Via The Financial Brand, which says that any social media strategy worth its salt requires at least one full-time operative. Snippet from the article:
“It’s very easy to underestimate the amount of time and energy it takes to create any kind of success in the social media space. Just to run a blog, it take[s] a bare minimum of five hours a week, and more realistically 10-20 hours. Add another five or so hours a week for Twitter. If you run promotions, or integrate video into your social media initiatives, the hours really start to balloon.”
The post refers to an online report on a well known organization that spent two years and hired two employees but still only had 135 fans on its Facebook page. That changed recently. Ask yourself, when you click through to find out how, whether your bank can find an equivalent approach–or be in position to benefit when some unknown user (perhaps inadvertently) launches the next Facebook fad.
H/T to ICBM’s Current News.
The blogging bankers at Nicolet National Bank in Wisconsin have been on a roll over at The Vault lately. CEO Bob Atwell’s latest post addresses this month’s meeting between President Obama and a few of the country’s biggest bank CEOs. He makes some interesting points on too-big-to-fail, concluding that “centralized and politicized finance is financially and politically profitable for both politicians and financiers.” An excerpt:
“The pressing policy question is whether we are going to enact policies to ‘discourage and eliminate’ systemic risk or whether we are going to develop a ’super-regulator’ to ‘manage’ systemic risk. Policies designed to eliminate systemic risk will foster decentralization and force bubble manufacturers to raise private capital for their reindeer games. They’ll be small self-funded games if the private players have to fund them. Those who want to ‘manage’ systemic risk will inevitably only further politicize finance. Megabankers and mega regulators will find the ‘management of systemic risk’ model mutually beneficial, to the detriment of the rest of us.”
Atwell mentions the president’s call to banks to lend. I have repeatedly heard bankers answer that saying, we will if a.) there’s a demand and b.) the person making the demand is creditworthy. Atwell notes that loan demand is down and should be. His reasons: 1.) People are deleveraging, not taking on new debt 2.) Bank capital is expensive right now, ergo so are bank loans 3.) Cheap cash is abundant but capital is tight. Check it out here.
Signs of economic recovery notwithstanding, Wisconsin banker/blogger Bob Atwell says his bank is preparing for a “difficult external environment” in 2010. The banking industry is in bad shape, governmental reaction is punitive, bank closures and FDIC funding prerogatives will tax earnings and capital at open banks, and the public proclamations of regulators differ from what bankers hear behind closed doors.
Atwell uses a barnyard metaphor to describe the situation:
“The federal government acts like the angry farmer when he discovers that half the horses have left the barn. He cannot beat the horses that fled, so he turns his wrath on the animals that he can strike. Most of all he is motivated by his desire to avoid explaining to his hungry wife and kids that he left the barn door open. He assures the family that there will be enough food as he plans to cut one leg off of each remaining horse.”
Hard, but not hopeless, for as Atwell’s post suggests, it’s the kind of thing you can get through with a little clear-eyed planning.
Bank president and blogger Noah Wilcox said the Obama administration’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency would infringe a basic American liberty, the right “to think for ourselves.”
He said much else beside. Check out his post Consumer Protection or Elitism?
Click here.
