Canberra

Social Media Not an Easy Call for Financial Advisors

January 16, 2012 By Des Walsh 9 Comments

When I accepted the invitation to keynote the Hillross Annual Conference 2012 in Canberra, Australia, focusing on practical strategies for social media, I was pretty sure that one of my main challenges would be finding examples of successful engagement via social media by financial advisers.

Part of the problem is that financial advisers operate in a highly regulated environment and have a justifiable concern that engaging with clients and the general public via social media might bring problems in terms of reputational risk or even put their whole business at risk.

My presentation is in the national capital, Canberra, this coming Friday Jan 20th and I’m very much looking forward to that. Hillross Financial Services is one of Australia’s premier wealth adviser firms, with a network of over 300 advisers and over 100 firms across Australia, who help create and protect the wealth of affluent and high net worth Australians: I feel honoured to have been asked to work with this group and I’m confident I’ll learn from them as well as sharing what I know.

Global issues

It’s clear to me from my research so far that the challenges facing financial advisors engaging with and through social media are by no means confined to the Australian scene.

One of my US colleagues put it this way: “Because of strict laws and internal controls by large financial companies, it’s difficult for many financial advisers to use social media as freely as the rest of us.”

That response was part of one of twenty five answers to a question I posed on LinkedIn Answers, in these words:

Do you know of any success stories of licensed financial advisors using social media to grow their business?

I would like to have felt I could ask about “case studies” rather than the softer “success stories”. A case study worthy of the name should include a context, a specified problem or challenge, and should report on what went wrong, or not so well, not just on the success elements.

But from the searching and asking I had already done, I thought that would be drawing too long a bow. Even so, I was hoping to pull in a bigger haul of success stories than eventuated.

That experience has emphasized for me that there is a real dilemma for many businesses looking at engaging via social media, and not just for financial advisers. Lawyers, people in the pharmaceutical industry, other professionals, have various boundaries in terms of their use of social media.

I don’t believe the problem is insuperable.

Right now, as as I’ll be proposing in my presentation on Friday, the way through the dilemma is, as I see it, to develop a coherent social media strategy with strong risk management protocols and procedures built in.

To take an analogy from where I live, on Australia’s sunny Gold Coast, we have magnificent beaches but the surf can be very treacherous. The answer for most of us is not to stop swimming but to swim in the area between the lifesavers’ or lifeguards’ flags. The presence of those flags doesn’t mean that nothing can go wrong, but it does give a reasonable assurance that the risk can be handled.

We have are used to having policies, including risk management, for our finances, our human resources management and other areas of business. We’re just not used to having social media policies as a normal part of doing business. But we need to. While that might seem obvious to people working professionally in the social media space, I am continually meeting business people for whom the idea that you could actually have a robust system of risk management that works for social media engagement seems to come as a surprise .

Getting the strategic framework right, incorporating good risk management processes, is a non-trivial exercise, but it can be done – and must be done by any business wanting to engage seriously and responsibly via social media. (To indulge for a moment in a bit of shameless self-promotion, helping develop social media strategy is one of the things I do, as a social media strategist, for companies wanting to get the edge, not just follow along.)

In the meantime, I am still looking for great – or quite simple – success stories from licensed financial advisers and wealth managers to help me tell the story.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: AMP, Australia, Canberra, financial advisers, financial advisors, hillross, Social Media, wealth management

Social Media in the Public Sector: Workshop Presentation

June 26, 2009 By Des Walsh

On Monday last I spoke in Australia’s national capital, Canberra, at a Government 2.0 workshop. My subject was “Why parliamentarians and public sector managers need to participate actively in social media”.

I used some slides to illustrate particular points:

Gov20canberra0609

View more documents from Des Walsh.

The video of the presentation is here:

Public Sphere: Government 2.0 – Des Walsh from Kate Lundy on Vimeo.

Filed Under: Government, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tagged With: Canberra, gov20, Government 2.0, parliamentarians, public sector, public servants, Social Media

Government 2.0: Policy & Practice

June 21, 2009 By Des Walsh

I’m off to the national capital, Canberra, tonight for the all day event at Parliament House, Government 2.0: Policy and Practice. As indicated in a previous post, I’m speaking on the subject: Why parliamentarians and public sector managers need to participate in social media. The sub-head is: briefings and slide shows won’t cut it.

I plan to live blog the event with the help of Coveritlive and am embedding the code for that here. I’ll switch it on in the morning. In the meantime you can register to be reminded when it goes live.

Planning to have some other colleagues teaming up so as to make it as informative a feed as we can.

<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=5771aa6068" >Government 2.0: Policy and Practice</a>

Update: My slides for the event are at Slideshare.

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0, Government, Social Media, Social networking, Web 2.0 Tagged With: Australia, Canberra, Government 2.0, government social media, social media policy

Speaking at Government 2.0: Policy and Practice

June 16, 2009 By Des Walsh

Got the word this morning that I’m scheduled to speak at the Government 2.0: Policy and Practice event next Monday in Australia’s national capital, Canberra. The fact that the event is being held within Parliament House makes me feel doubly appreciative.

This is the event I posted about a couple of weeks ago as Open Government Camp and Social Media.

Because I’d thought of the event till now as something of an upscale barcamp, I think I’d been feeling fairly relaxed about the idea of speaking, if I happened to be chosen out of the array of people offering to speak.

Now that I have an idea of who is expected actually to attend, I’m feeling a tad nervous (which is probably not a bad thing in terms of assisting my concentration on doing the best job I can on the day).

There are some 150 in person attendees expected and 200-400 simultaneously online. I understand there are few or no spare seats now. About a third of the registered in person attendees are from Government including agencies, staffers from several portfolios, as well as some politicians including Minister Lindsay Tanner and Senator Kate Lundy.

That I’m speaking only for 10 minutes, with 5 minutes for questions (as are most of the speakers) doesn’t of itself make me less nervous: I don’t have a lot of time to get my points across.

My topic is “Why parliamentarians and public sector managers need to participate actively in social media (briefing papers and slideshows won’t cut it)”. This is a riff on a hobbyhorse of mine, that if senior people in any organization want to be most effective in terms of how social media works, they need to get in and participate. They need to be players. It’s not enough to be able to say “Oh, yes, I’ve read about that.” What being a player might mean in practice is something I’ll be rehearsing over the next few days.

In the meantime, to help me get an up to date perspective on the topic of my presentation, I’ve posted a question on LinkedIn Answers:

Where can I find examples, lists, blog posts case studies for serving politicians and senior public sector managers as active users of social media?

There has been one, very helpful, answer so far and I will report here in due course on the responses that come in over the next few days.

I’ve also set up a CoverItLive link to help me report on the day. I’ll be posting the stream here on the blog, closer to the time. If you would like a reminder of that, please enter your email address in the form below.

This is the RSS link for the CoverItLive stream.

Please, if you have any suggestions as to what I should try to cover, your comments will be very welcome.

Filed Under: Government Tagged With: Australia, Canberra, citizen participation, CoverItLive, Government 2.0, government policy, open government, Social Media

Open Government Camp and Social Media

June 3, 2009 By Des Walsh

Although there may well be available by more information on social media in business small and large than any one person could absorb in a lifetime, my sense is that we are only just beginning the journey to understanding how social media can work, or not, in the government sphere.

As a social media strategist who is a former Federal and State public sector executive and over several years a consultant to various government agencies, I’ve wondered from time to time how the sort of conversations that occur around social media in the business context might translate across into the public sector.

But I’ve spent little time on the subject of government and social media, apart from an occasional blog post.

An initiative backed by Australia’s social media savvy, long term blogger Senator Kate Lundy has prompted me to get off the fence and join the discussion. I have registered to attend the Public Sphere Camp, Open Government: Policy and Practice, on June 22, to be held in Parliament House, Canberra. Some camp site!

As befitting the topic, it’s an open event, physically and virtually:

Anyone is welcome to attend the Public Sphere Camp, however seats are limited in the physical component of the event which will be in Parliament House (Canberra, ACT – details on registration page). Anyone will be able to see streaming video online and participate in the event discussion via Twitter, and we will ensure there is liveblogging on the day to also help capture the ideas presented on the day, and to capture external feedback on those ideas.

There are a lot of aspects to the topic “Open Government”, some of them quite technical. It’s clearly not all about social media and I don’t intend to get into a bout of social media barrow pushing, but I’m working on the assumption that policy and practice on open government will have to incorporate some up to date and even adventurous thinking on the role of social media. And a well thought out strategy (which will include a wide margin for flexibility, fast prototyping and “failing forward” – not an easy call for government administration!).

Certainly the US Government’s Web managers see, in line with the new Administration’s program, the need for a “government-wide strategy for using social media tools to create a more effective and transparent government”.

I don’t know if we’ll get to that level of policy commitment in Australia in the foreseeable future, but I hope that we can have a practical discussion in the meantime. And as a former public servant, my idea of a practical discussion on this topic includes, front and centre, what it means for the people who will be charged with implementing the policy – the public servants.

So I’ve put my hand up to speak in one of the 15 minute (including questions) slots and indicated I’d like to talk about the cultural change implications of employing social media in the service of open government. Stephen Collins may have dibs on that topic, having signalled it before I did, and if he gets the nod that will be fine as he certainly knows the terrain. I am just hoping the topic gets an airing, however briefly.

Public servants at various levels, from departmental heads and managers of particular programs to people dealing directly with the public on a daily basis, are going to be affected by any serious policy implementation in this field. Not all are going to be comfortable with the kind of openness and transparency social media can bring, or with the speed of impact. Some will resist – actively, passively – some will try to be inconspicuous, others will relish the opportunities social media provide to better serve the citizenry.

Whatever happens, things won’t be the same.

Photo credit: Parliament House, Canberra, Australia, by stage88 via Flickr – Creative Commons license