06/29/2010
Walk, Run, and Climb
We’ve been on a social media kick around here since reading about its success in the community banking sector.
Looking locally for advice, we read up on some digital branding advice via Dave Allen of North.
Allen makes a great point that social media isn’t the next high-horse technological breakthrough to use to ride off toward success.
It’s simply a tool that, when used properly, can shorten the distance between your business and your consumers.
In the small balance commercial mortgage business, not only is there a long path that must be traversed, but there’s also a giant wall called covenants, lender conditions, borrower financial, and deal packages to climb.
As social media continues to permeate the financial industry, how does it address not only the shortening of the conversational path, but also the scaling of the deal scenario wall?
Thoughts?
02/23/2010
Treat Your Blog Like a Business
The title of this post is a potent line from Mark Watters’ blog article, “Nine secrets to Successful Blogging.”
Though many aspects of that post are a bit too hyper-capitalistic, there are definitely gems of knowledge to be found within the whole post.
Treating your blog like a business means to have a solid plan. Running your blog on a yearly to multi-yearly plan heightens your chance of remaining relevant, as well as motivating you or your contributors to post.
“Passion attracts others…” resonates with our company. Our blog is dedicated to remaining positive and intelligent about our industry. We hope that our passion and fervor pushes our peers and colleagues to be as into commercial lending and financing as we are.
Lastly, interacting with other bloggers is a must. We are glad Watters hit on this theme. The more you share your thoughts with other bloggers and authors, the more likely they will reciprocate.
Building readership within the financial sector is difficult. The down markets and regulatory articles do not have to retain their inherent negativity. If some news or facts greatly affect your business, reflecting upon this shows great integrity and responsibility to come from your organization via the web.
02/18/2010
How Does It Fit?
Social media in our industry is not a question of whether or not it fits, but how it fits into your overall communications strategy. It is a difficult question for many businesses. Slowly but surely, people are figuring it out. We here at Fairway continue pondering how to fully use all of those web resources every day.
To simply ignore social media because it is “too hard” or because “I don’t have enough time for it” can be detrimental down the road. According to Nielsen ratings, people generally spend 82% more time on social networking sites than they did a year ago (Source: eRealEstate.com). Those people could be your colleagues and customers to who you could be the targets of your marketing and communications efforts.
If you are all about these tools and have started exploring ways to increase your fan base across the popular tools (like Twitter and Facebook), please consider the pros and cons of manufacturing fans and followers versus organically growing a strong base of brand believers.
While having a large legion is attractive from an ROI perspective, organically building relationships at a slower pace can also prove to be fruitful. Like the handful of close business relationships that you might have, social media relationships can be nurtured in a similar way. Check out Seth Godin’s post on viral content and faux followers for more insight on this paradigm.
Feel free to talk social media shop with us. We always want to hear of great financial social media stories as well as share bits and pieces of what we’ve accomplished.
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