CBA hires social media exec
Following a five-month search, Commonwealth Bank has appointed its first Social Marketing Manager, to lead a fresh approach into social media strategy.
The newly created role signals that the CBA is lifting its game to embrace social media as more than just an extension of customer relationship management and outreach.
Given the heat in the local social media marketing stakes it is interesting that the recruitment process took five months and the selected candidate has emerged as an expat Australian living and working in New York, Niki Epstein.
Epstein, who has a strong background in the music and entertainment industries, started her new Sydney-based gig last week, leaving behind a digital marketing role at A&E Television Networks based in New York.
A spokesperson for the CBA confirmed her appointment and said Epstein would be in charge of driving social marketing strategy and engagement with broad responsibilities in devising and executing the bank's social media activities. She will be "looking to engage with customers that are already engaged in social media to improve customer satisfaction and online brand presence," the spokesperson said.
This newly created position will be responsible for helping to drive, implement and manage the Group's social media strategy in the digital environment. The role will include working with all parts of the organisation, including brand, PR, web development, customer relations and marketing portfolio managers in addition to working with external partners.
The appointment marks a positive step by the CBA in taking on a significant investment in social media and perhaps heralds some innovation from the banking sector in expanding the rather conservative social media customer engagement stance that is currently in play.
As Forrester Research analyst Steven Noble recently noted in the report 'Social Strategies For Australian Consumer Finance', Australian financial institutions seem nervous that they don't belong and yet are reticent to walk into the bar that their customers drink in, lest the bouncers reject them at the door.
"This wasn't always the case. Earlier in the history of social media marketing, a few Australian banks were quite forward, taking some clumsy steps that backfired, such as spamming blog comments. But they were the exception. On the whole, financial institutions in Australia would rather be absent from social media than be seen to be oafs, which is one of the reasons they have moved cautiously and seem relatively absent," Noble states.
He adds however that despite their caution, financial institutions do understand the power of social media but are just very slow to embrace it. "At this stage, most financial institutions seem happy to experiment with social media, confident that unmeasured benefits — such as corporate learning — justify the effort and expense. Eventually, they'll reach a point where this is no longer acceptable, and they'll start assessing social media marketing with the same rigour they apply to most business endeavours."
The CBA, like most banks, has been making mutterings about taking social media more seriously for some time.
Some customers' complaints raised over Twitter, for example, are being resolved quickly by bank staff, though the identity of the author may be a factor.