We’ll see what happens, but as usual, most financial services companies are asleep on social media — check out #citizensbanksucks on Twitter for a recent discussion (one-way…)

Banks can’t yet wrap their heads around social media – there are exceptions, of course, but by and large they’re not even monitoring in any consistent fashion. The question always comes up, “well, how many of our customers are actually ON social media?” or “That’s not our target market.”

I’m not sold on Social Media over the long haul, but for banks, you at least have to monitor and respond personally — the customer service application for Twitter, for example, is becoming increasingly clear. But, you have to monitor. See @comcastcares.

Other roadblocks are compliance and legal — the regulations and policies haven’t caught up — read that the Federal Trade Commission is going to monitor blogs for “commercial claims” http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090621/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_bloggers_freebie_disclosures — that can’t make the local legal department too confident.

But, I agree that this mode of interpersonal mass communication (kind of a contradiction in terms, eh? ) is likely to morph into something that financial companies are going to need to evaluate — stock trades by Twitter, anyone?