Three Ways Asset Management Firms Can Leverage Social Media

The “Social Enterprise” is a concept that organizations within the Financial Services industry often want to embrace, but find it challenging to do so. Regulations and compliance rules provide limitations and restrictions that don’t often apply to other industries, like CPGs and consumer brands, that have already embraced and found success with social. Additionally Financial Services firms are still looking for ways to use social to bring real benefit to their businesses specifically.

Another part of the challenge is that social is often only equated with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other “externally facing”, consumer technologies. Yet, there is a whole other piece, Social Collaboration, that is often not considered, but is a great way for these companies to realize big benefits with social.

We’ve been working with some great companies within the Financial Services industry to help them understand how Social Collaboration could work for them and the best ways to deploy it within their environments. We’ve found a lot of success using Salesforce.com’s Collaboration Cloud, specifically Chatter, to help our clients jump-start sales opportunities, make sales and product teams more efficient, and keep the company at large more informed of current events, market trends, and competitors.

Below are 3 examples of how Asset Management firms can use Chatter:

Get Relevant, Contextual Information on Products in Real-time. Rather than asking product marketing to send out mass e-mails to the entire sales team, use Chatter to give contextual and conversational information about specific products. This way, members of the sales team can opt-in to the specific products that they want, increasing the relevancy of the information that they get and increasing the chance that they’ll actually read and use it. Additionally, they can ask questions and share feedback with the product team all within one place, so that there’s no need to search their e-mail inbox or wait for a reply to an email for information when they need it.
Share Best Practices Across Regional Teams. Use Chatter Groups to create a space for team members to share success stories on what has worked out in the field and closed deals. This is more effective than e-mailing the success story, because it’s more easily found (no need to remember what to search on within an e-mail inbox) and it’s more interactive (team members can ask questions and offer up advice pro-actively).
Get Portfolio Managers’ Points of View on the Market and Current Events. By encouraging wholesalers and their teams to follow Portfolio Managers (PMs) on Chatter, they can get real-time updates on the PMs point of view on the market and translate that to their partners and clients pro-actively. Additionally, clients or wholesalers may have questions that are commonly asked of PMs – by using Chatter, the PM can respond to the question in a way that all members of the company can see the answer, creating more efficiency for all parties involved.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that we recently announced G1 Asset Management - a solution aimed to help financial services firms and banks transition to cloud computing with Salesforce.com. Click through to get some more detail.

Cyndi Zaino (17 Posts)

Cyndi is a senior consultant specializing in Cloud Sherpas' Social Enterprise division. She has worked on a variety of online interactive, social media and technology and community-based projects with several major publishers, consumer brands, global financial services firms and smaller service-based businesses.