Day Three of the FSC Annual Conference: Yahoo!7's crystal ball

What does the future of digital hold?

Day three of the Financial Services conference saw Reg the Goldfish (@RegTheFSCMascot) having an aspro and a quiet lie down on the bottom of the tank - as the plenary volume was cranked up.

After a robust political debate between MPs Deborah O'Neill (@deborah_oneill) and Paul Fletcher (@paulwfletcher) and a pacy plenary from CBA economist Craig James (@craigjamesoz) delegates heard from Rohan Lund of Yahoo!7

Lund's predictions for the decade include the following:

• Data geeks will become rock stars
• Mobile will become the dominant platform - already more searches are done on mobile devices than computers
• Advertising that's more relevant to users (contextual) will increasingly be seen as content, not advertising

At the same time ivory towers may have their foundations shaken by the three things driving structural change.

Top 3 trends

• Internet speed - every second equals revenue. Why are people transacting online? Because it's faster.
• The social graph - Facebook knows more about us than we do ourselves. If it can predict that pet owners are better at repaying their debt...what else can the social graph tell marketers about us?
• Proliferation of mobile devices - as a replacement, ultimately, even for our wallets and house keys.

How to be sustainable as a business to the financial services industry?

A few tips from Lund include:

• Using the power of the big data we have as financial services institutions
• Work out how to make the consumer trend towards collaborative consumption work for your business
• Look for opportunities to make life easier, faster for consumers...where, how and when they want it.

The bottom line?

Deliver more utility to consumers, says Lund. Not more "stuff". We just don't need it.

Day Two at the FSC Annual Conference: a call for higher retirement age

Will we outlive our money?

As Reg the goldfish (@RegTheFSCMascot) headed for a quiet corner of the tank this morning (too many bubbles last night) John Brogden, Financial Services Council CEO, called for a higher preservation age.

With no magic policy wand to wave in order to make our national savings gap disappear, what are the practical opportunities available to us? 

Increase the preservation age, argued Brogden, on the basis of Rice Warner research. And consider other reforms: putting GST back on the agenda (to be broadened or increased) and reform of state taxes - cited as the most distortionary in the Australian economy.

Economic reform to support financial services and superannuation

Tax reform decreases pressure on Government to use superannuation as a honey pot for funding, argued Brogden. Such reforms, such as the abolition of state taxes, promise direct and indirect benefits to the financial services industry, said the FSC chief.

Arguing that the economic power of superannuation will eclipse that of banking, Brogden called for economic reform that will support a stronger industry.

Marking his third year as FSC CEO he also referred to the industry's greater ability to influence the economy in which we invest - and the likelihood that superannuation as a sector will become more significant to the economy and individuals than banking.

The Johnson report featured in Brogden's remarks - increasing withholding tax creates sovereign risk he argued, and government must look to the Johnson review as a priority.

Longevity risk - aka how to pay for us all living longer?

Brogden told assembled financial services industry delegates that Australian life expectancy has increased from 55 to well over 80, while the age pension age has only moved two years - from 65 to 67. 

There is, as a result, a huge savings gap as people live longer.

So increasing the preservation age in Australia to 62 (from 60) would increase retirement savings by $400bn. Expect more policy development and research as the FSC mulls impact of increasing preservation age.

Cited as the single most effective way to address the longevity risk, Brogden advocated increased work place participation by older workers - ensure older workers stay in the workforce. And thus reduce longevity risk - the very real danger of outliving our retirement savings.

Day One of the Financial Services Council Annual Conference

When MC Tracey Spicer took to the stage to introduce the regulators panel the conference mascot, Reg(ulator?) the goldfish headed for the exit. After all how could he compete with APRA and ASIC representatives?

I'm not sure if Reg (much discussed on Twitter #fscmascot) felt unloved or in fear of a looming lack of oxygen as the four regulatory representatives filled the air with warnings to the audience of wealth management and financial services executives.

Reg may have been followed by delegates were it not for some quite frank comments from the panel.

For anyone who missed it, here are a few of the things on the regulatory hit list this year.

For insurers, APRA's list includes governance in group life schemes, disability and mortality claims experiences, and direct life business - for the latter, concerns around the quality of risk and marketing. Specifics included poor data in pricing and poor tendering processes in group life. In direct life, the spotlight is on discontinuance rates and the potential for reputational damage. Boards of direct businesses are well advised to take note.

ASIC talked about FoFA and a continued focus on consumer protections.

So what advice did the regulators give the industry?

1. Start at the top - governance has to come right from leadership down. Perhaps, if we go back to Reg the goldfish, we'd paraphrase as "fish rots from the head". The suggestion was that regulators will be sniffing around management teams in insurance as a result.
2. There's an enormous amount of change, and regulators don't underestimate its impact. So talk to the supervisors, understand what they want and provide feedback about their guidance based on your own experience - don't lose the opportunity to have input.
3. Think about the long term outcome we want from the changes we're making. By all means implement change but don't lose sight of the longer term outcomes the regulatory channels aim to achieve for all stakeholders.
4. Engage with the regulator - either directly or through your industry association - it will improve the guidance you get back.
5. Finally, while we're going through change stop perhaps to have a closer look at what you think is "business as usual" or standard practice. Otherwise you may get a regulatory wake-up call.

And finally? Watch what happened to the reputation of the banking industry in the UK. We haven't seen that in Australia. Expect a touch time ahead in terms of reputation if we don't support regulatory change.

Social media for B2B? Why it's the content that counts

By guest blogger, Tamera Lang

In a recent article in the Australian Financial Review, Agnes King asks what a social media campaign could possibly offer to clients of an accounting firm. Her claim is that Facebook and Twitter are effective business-to-consumer (B2C) communication tools, but that they have no place in a business-to-business (B2B) strategy.

Reading the article, I was struck by Ms King's narrow view of social media. Sure, if you're using Twitter to distribute a press release to journalists - or reporting what you ate for breakfast - no one would deny that your presence has limited value. However, there is so much more to Twitter and other social media tools than distributing your own content.

B2B communication may be about business, but it's still an interaction between people. And in an ever more digitised world, people think, feel, talk, network and listen online and through social media. The fact is that accounting firms and other B2B providers often have well-established brand identities in the so-called offline world. So why not online - especially given its growing prevalence? For them, the social media space is about enhancing that existing brand and reputation in a new form of conversation.

Ms King is correct when she says that you need to have something interesting and relevant to say and that this can be a challenge for all businesses on social channels, not just those communicating B2B. However, from the point of view of their clients, accounting firms have a wealth of interesting business content to impart. In fact, many such businesses have a staggering volume of material on their websites. The question is: why wouldn't clients in search of information simply visit the website, or even Google?

True, a great deal of content is available using these channels. But finding it relies on active searches and knowing what to search for. When, to put it simply, you don't know what you don't know, how are you going to find it? And then you get to the question of which clients want to know what information? Because they have many different interests.

That's where social media can really come into its own.

It enables a business to reach out and understand audiences, and to direct them to in-depth material that interests them. It also has the added benefit of being a two-way conversation, with content responding to and, in some instances, even guiding the mood and needs of the audience. That is something that a website and Google certainly can't give you.

The upshot? The key to success for B2B communicators is delivering engaging content. Content needs to be timely, relevant, thought-provoking and straight to the point. Accounting firms (and their spokespeople) on Twitter are engaging right now in conversation about policy, regulatory reform and business strategy, in ways that enhance their brand and establish them as leaders in their field. They are not afraid to lead the pack and show some personality.

Then comes another big question. Even if your content is great, does social media really work to spread the brand, establish leadership and ultimately, to promote the business? For many businesses, even those that have embraced social media, the question of reach, impact and how they can tell if they are achieving their aims remains. 

It's a question that need no longer remain unanswered - or wildly stabbed at - thanks to the range of ever more sophisticated analytical tools available. Businesses can now actively monitor and evaluate, tweet-by-tweet if they like, the response to their social media initiatives.

Ultimately, what businesses say to other businesses through social media channels does matter. It can engage, build brands and relationships, establish businesses as leaders and experts: in short, add to business performance and reputation. But that will only ever happen if they remember that it's the content that counts.

Tamera Lang is currently undertaking an internship with BlueChip Communication

When worlds collide: word of mouth v. social media

By guest blogger Sophie Halls Anning

Did the headline of Monday's AFR, 'Word of mouth trumps social media' send marketing folk seeking out recommendations on the best word-of-mouth agency? Questioning whether Twitter might just be an ivory tower containing only a few of their most vocal target audience? Wondering whether the high production value of the clip on socionomics might have contributed to a misguided leap of blind faith? Or, did it have them doing as I did, Googling word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing and seeing what insights traditional, online and social media as well as wikis and websites could reveal about this underground speciality?

I recall WOM fighting for share of PR budget a few years ago, rather than being seen as a discipline in its own right. Social media, by contrast, could swallow up to 17.5% of total marketing spend over the next 5 years, up from the current 7.1% estimation, perhaps because, unlike WOM, it's quantifiable and its reach on numbers alone, is vastly superior.

Australian agencies emphasise that they don't pay the people on their database to spruik products to their networks. They just give them free stuff on the basis that these people possess a voice. Does their status as Citizen Smith rather than a media personality or celebrity neatly side step the classic 'cash for comment' accusations made famous years ago by Lawsy and more recently the SA Tourism Commission's Kangaroo Island campaign?

Andy Sernovitz's Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, endorsed by Seth Godin offers some great tools to get started in word of mouth.Sernovitz suggests starting with the basics: "a clever product name, a special service, a choice of uniform, a well-worded email, or being a little bit nicer to your customers". The stand out here is that nowhere does he mention giving free stuff to people on a database in exchange for chat. By all means, share a good experience over a coffee or on your Facebook status. But talking up a wine sent to you by a company that's being paid to have you talk about it? I'm not so sure. Because once consumers find out that recommendations aren't entirely as independent as they thought, the danger lies in them quickly losing respect for your brand, product or service.

As the SA Tourism Commission discovered to its peril, conversation on social media has a pace which makes the Hush Puppies epidemic referenced in Malcolm Gladwell's seminal book The Tipping Point seem slow. And, as targeting and reach continue to improve day by day, if not minute by minute, it seems clear to me that social media wins.

Sophie Halls Anning is BlueChip Communication's General Manager

Finally a lesson from politics worth keeping

By guest blogger Bruce Madden

A week is a long time in politics. But it's just a tad longer for journos covering the often bizarre world of hung parliament politics. Add in this week's COAG interplay between the Feds and the States and bizarre goes to downright absurd.

As a former editor turned PR/media trainer who has spent the best part of a decade educating Financial Services executives how to behave when a microphone is switched on, I am on the constant lookout for examples to illustrate a few key points.

By the way, the expression "media training" has its own identity crisis, which is a whole other story. But in my book, training people for media is actually about helping to shape people as worthy participants in the game of media. I don't endorse the rote learning approach to media training which is to have folks memorize a bland statement and repeat, no matter what the question. I stick to the basics. Or stuff you might assume to be basic.

Like don't attack or threaten a journalist. Don't ever offer a dead bat "no comment" to a question, especially the questions you don't like. Don't, under any circumstances, avoid answering a question, feign a faint, spontaneously burst into song or walk away from a doorstop interview pretending to speak on your mobile phone, throwing a lame threat over your shoulder to call the cops!

Yes, I refer here to the Labor Senator Mark Bishop's efforts in Canberra airport this week. A classic piece of footage that went to air on the ABC this week and which will provide much for future BlueChip media training programs.

The past week yielded another gem - in the media "what not to do's" category. Queensland Premier Campbell Newman's declaration of bankruptcy ahead of the COAG meetings goes down as one of the best.

As they say in Spain "sin duda ha sido una larga semana en la politica"

"It surely has been a long week in politics."

Bruce Madden is BlueChip Communication Director and co-founder

How to get social. Stat.

By guest blogger Michelle Ryan.

Social media. Sick of hearing about it? Well, you'd better get used to it, because it's not going anywhere but up.

In fact, regardless of what business you're in - whether in financial services, retail, manufacturing, FMCG etc - the influence of social media is growing, and its impact on your company shouldn't be ignored. Or if you do, you do so at your own peril.

That might sound dramatic. But you need only look at where most news is broken these days - via social media - to realise this is where consumers are living and playing. So to not be part of it would be to ignore your current and potential customers.

So how to get up to speed with social media quickly?

You may have heard us recommend using social learning to get yourself, your colleagues and, ultimately, your business comfortable with using social media ... for the benefit of your company.

In this post, I want to take a very quick look at 'why' you should explore social learning.

What's in it for you?

If we take the impact of social media as a given, then our next step is how to make social work FOR you - and not the other way around. And doing this involves one key element: training. When it comes to training, social learning is pretty much best practice. In short, it allows you to combine expert teachers, with your own home-grown 'experts', otherwise known as your staff, to teach and learn from each other. 

This great info-graphic goes through what such training might involve for different people in the business. Remember: not all employees are created equal. So in order to train them effectively it might be best to separate them into groups based on their web literacy i.e. the digital native vs. the digital contrarian.

Where to from here?

In terms of the benefits of social learning - don't just take my word for it, take that of some of the absolute global best practice in this space.

In this article, Dell, Intel and Constant Contact talk about building social media through this kind of training. In particular, Dell talks about its 'unconferences' which it has used to train more than 5,000 employees - using experts and employees to drive the session topics.

Meanwhile, PepsiCo call their training Social Media and Responsibility Training - or SMART U. Employees said they'd love to share their PepsiCo pride, but they wanted Pepsi to explain the social media policy first. So they did. And they also educated them on social media tools such as Twitter, giving them lots of examples to help them tell the story. Which they then did.

If these examples inspire - and you are keen to give your own internal social media conference a try - this post will give you some tips on how to get started.

Michelle Ryan is an Account Manager for BlueChip Communication.