A Case Study - ORM: Keeping Your Ears to the Ground

Possible Courses of Action

Bank 1 & 2

While Bank 1 appears to be surviving well online with a consistently high reputation score, Bank 2 would fair better through active participation in forums and on blogs where their brand is repeatedly negatively referenced. This participation would do a lot to mitigate the negative impression currently being held by a segment of the market that is extremely hungry for interaction.

As many forumites naturally assume the role of opinion leaders, engaging in the online conversation through these forums would greatly help both Bank 2's online and offline reputation. Additionally, Bank 2 should analyse the service offering and standards set by Bank 1 to see how they could improve and meet the public's requirements.

Bank 3 & 4

Where both these banks fell short was in the number of mentions relating to their practices of spam. Bank 4 was further suffering from criticism of their newly launched website. Considering that this criticism was originating from the online market, Bank 4 would go far in heeding this segments advice. By acting proactively in rectifying the situation and site usability, they would be engaging with their market at the same time.

While Banks 3 and 4 did not generate as many online mentions in total as the previous two banks, the majority of their online noise was generated by their sponsorships of popular sporting events. This suggests that customer opinion may be neutralised by the sponsorship of events that are close to the consumers' hearts, and may go far in stabilising potential reputation threats.

These two banks are in a perfect position to use their sponsoring of the sporting events to create a greater affinity between the marketplace and their brands. Both could and should have utilised more WebPR in order to highlight how their support of these sports was benefiting the community, and showed their enthusiasm for the sports themselves. As it stood both sponsorships came across as being pure commercial ventures, thus losing a significant amount of the reputation leverage that they could have generated.

Wrapping Up

Ultimately the results showed that consumers without detailed financial knowledge chose their bank based on reputation and peer-recommendation. With many of the prominent online voices fitting the bill of opinion leaders, Online Reputation Management becomes a critical component of any major bank's marketing drive.

While the ORM conducted on these 4 banks was purely investigative, the results and implications gathered from the "listening" side of the online conversation are themselves noteworthy, and the potential for corrective action is self-evident.

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