Four Australian Banks – Four Social Media Infrastructures

Brand storytelling is what drives content, and it’s more than just the copy on your web site, an app, an ad, a tweet or a Facebook status update. To be effective a brand must be supported by an infrastructure that has the right teams, structures, editorial workflows and technology solutions deployed to drive organisational change.

Our KINSHIP team examined what technology solutions the top four Australian banks are leveraging to support their social media efforts and found four very different technology deployments.

Commonwealth Bank

Commonwealth are leveraging Radian6 technology supplied by Salesforce. Radian6 doesn’t support Instagram though and it seems escalations are responded to outside of Radian6 in the Twitter web client. However, the strategy is not consistent across the bank’s regional offices with Indonesia using a combination of iPhone, Hootsuite and Twitter Web.

ANZ Bank

At first glance ANZ Bank seem to be a very consistent Hootsuite Enterprise technology user.  However, that is not consistently leveraged across the bank with Blue Notes leveraging the Twitter web client.

Westpac

This is the most unique of the banks with Westpac leveraging the platform from Lexer. Lexer has the ability to merge various social, digital, and company data into a single view. However, KINSHIP hasn’t being able to confirm that this platform is compliant with the Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook terms of service [API data use].

National Australia Bank

Although NAB are an ex-Radian6 user, we understand that was more for research and listening. From a day to day perspective NAB leverage Lithium Social Web.

Twitter Comparative Analysis

Comparing the four banks there is clearly a focused investment into Twitter by ANZ Bank, followed by Commonwealth Bank.

Michael Brito, a friend of the KINSHIP team has stated that “Unfortunately, you can’t just turn the “publisher” switch on and expect operations and culture to change overnight. You must deploy a social business strategy to make this change successful and scalable – one that encompasses people, process and technology.”

The Australian Banks need to move from merely supporting agents and community building to supporting the development of a social media strategy. A key part is examining how Social Media links to the bank’s business strategy, as well as the overall “technology architecture” of the Bank. In this way a formal “social architecture” becomes a piece of an overall digital architecture and “digital transformation” program rather than something hanging off the side.