Tweeting a path towards a client-centric business model

Twitter, for those of you that do not yet know, is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as “tweets”. And for those of you that have not yet realised, it has the potential to emerge as an entirely new communication and marketing channel for the wealth management community. Until now many have dismissed Twitter and other social networking tools as “for the kids”. This misconception ignores key realities of their use. Indeed, findings by Forrester Research show that the use of social networks by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 per cent in the last year. In addition, Nielsen, the media research company, believes adults aged 35 to 49 had the largest representation on Twitter and comprised 42 per cent of the entire audience, or three million individuals. The demographics alone are compelling enough to force a strategic engagement with Twitter – and/or other social networking platforms – onto the 2010 agenda for private banks. However, we suspect many in the industry believe Twitter and the like to be too “retail” for the wealth space. Here we turn (as usual) to parallel industries to identify the game-changers. Indeed, Twitter has already found a role in the rarefied world of haute horlogerie. Watchmaker Perrelet, one of Switzerland’s oldest brands (and inventors of automatic movement in 1777), uses Twitter to augment its marketing and product development – particularly the 2009 turbine watch. The brand, backed by a collection of luxury luminaries, under H5 Groupe, has engaged consumers on the experience of ownership to gain market penetration (at almost zero cost) in an ultra-competitive and fragmented brand market. So, looking to the horizon, the use of Twitter as a corporate tool will become even more commonplace. Twitter itself recognises this and will soon offer business accounts to corporate clients. This will enable client teams to analyse trends in consumer interaction. Critically it will provide businesses with demographic information and deeper insight into the client psyche. The use of web analytics, such as Twitter surveys, will allow for data on individuals following the company’s account to emerge. To overlay these tools to measure online reputation, impact and influence of individual tweets will also become commonplace. In this context, it is not too far-fetched to see private bankers, between client-visits, Tweeting the successes and issues that arise, on a no-names basis of course. That is if their fingers can handle the small buttons on their Blackberries, of course, as Barack Obama has complained. Going further, this could be linked into marketing and communications for individual client segments and propositions. Of course, this still falls short of the Holy Grail – end-client product development and viral marketing. These two elements will be the keys to proving the client-centric business model in a tangible way to existing and potential consumers. Indeed, Perrelet is a case study of retail communication tools being applied to the luxury market to this end. The examples will grow. However, as with all communications programmes, it will be imperative that institutional leaders obtain company-wide buy-in, set clear objectives and metrics, ensure consistency to protect corporate reputation, and plan the delivery of varied and exciting content to engage the end client, as well as staff. Delivery across all these criteria, not partial delivery, will deliver results. These are all areas that Scorpio Partnership has actively been researching as part of its wider strategy to identify the future benefit of Web 2.0 tools to the wealth management community. Go twitter. Graham Harvey and Karl von Bezing are directors at Scorpio Partnership, a consultancy dedicated to the global wealth management industry