Building a Social Media Marketplace in Financial Services

Filed under Uncategorized by on 10 July 2009 at 13:23 {2 comments}

I remember in my days working at Edelman during the ERP heyday that online B2B marketplaces, particularly for manufacturing, were the buzz and actually changed how many companies did business. Last month, I presented at the Ragan Corporate Communications Social Media conference (we also hosted the conference at the exchange) about what we are doing in the financial services industry (you can view my presentation here via Slideshare and a recap from Barbara Rozgonyi here).

In my opinion we are in the midst of developing a new marketplace at the exchange. In the past several years alone we have seen tremendous and rapid change in our industry. As a marketplace founded in 1848 (version 1.0) our model was unchanged for more than 150 years. Buyers and sellers came to our trading floors to hedge their risk and sell their products. They also used the markets to discover what the market would pay for a price. In 2002 that evolved (version 2.0) when the exchange went public (Nasdaq: CME) and we had new audiences to communicate with (investors, analysts) besides our members. When I came to the exchange in 2004 another shift occurred when for the first time ever electronic trading (version 3.0) surpassed floor trading. This shift in trading create even more opportunities for us as we now had customers in more than 85 countries directly connected to CME Group (as opposed to our trading floor). Today, more than 80 percent of our volume is now electronic. If you want to know more about how the exchange operates you can watch the video here.

So where are we now? I believe social media is profoundly changing financial markets once again (version 4.0). Social media, in particular Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, are having profound effects on the way our customers interact, communicate and research what is happening in the economy. If you want a great example of this just go to StockTwits and follow the conversations. We’ll see where all of this takes us but I think social media will continue to create a number of real business opportunities for traders and the financial markets in the coming years.

I’ll be talking more about this idea and concept at Blogwell and Ragan in the coming weeks. So how is social media changing your views about your industry? I welcome your thoughts, ideas and questions.

B2B Case Study: ShipServ

Filed under Case Study by on 29 April 2009 at 12:27 {6 comments}

The social media program that this case study is based upon was a joint effort between ShipServ and Velocity Partners, a London-based B2B Marketing agency specializing in technology markets.

So what works for a B2B company? Let’s start by taking a look at a campaign that’s been pretty successful so far. This campaign was driven by John Watton, the VP of Marketing for ShipServ, an internet trading platform for the shipping industry. ShipServ has a global audience and a dispersed community of purchasers who are, believe it or not, quite eager to network.

Goals of the campaign:

  • Raise the awareness of the ShipServ brand amongst our target audience
  • Increase traffic to shipserv.com by 50% in three months
  • Engage with the audience and start to build community

Challenges faced:

  • Limited budget
  • Conservative target audience, late to adopting the internet and Web2.0 technologies

ShipServ’s Strategy:

  • Build an online community of advocates
  • Move communications from broadcast to discussion, engaging the audience in ongoing,open dialogue
  • Nurture prospects through drip feed of relevant content
  • Establish key themes on a quarterly basis, and develop rolling thunder of editorial content

Tactics Used:

  • Launch of the ShipServ Maritime Trading Network Group on LinkedIn in December 2008
  • Joined five other maritime groups on LinkedIn
  • Launch of the ShipServ blog as a container for opinion pieces
  • Opened up a twitter account, taking direct feeds from the website
  • Undertook keyword planning, optimized the website and developed landing pages for SEO
  • Revamped company newsletter to be more point-of-view oriented
  • Distributed humorous viral video

  • Underpinned site with lead nurturing system (marketo) to track visitor behaviour and nurture leads
  • Developed six themes, each of which manifested itself in:
    • A discussion posting on the LinkedIn groups
    • A social media release, distributed via PitchEngine
    • A blog posting

Results:

Building the community

  • Built a community of nearly 400 on LinkedIn
  • Attracted nearly 300 visitors to blog postings
  • Attracted over 50 relevant followers on Twitter
  • Over 600 views of the viral video, 62% of which came via email distribution and 18% via shipserv.com/linkedin distribution

Web site stats:

  • Visitors went up by 59% (increase in quantity)
  • Page views went up by 70% (increase in quality)
  • Average time on site went up by 25% (increase in quality)
  • Linkedin and Twitter went from zero to being in top 20 traffic sources
  • Number of leads passed to sales increased by 400%

This is a great example of using social media as a low cost way to build brand awareness and encourage engagement in a B2B space. Ship Serv, and John Watton, are instituting pioneering strategies with social media in a what is usually considered a pretty conservative industry.

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