It’s not often you see a bank being innovative, that’s why this initiative from First Direct (http://www.live.firstdirect.com) caught my eye.
First Direct is part of the banking giant HSBC and offers online and telephone services in the UK with no actual branches. Their strapline is ‘banking’s better in black and white’ with the idea that First Direct is “honest, open and transparent” which ties in nicely with this campaign.
First Direct Live measures feedback from customers across the web, as well as inviting them to comment directly on the site. The page features Flash widgets that show sentiments such as positive and negative words being used about First Direct on websites such as Review Centre, Dooyoo and Ciao. However it looks to me as these three sites could be the extent of it’s external web sourced comments as First Direct doesn’t list where the information comes from, which is utterly lame considering this is all about being ‘transparent’.
There’s even sharing options in case you want to show all your Facebook chums how well First Direct is doing with customer feedback!…
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The only way this could benefit anyone is if you wanted all your friends to flock to the ‘hide’ button next to your newsfeed updates so that they never see any more from you again.
According to this blog, “It works by taking everything that’s said about us online, from over 8 million forums, blogs and social media sites, and then feeding it, live onto our website for all to see”. However out of those 8 million sites (are there really that many?), I can only see Review Centre, Dooyoo and Ciao mentioned.
These sites aren’t really a good source for First Direct’s ‘sentiment tracking’ as they hardly have any updates. For example Ciao has 131 reviews for First Direct, and how many of those were made in 2009? Just two. How the hell can that be a good representation of ‘live’ brand sentiment? The same applies with the reviews on Dooyoo (5 this year) and Review Centre (13 this year). The majority of the reviews were made before First Direct launched this campaign.
First Direct are missing a trick by not using Twitter, you know… that real time micro-blogging website used by millions of people. They simply have to announce that the the hashtag ‘#firstdirect’ will be tracked. They already have 538 followers on their Twitter page, tell them, they will tell others and in the space of a few weeks you will have real up to date, uncensored feedback to track.
Facebook Fan pages also need to be utilised, tracking things such as positive and negative wall posts, likes on status updates etc . I would imagine a fair amount of customers for a online bank would be using both these services.
It was so bizarre that First Direct didn’t utilise Twitter or Facebook, especially with everyone was praising this as a social media campaign, so I decided to do some digging and found this interview with Lisa Wood, the head of marketing for the bank. Here’s the relevant bit:
Did you consider pulling comments straight from Twitter and showing them on the site, as Skittles does?
We did talk about Skittles when we discussed the campaign, and thought about the idea of a Twitter stream on the site, but we couldn’t do this for legal reasons. Having looked at the ins and outs of doing this, and the Twitter terms and conditions regarding intellectual property rights, we decided it wouldn’t be possible.
So First Direct want to own the IP for all reviews and comments? Well that means making a social media tracker is pretty pointless seeing as practically every one of these sites gives the user ownership of the content. And rightly so. Facebook T&Cs here and Twitter T&Cs here. It basically means you won’t see what’s being said about First Direct on more other sites where you can comment more spontaneously.
My hunch is that First Direct didn’t want to use a Twitter stream because they have less control about what’s being said about the brand. Maybe they didn’t want to have the same fate as HSBC when an unofficial site used Twitter to stream ‘raw’ reviews.
It’s not that I don’t love the idea of sentiment tracking, quite the opposite, I think it’s brilliant and I’d like to see other brands explore this sort of thing. The problem is that using the words ‘social media’ to describe this campaign makes you automatically assume it’s actually using the services that are defining the market like Twitter and Facebook, therefore making you want to drink it’s ‘Kool Aid’. Marketing Week clearly made that mistake thinking it uses Twitter, even though the statement from Lisa Wood says otherwise.
This campaign comes after the First Direct ‘Social Media Newsroom‘ launch, where you can share the bank’s press releases with your friends (why would anyone do this?), look at their Flickr feed with photos from staff parties (??) or watch their YouTube channel with adverts and more staff content (incredibly boring). I really don’t count adding a share button and a couple of feeds as ‘doing social media’. The newsroom was created in collaboration with the social media specialist (debatable) public relations consultancy Wolfstar.
Overall it’s a move in the right direction by First Direct, it’s good to see a bank experimenting. They already have a iPhone application which appears to be doing well. Now lets see some other banks have a go.
The agency behind this was Made By Pi
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![Review Centre](<a href="http://s91302.gridserver.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/firstdirect2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2568" title="firstdirect_live" src=){kind=link}
The campaign successfully creates the illusion that it is being transparent, thereby generating lots of buzz, without actually being transparent at all.
A REAL social sentiment tracker should be employed by the marketing team for their own use, even if they are too scared to ever let the public see it.
Hi Chris, that’s exactly right, just because the words social media are mentioned people automatically assume a) it’s great and b) it works.
I tweeted @first_direct asking what sites they track and I got this back:
“@mutlu82 We’re searching over 8 million sites including Facebook and Twitter for the online sentiment tracking”
So I headed over to Twitter and searched #firstdirect again (I did this before I wrote the post when it dawned on me they were full of bull), guess how many people are talking about first direct on Twitter? FOUR, and one of those is me. They obviously aren’t tracking the words “First Direct” outside of the hashtags because this brings up millions of unrelated results as it’s a generic term.
When they mentioned Facebook I automatically knew this was bull, after checking that they don’t have a Facebook Fan page and they can’t search public status updates because just like Twitter, “First Direct” is so generic.
I replied to @First_Direct querying this but haven’t heard back.
Hi, Amanda & Rebecca from first direct’s PR team here.
Below is in response to some of the questions you’ve raised both in your blog and on Twitter:
The Live site uses an aggregated search engine [provided by a company called Précis] to provide the raw data. It scans millions of sites including Twitter, blogs (and comments on blogs), micro blogging platforms, mainstream media, forums etc… (not all of Facebook though, just the publicly available bits). We then filter these using a Boolean operator to get rid of the “first direct” phrases which are not referencing us, such as “first direct flights”, by using includes like “bank” and “account” to make sure we’re getting relevant results. Then we filter them again for positive and negative words to determine the sentiment. We also filter for profanity.
Here are some of the top sites that have mentioned first direct since 1st September to today.
1. twitter.com
2. moneysavingexpert.com
3. thefinanser.co.uk
4. facebook.com
5. guardian.co.uk
6. prudentminds.com
7. livejournal.com
8. financial-news.org.uk
9. brandrepublic.com
10. moneysupermarket.com
Hope this makes it all clearer for you.
Hi Amanda & Rebecca,
Thanks for taking the time to reply and listing the sources.
Facebook and Twitter appear in your top sites, but I can only find 1 public mention of First Direct (that was about this campaign) on Facebook and 2 on Twitter (the other 11 are about this or the newsroom campaign). Is this correct? (I didn’t count the staff group or anti-First Direct group)
I used boolean searches on Twitter before I wrote about the campaign, using “first direct” with terms like “bank”, “account”, “money” (brings up unrelated First Direct results), “overdraft”,”mortgage” looking for stuff consumers are tweeting about the bank rather than retweets of press releases etc. I could only find the two results.
I guess my point is that the buzz associated with saying you’re tracking Twitter and Facebook is different to the reality of the what’s actually being extracted? If no one is discussing you in their social groups, are you driving conversation in these channels? Doing some above-the-line stuff telling your 1.6 million customers to tweet what they think with the hashtag #firstdirect would work wonders.
I’m taking a look at some of the other top 10 sources and comparing to the statement on your press release “The microsite aggregates consumer opinions from eight million social media sites.”
Do Brand Republic really count? They just react to press releases and are often full of positives words either because they quote Marketing Managers or don’t criticise things that matter to the consumer, products like mortgages, savings accounts and customer service. Doesn’t that skew the results? They have user comments and forums but it’s not consumer focused.
Prudent Minds is more press releases and positive quotes from executives etc about your new products. The blog doesn’t allow user comments on it’s news items which is where First Direct is frequenly mentioned.
Money Saving Expert and Money Supermarket are excellent sources of sentiment, constantly updated informaton from consumers about the service they are getting. As a consumer those are the kind of things I would expect these results to be based on rather than extracts from superlatative filled quotes.
I’ll update the post to say you do track Twitter and Facebook