Alternative marketing thinking

After bringing the Card Lab, Capital One Financial Corporation has now tied up with Flickr to bring the first ever Capital One Image Card. Customers can either choose pictures from Capital One’s gallery of images or upload one of their own. The company claims that personalization will help customers create cards that are distinctly them. Users have to follow a simple online procedure to get their own cards. Last November, Capital One launched the Capital One Card Lab which provides consumers with a new level of transparency and choice in credit cards. Customers are offered a series of interactive choices related to interest rate, annual fee and reward options, where they can click to select the combination of features that are most important to them. As choices are made, the tool narrows the options in the remaining categories, eliminating options that don’t work together. For example, consumers who are willing to pay an annual fee can earn rewards faster. So while banks are focussing on the many benefits that they think will attract customers, Capital One is probably doing something better by going on the creative track. Read what some bloggers are talking about the latest offering by Capital One here.

The Royal Bank of Canada has started a unique web portal to help students learn about money management, through video and text blogs by six chosen bloggers. RBC p2p claims to be a place where students can voice their own thoughts about the kind of banking they really need and want. The six bloggers are a mix of university students, aged between 19 to 29 years, right from all the way in Saskatchewan to British Columbia. A good thing would be to link up this blog to more student-popular social websites like Facebook, MySpace and others. We think that Twitter updates on what students are discovering would also revolutionize it and make it more interactive, something that students would actually talk about even when they are not using it.

A few days ago Google launched Knol (units of knowledge), where experts from different fields will be invited to write on specific subjects. There have been varying kinds of reactions to the effort. From Wikipedia killer, to copy cat. Read Seth Godin post on the subject.

Google’s aim, as always is lofty. “There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge” writes Uli Manber Google’s VP of engineering.

Wish CEOs and brand managers are listening. There is a lot of useful knowledge that people possess about brands and products, but very few companies are actually using this knowledge to help customers solve their problems.

One of the biggest problems/opportunities of the networked age is that ordinary people often know as much or more about the company and its products as do these companies. Yet very few companies, specially companies that were set up in the pre-networked era have actively harnessed this knowledge.

Technology companies are probably leading this revolution, but why can’t financial institutions, white goods manufacturers, well, just about any company use the power of knowledge that resides with consumers, former employees and ordinary people for their own good?

Many of us look up search engines and forums trying to find little things - local telephone number of the company that can help service the washing machine, for instance. Sometimes the service centre has moved on and the listed numbers are old or outdated. Imagine setting up a knol, even a mini wikipedia where people who have used a service can become willing participants in knowledge sharing? Once consumers see such services they will start using them willy-nilly, to soon build up critical mass. If we were to let go of short-term thinking, company managed wikis could become the perfect place to spread word of mouth about the brand and its products. Enable a few web 2.0 tools and soon a fertile, ever updated repository of valuable knowledge, will help companies and brands rank high up in search listing.

Interesting links. Usenet. The original help desk, set up in the late 70s. About.com one of the earliest attempts to set up a network of experts, today About results are among the first ones to show up on Google. Yahoo Answers, one of the more successful services from Yahoo. Seth Godin’s Squidoo, because everyone is an expert on something. Wired wiki. a journalist experiments with crowdsourcing. Suggestions on My Yahoo is powered by a Digg rating engine, wow!

Update: Services like GetSatisfaction (people powered customer service) and GetHuman (a people created service that helps others reach human service executives on phone based IVRs) will force companies to set up similar services.

Sangini Women’s Co-operative Society bank run by sex workers is definitely a first of its kind in India. This bank is run in three tiny rooms of Kamathipura, India’s biggest red light area by prostitutes of Mumbai city, in the hope of saving up for the future. The start-up capital was provided by the Washington-based non-government organization, Population Services India (PSI). The bank has proven to be a commercial success too. Within months of the bank’s start-up, capital has grown steadily and the amount remains invested in fixed savings schemes. Earnings from the bank go partly towards paying savings interest to about 1,000 of the bank’s customers. The rest is used to pay salaries and give loans. The bank’s customers say that they are saving to build houses in their native villages and educate their children in good schools. More here.

Another Sex Worker Co-operative this time in Ahmedabad

The Bankwatch reports of the recent Wells Fargo initiative, ‘Be Center Stage in the Rose Parade’, where they are calling anyone who can sing, dance or direct a film to come together and create a music video. With the winner having his or her video highlighted in Wells Fargo ads during the Tournament of Roses Parade and on wellsfargo.com. This is the first time that a financial institution is venturing into customer generated media marketing. Contrast this to the CMO of Citi, Lisa Caputo’s paranoia (see this story in Mediapost) about letting customers play around with the group’s logo and other corporate material and we wonder if along with Chuck Prince will we see a marketing person move on as well.

Nigel Hollis at the Millward brown Blog has an interesting post on how a small student protest on Facebook forced a bank, HSBC, to climb down on a rate increase. The point he makes is not so much that some 6,500 protesters on a social networking site could force a bank to do a climb down. His team at Millward Brown did a quick poll in their offices among new graduates, which showed that only 4% of them had heard of the protest through Facebook itself. While almost nine times as many - 35% - had heard about it through traditional news media. The rest, in the majority, were unaware of the issue. So while the Facebook revolt was a catalyst for the wider news coverage, it was the latter, the traditional media outlets, which really caused HSBC to take notice. Nigel concludes that social networks are a great place to seed marketing campaigns, but to get them to flourish you will need to add a good dose of traditional media coverage. We think there is another little thing that maybe worth noting. That anything that happens on Facebook right now is worth talking about. Just like Second Life had all the buzz a few months, right now it’s Facebook time. Read the whole post here.

If the recent eMarketer study on the effects of customer ratings on their websites is anything to go by, banks should be looking seriously to let users leave testimonials or user reviews on their sites. The study shows that over half of online retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe said their overall conversion rates had gone up in the past year. Over three-quarters said their site traffic had increased. And average order values rose for 42% of the responding online retailers. The survey conducted by E-consultancy and Bazaarvoice found that 28% of online sellers were using customer ratings and reviews. More than half said they were considering it. More than half of all online sellers considered user-generated content either extremely important or very important to company strategy over the next year. A majority of online sellers thought a major benefit of such reviews was to increase conversions, while 73% thought improved customer retention and loyalty were major benefits. Nearly six in 10 thought the fact that customer reviews improved search engine optimization was a major benefit. More at eMarketer.

Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Orkut have been a great place for musicians and online dating companies to grab market share. But banks? It all started on May 24 when Facebook, taking a leaf out of what Microsoft has been doing for years, opened its network to outside developers. And one of the first finance companies to get onboard was Lending Tree, (Rob at Lending Club wrote in saying that they are in no way connected to Lending Tree) with Lending Club. Paypal has set up PayMe an online payment mechanism. But consulting firm Online Banking Report feels that all this is just the beginning. The rise of social networking, they say, could have a profound effect on banking and personal finance. As companies combine massive databases of financial transactions with the ‘collective intelligence’ of a networked customer base, interesting things can happen.

One of the things that took analysts covering a recent World Bank presentation by surprise was the fact that the Bank now monitors buzz. One of the slides on show monitored the number of times the World Bank had been mentioned in blogs between November 2006 and February 2007. And if you were following the end game in the Paul Wolfowitz saga, you could say that the blogsphere had unleashed a billion or two nattering nabobs of negativity tainting the once venerable organisation. To help the bank
understand the unbridled chatter all around, the Bank unsatisfied with the capabilities of the available tools went out to create its own Buzz Monitoring tool. Read more from Salon Magazine. The Bank has put out a version of the tool for the world to download and use our here.

Niche TV channels are sprouting all over the Internet and media networks or brands have little or no role to play in them. Like Flush TV, a customer created channel, that’s half blog and half TV on a subject that’s way low on the Maslwo’s hierarchy. Now into its 9th episode, Flush TV is philosophy for those who believe in plumbing. This five minute internet reality series, as the New York based creators call it, is available as a vlog on iTunes. There are tonnes of such examples, including Manchester United’s online pay TV station, DIY site Instructables, and Unboxing - a site for people who get vicarious thrills from opening new stuff. For a jaw dropping slide that looks at media fragmentation, here’s a slide that tracks this subject since the 1700’s.