"We need to adopt the social media as an asset with proper control mechanism and awareness across the organisation"

Ensuring Social Media As An Asset For Business

We live in a knowledge economy where information is vital and critical to ongoing success as we transition to a post industrial age where workers don’t carry bricks but laptops, Smart Phones, Tablets etc. These assets are now not just restricted to online properties you own such as your website but anywhere you have a web presence and this includes your social media channels.

Social media is transforming the web and with the rise of Facebook there has been an unseemly gold rush by brands to make their online presence more social. This social participation broadens and deepens the reach and influence significantly of any brand and organisation.

The challenge is the positive and negative stem from the single truth about social media. It’s people sharing their opinions in an open forum.

For customers, suppliers and employees, social media creates engagement with the business directly; using employees who are empowered to participate. The opportunities are huge, to engage massive communities, build loyalty and improve performance.

Three Social Media Strategy Guidelines

Clearly, most asset managers need to have stronger social media presences, guided by intelligent strategies. In our view, there are some specific steps that managers should take and some risks they should avoid. We suggest following three broad guidelines:

1. Meet the needs of your audience
Using social media accelerates information dissemination, as well as improving investor and advisor education. Social media networking and interactivity supports and educates clients, leading to benefits for both the client and the asset manager. Our interviews show that the most  successful companies are not the ones that simply churn out press releases, but those that engage with their clients.

2. Manage your risks
Most of the risks associated with social media are non-financial, but any can quickly hurt your profitability. We have identified four principal risk categories:
• Brand & reputation risk covers damage to relationships with clients, shareholders and business partners
• Information security risk covers unintended leaks of sensitive data, due to account hijacking and subsequent misuse
• Legal & regulatory risk covers issues like the mistaken release of private data and the failure to effectively meet a regulator’s data retention demands
• Client ownership risk deals primarily with the ownership of intellectual property.

If an asset manager has invested time in developing a following, what’s to stop a competitor from joining the conversation? Or if a ‘star’ portfolio manager interacts regularly with clients, how can a company limit the danger of losing clients if the portfolio manager defects to another company?

3. Measure your success
Connecting sales figures to social media usage is difficult. But metrics on brand awareness, content engagement and investor sentiment are relatively easy to calculate.

As a conclusion we need to adopt the social media as asset with proper control mechanism and awareness across the organisation.