
Yorkshire Building Society recently launched a social campaign around the hashtag #aplacecalledhome, encouraging people to post photos on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter that reflect what home means to them. The social team, which the Society formed about 18 months ago, ventured into Pinterest for the first time as well, offering £1,000 toward remodeling for whoever posts the most inspiring collage of how they’d like to make their house a home.
They also held an event at Yorkshire’s head office, where the social team filmed a group of children as they built their idea of a home using the video game Minecraft. It will soon promote that video on Twitter and Facebook.
Unlike Red Bull, Yorkshire Building Society doesn’t have skydivers playing Quidditch to highlight in social media, but it does face something Red Bull doesn't: strict financial industry regulations regarding marketing. Bassinder’s challenge is to make the Society’s social engagement as creative as possible while complying with those regs.
That’s where he and his team lean on Oracle Social Cloud, which includes workflows to help ensure that every social post has been through the company’s approvals process—regulatory, risk, and legal—before it goes public. It’s what gives Bassinder confidence that his team can maximize their creativity and control at the same time. Oracle Social Cloud lets the team monitor and manage activity across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn , as well as analyze data on all of those social efforts in one dashboard.
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Oracle’s Social Relationship Management social listening capabilities also help the team track what’s being said about Yorkshire Building Society on social media, and reply if needed to brand or service issues. Members of Bassinder’s social team currently respond directly, in the social channel itself, though he’s looking at plugging the Society’s customer service team into Oracle Social Cloud. “Social is just another channel” to connect with customers, he says.
Bassinder underscores the importance of thinking like another social user, not like a business using the channel. Bassinder’s philosophy: “ Be a social business, not just a business that uses social media ” and that means being agile, innovative, responding with a human voice, and saying sorry if it’s called for.
That’s why it’s essential to have a technology platform that lets the Yorkshire Building Society have a dialogue to understand what customers need—to listen and respond as well as send out messages. “For me, social media is the world’s biggest focus group,” Bassinder says.
Chris Murphy is director of cloud content at Oracle.
