If you’re like me, you don’t think of Financial Services and Social Media in the same sentence all that much.  In fact, if you’re like me and have worked at super secretive hedge funds and the sort, you would never think of social media and financial services. The very idea is like oil and water, a complete oxymoron. But, some financial service organizations are starting to change their outlook. The Financial Communications Society assembled a wonderful panel at the Union League Club of Chicago to discuss this very topic.

The symposium consisted of fabulous expert speakers and led by Alecia Dantico, our moderator. Eric Rehl of Robert W. Baird and Pat Allen of Rock the Boat Marketing, contributed incredibly valuable insights into content development, intra-organization social media management and tools and strategies to help with social media campaigns. Ruth Wagner of cmp.ly discussed technologies to help facilitate social media compliance through legal disclosure. Finally, I discussed the need to partner with I.T. in an organization to develop a wholistic strategy for the development and management of social media.

The consensus from the audience seemed to indicate that I.T. was a inhibiter to accomplishing social media goals rather than a partner. Unfortunately, that is a common theme in many companies that has come from a long history of an adversarial relationship between I.T. and other departments. For any company to be successful, they need to see I.T. as a partner and leverage technology as a competitive advantage in accomplishing the goals of the business. Adversarial relationships between I.T. and other teams in the organization stalls out progress (a.k.a. revenue). That’s when I.T. becomes a cost center as opposed to the business enabler and competitive advantage that I.T. should be.

All in all, a great panel and I learned a lot from the other speakers. If you need help with your social media strategy, compliance or I.T. strategy, don’t hesitate to contact me or the other speakers on the panel.

Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. — John Wooden

Panelists from left to right:  Eric Rehl, Pat Allen, Brian Greenberg, Alecia Dantico and Ruth Wagner.