Nordea’s use of Facebook and social media to engage their customer

I really enjoyed the presentations in Oslo, particularly the case studies by Nordea and ValYou.

Nordea spoke about their experiences with social media usage.  This, in itself, is fascinating as just a few years ago no bank spoke about social media in finance.  Now, I am building case studies about how banks see this as both a customer service channel, and a platform for full deposit account usage (mBank and ICICI).

But there is still quite a spectrum of banking from those who ban the use of social media in the office ot those who embrace it for communications.

Nordea falls somewhere in the middle, according to Rune Sjøhelle, Head of Brand Management and Social Media in the Nordea Group and Head of Communications in Nordea in Norway.

Rune presented the Nordea experience of engaging customers through Facebook, Twitter and Youtube and showed that it’s a journey that is challenging, relentless and fruitful.

He began by talking about the general trends of social media usage, highlighting that Ellen Degeneres selfie at the Oscars was the fastest shared update of all time.   It reached almost a million people in just half an hour and now stands at over three million retweets today.

If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014

Rune then discussed how most folks do not see a trend till it hits them in the face – “the internet is a fad” (Clifford Stoll) – but when social media hits over a billion people and news can be shared in real-time one-to-one, the world has changed.

As Rune put it: “we need to be there because our customers and stakeholders are there”.

But it’s not just that, it’s more than that.

This was demonstrated to Nordea’s management when, in 2010, they got a wake-up call from the NGO Avaaz who started a social media campaign to stop Nordea funding a firm involved in deforestation in Australia:

The power of this campaign which spread like wildfire, so to speak, stopped the company in their tracks and made them reconsider their approach to the online community.

Now, they embrace Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn, but in different ways.

Facebook is for customer service, Twitter for influence, Youtube for advertising and LinkedIn for recruitment.

Rune then focused upon Facebook, and the fact that a lot of what goes out on Facebook is unseen.  The average update is only viewed by 3% to 15% of followers, so you have to pay or engage to get noticed.

He cited a number of examples where Nordea have paid to promote a page in a campaign and these were particularly successful, and measurably so. They weren’t expensive either.

You can see Rune’s flow of thinking through his presentation below: