Financial Services Supper Club: Having a social purpose and feeling âepic!â

MoneySuperMarket’s Sharon Flaherty delivers the first Financial Services Supper Club talk

The inaugural DMA Financial Services Supper Club, in association with Social i Media, kicked off at The Portman Marylebone on Thursday 5 June 2014. If you couldn’t make this lively, informal and insightful event, here’s some of what you missed.

Sharon Flaherty, an expert and thought leader in content marketing, journalism, social media and PR, kicked off with a ‘political hot potato’: ”It will be interesting to see if you can make social work; no-one’s been able to yet.”

This led to a discussion of how financial services firms define success in social media – and the uncomfortable notion that a single sales-related KPI is unlikely to be fit for purpose.
Sharon then posed a no-nonsense question:

“Does your firm have a social purpose?”
Social purpose, she explained, meant defining something that you stand for, that gives people that ‘nudge’ to engage with you socially because there is genuinely something in it for them. This is quite different from the ‘how to’ and ‘why’ of a social media strategy and more akin to a mission statement that should act as a seam through all social content and activity.

Sharon then shared insights into how this social purpose was translated by MoneySuperMarket and (her former company) Confused.com in their social media approach, and how responsive content and hyper-personalisation is increasingly deployed.

The questions “What is your social problem?” and “What is social success for you?” informed the debate over a delicious three-course meal. The discussion spanned many hot topics for financial services, including:

• Financial regulation (particularly relating to Twitter)
• Data collection – and the challenge of different departments collaborating to use this effectively
• The changing nature of CRM (customer relationship management)
• Getting the mix of PPC (pay-per-click), SEO (search engine optimization) and organic content right
• Where’s the ‘line’ between timely, hyper-personalised marketing and ‘creepy’ corporate behavior?

Here are some of the top tweets of the night:

Why join the Financial Services Supper Club?
It’s an informal space to hear from some of the best financial services marketers in the business, trailblazers with real-life case studies, sharing the trials and tribulations of marketing at the sharp end of the ‘New Normal’ in financial services.

• Informal, friendly atmosphere (Chatham-House rules for discussions)
• 3-course dinner included, hosted at a central London location
• Hear from – and put questions to – some of the most forward-thinking marketers in UK financial services
• A casual but stimulating environment to share industry best practice about digital and traditional media channels
• Follow and contribute to the conversation on Twitter, using #FSsupper

To find out about the next Financial Services Supper Club, contact Megan Hawkins.

If you work in financial services and have a case study you want to share or a topic you are burning to discuss, please get in touch: Anna.Lawlor@Social-i-Media.co.uk

By DMA guest blogger Anna Lawlor, financial journalist, content creator and co-director of Social i Media