The second document in Tempkin of Forrester Research’s series on social computing and financial services.

Forrester Research: Financial Consumers Adopt Social Computing

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Length: 5 pages Shifts in online behavior are creating new phenomena that Forrester calls Social Computing. We examined how many customers within bank and brokerage customer bases perform various Social Computing activities.

A few of our findings: ING Direct and HSBC Group customers are the most likely to visit social networking sites; E*TRADE banking customers are the most likely to listen to podcasts; and NetBank customers are the most likely to read blogs.

Some of the conclusions are to consider how to use social computing tools for financial services relevance.  One idea is to lever for educational purposes, such as retirement and wealth management.

I would go further.  Social tools, such as blogs, and wikis, can be used for:

• product development
• product and service creation
• discussing privacy and security
• discussing the brand, and brand attributes, and how the bank is standing up for its attributes

Relevance to Bankwatch:
Social computing is the right forum to open the bank to be more human, and genuinely customer centric.  Products and services created co-operatively with customers will resonate with them because of the design, and because they place the bank on the side of the customer.  This is customer centric, and demonstration of customer advocacy.

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