Book 1 in the new series 'Customer Experience Without Borders'Everything you ever wanted to know about social media in financial services ... but were afraid to askWeb 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogging, virtual worlds ... is social media all a bit unfamiliar as a working tool? All a bit smoke and mirrors? Do people really want to interact with their financial services providers in cyberspace? What about the potential for reputational risk? And there's no bottom-line impact, surely? Best just leave it to the marketing people .... WRONG! The benefits of leveraging social media go well beyond marketing. Blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have quickly became essential tools to manage reputation, foster innovation, develop new products, strengthen customer relationships and satisfaction, drive customer advocacy, aid recruitment, and increase market share. Social media has increased expectations: now your customers expect you to show you listen to them - they want to be able to trust you. And word of mouth is increasingly powerful: it is critical to know who your key influencers, advocates and, yes, your detractors, are, and to find the best way to engage with them.So, you need a complete social media strategy. And A Practical Guide to Social Media in Financial Services contains everything you need to get it. It offers a pragmatic approach to social media in our heavily regulated financial services industry. Its compelling theme is how to create an ever greater customer experience through engaging with them and rewarding them for their support. A Practical Guide to Social Media in Financial Services is both a start-up guide for the social media novice and a best practice guide for the more experienced. In it, you'll find all you need to know about:• Judging and assessing your social media operation;• Proving the business case and ROI (get a copy for your Chief Financial Officer);• The commonly made mistakes (and how to avoid them);• Recruiting and managing talent, working with, not against, your social media team, improving worker relations, and breaking silos;• Best practice by banking market and segment;• The most comprehensive financial social media case book ever assembled;• Learning the lessons and assessing the contribution of those who didn't execute their initiatives properly;• The more challenging questions you need to be asking a social media software vendor;• And, of course, a forecast of where the industry might go next.The risk of not embracing or at the very least acknowledging social media is considerable. So ... what are you going to do about it?