Metro Bank hit by comic's Twitter tirade

Metro Bank's social media policy has been put severely to the test in recent days.

Comedian Al Murray took to Twitter to blast the bank over the opening of its 12th branch in Chiswick.

Murray tweeted on Friday: 'I have actually crossed the road to avoid the toe curling god awful pisspoor balloon waving music blaring launch of my local Metro bank.' Posting a pic of the opening celebrations, he added: 'I love it when cretins treat the rest of us like morons.'

He then invited his followers to use a rather unflattering hashtag, which I won't repeat lest any children are reading (unlikely I know but hey ho). Metro Bank initially stayed out of the debate, but decided to respond when a few days later Murray was at it again. On Tuesday, he tweeted. 'Metro Bank: Another "reason for joining - no stupid bank rules". Um isn't that what landed us all in it?'

The bank shot back with 'Hi Al. We'd love to welcome you into our Chiswick store and explain what we're all about. When are you free?' 'That's very kind but very busy at the moment,' came the comic's reply.

Should they have responded earlier? Possibly. But Metro Bank are one of the better banks when it comes to social media and they did at least get there in the end. It's good to see a bank showing a proactive approach to monitoring and interacting with the public on sites such as Twitter. Rather than burying your head in the sand and hoping for the best, as continues to be the case with many financial institutions.

Social networks in FS – Facebook remains the best option

Guest blog post by Stephen Dunnigan, Country Manager UK & Ireland, MicroStrategy

I can empathise with some of Scott’s recent FStech blog on the use of Twitter and Facebook in FS. We have all seen too many ‘amusing faces in the pub’ photos, but I just can’t agree with the idea that Twitter has replaced Facebook as the social network of choice in FS.

Of all the social networks, Facebook has by far the highest number of active users – around 900 million at the last estimate – and also the richest data on its users. Using that data, the potential for targeted and relevant marketing is huge. Users can be segmented based on their  interests, psychographics, demographics, preferences and likes. Segments can be targeted with personalised content, special offers, and recommendations based on who they are, where they come from, and what they like.

The best way of doing this is via closer integration of IT and marketing to forge social CRM strategies. At last year’s MicroStrategy Social Media Marketing and iCommerce Summit, Facebook’s Tim Campos spoke about how organisations can monetise their Facebook data by converting the site's social graph data structure into a relational data structure, enabling the use of existing Facebook data for enterprise applications. These apps enable personalised messaging based on the rich and constantly updating Facebook data – ideal for customer engagement and building brand loyalty.

The Corporate Insight research cited by Scott last week does reveal that 88 per cent of the FS companies surveyed were on Facebook and 92 per cent on Twitter. Yet so many Twitter accounts are inactive or spam and the user numbers do not come anywhere near to those on Facebook. And the nature of Twitter – 140 characters per update – means that the users it does have do not reveal much of substance that could be used by FS marketers. I do not mean spam, but relevant, targeted and personalised offers based on that user’s profile and interests.

While many of the status updates may seems trivial, only Facebook allows FS firms to engage with customers and prospects in a meaningful way, so the odd un-flattering picture of a friend in the pub is a price worth paying.

You’ve been Twitterhacked

PayPal UK's Twitter account was yesterday taken over by a disgruntled customer who fired off a series of angry tweets complaining about the service. The unidentified person railed against PayPal freezing their account and also linked to paypalsucks.com, the "anti paypal site exposing the nightmare of doing business 'the paypal way.'

Last night, the Ebay-owned outfit suspended the account and stressed that this incident only affected Twitter and none of its credit card or other sensitive data had been breached. The account was quickly back up and running and the company tweeted: 'This account was hacked earlier. We have it in our control now. Your personal data is still 100% safe, hack occurred on Twitter not PayPal' and 'We apologise for the bad language and childish nature of tweets that came from this account at the time.'

I’m a big fan of Twitter. It is proving to be a really useful way for FStech to communicate with readers, distribute news and catch stories that might otherwise have passed us by. However, the relative ease with which one can access someone else’s account is a concern. The simple password system needs to be looked at and perhaps replaced by a two-way authentication system, at least on certain accounts.