Marketing, Policies and Contests – How a Bank is Using Social Networking – Social Media Breakfast
Planning a good marketing strategy on social networks is a way to connect with community. Some are taking their marketing to the levels of giving away great prizes. Businesses are seeing the opportunities with using social media to build community.
Stephanie Byrnes works for the State Bank of Cross Plains. She has been spearheading a couple contests in the community – including contests that involve not for profit corporations. During this half hour, Stephanie will be touching upon:
- History – Why Social Media to do this?
- Bank Compliance – Reputation and Social media policy
- Banks and Social Media
- Contests – Running of and issues regarding (including cheating)
“We have a lot of specific rules we have to follow to be covered and not get charged fees…” Stephanie mentions. “As you can imagine, compliance and marketing don’t allways get along, espeially with contests, it’s a bear. It was something we needed to look into.”
“It was very new and there weren’t too many rules just yet. So with other advertising rules – if you advertise a CD special, you have to put disclaimers on it. And with first review we are like ‘What are we doing with this?’ Are we going to get fined – There was a real risk here that they didn’t know.”
Putting Policies in Social Media for Businesses
Stephanie goes on to how they approach Facebook through policy. She talked about how they had to watch what was posted. Stephanie talked about how Aflac took a bad situation in the Gilbert Gottfried situation and created a contest to find a new voice for the company.
Running Contests on Social Media
Problems with 2nd Year Contest
The second year, they upped the ante with
“We appropriated an individual component. So now individuals were championing for charities.” Stephanie gave an example. ” We spanned it out for 2 months, we had a 2 week submission period. After two weeks, it flipped up to a voting portal. We wanted to watch what people were posting for a picture [making sure no inappropriate content was loaded].”
They changed the voting scheme to 3 votes per IP address every 24 hours. With the change, everyone was on their own.
The prizes were $1000, $750 and $500 with an iPad2 for the winner. Therefore, the campaign was a lot more successful in participation. They found it was a more competetive contest. They used a system called wizehive to help out with the contest.
The end result – 61 groups competing, 112,000 votes.
Now, even though there were non-profits involved, there was some issues. People were challenging the winners. Someone noted a possibility of fraud. The bank had to do some investigative work past the contest.
The results are pretty interesting. To find out what happened, well, you’re gonna have to watch the video for what Stephanie talks about.
This is a very interesting 35 minute view – especially for those who want to run contests for their sites or companies.