Say that again? Bank launches social review site. About attractions.
A curiousity popped into my mailbox from First Direct today (I’m a customer of their online current account):
The Little Black Book is something new from first direct. And we’ll be honest with you. It has nothing to do with banking. But, it has everything to do with first direct. And that’s why we think it’s one of the most exciting things we’ve ever done.
The Little Black Book is a directory for First-Direct customers to share their opinions and reviews of their favourite attractions. The bank has created a social platform for its customers to talk about the things they spend their money on.
At first blush it seems to be a brave move. A bank with a strong personality wants to engage its customers but doesn’t feel the content of its core products is social enough to be spread naturally. So its willing to spend some money on building a platform for them to share what they are passionate about.
This has really piqued my interest, and I’ll dive deeper to find out if it’s genuiunely useful. I admire the move, and hope the content lives up to the promise.
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It’s an interesting idea - although my first though would be the security implications. I make a (IMHO) reasonable assumption that at some point First Direct will take the security of this site less seriously than they do of their online banking.
That leaves you with a pre-selected list of targets all of whom have the same bank, logging into a social site (Which the customers themselves will naturally be more lax about), hosted on a firstdirect.com subdomain.
Seems like a recipe for disaster to me!
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not against the idea - I just think it would be better if it wasn’t tied to FirstDirect customers, and wasn’t hosted on a firstdirect.com subdomain.
PS: I built the same thing back in early-2000 (Albeit without the nice design, the pretty pictures and the formidable market-reach) at http://www.somewherenear.com/ I don’t imagine we were the first either!
According to this article in Makreting, First Direct targeted the 20,000 of their “most digitally- active customers’:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/Marketing/News/862769/First-Direct-uses-social-networking-banking-personal-again/
It looks like that because people are worried about which banks are safe and where they should put their money, banks are looking to provide added value in the form of initiatives such as the Little Black Book in the hope that people will migrate to bank with them.
Will it work?
I guess you can look at the site and let us know!