On Wednesday this week the panel consisted Don Tapscott (author Wikinomics) WhipCar.com co-founder Vinay Gupta and myself (as Co-Founder of 90:10 Group).
You can read the column in full in the print edition of June 27, 2012 or online (nb: the FT has a metered paywall model for content).
Or you can click on the images here to see larger versions.
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"Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has announced that it will allow its financial advisers to use Twitter and Linkedin, providing they tweet from a library of pre-written messages. Does this defeat the purpose of should it be commended for embracing technology?
They appear to be thinking of
social media as little more than a way in which they can indulge in direct
selling. It’s a reductionist approach to human interaction which seeks to
simplify the possibilities to: buy/sell. In doing so it misses out on the customer-led
insight and innovation those prepared to be more human benefit from.
Indeed, you could ask why they
bother attaching humans to the Twitter accounts at all when selecting from a
library could as easily be achieved by a bot – and with less room for risk via
human error.
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It also carries the risk of
becoming the banking world’s equivalent of Apple’s Siri – and we all know how
much fun people have had trying to catch Siri out.
On the plus side at least they
have a control group of 20 who are being given a freer hand to be themselves.
My guess is they will out-perform their bot-like brethren.
I was also on the Judgment Call panel when Morgan Stanley first started its twitter experiment a year ago (the recent interest is in a global roll-out to 18,000 staff after a year long trial). Click here to compare.
Darn paywalls.
ReplyDeleteIn all seriousness, I don't think there's anything wrong with a prepared tweet as a starting point for a conversation, and I can understand the need for some decent guidelines around financial matters, but the problem is that most people would expect to be able to respond and interact on Twitter - what happens then?
Do they have a million pre-written tweets for every possible response, call centre style?