What It Is:
For the financial services industry, social media is a minefield. Banks don’t exactly feature high on the popularity index in the first place, and on social media, they become easy targets for people to vent their frustration. JPMorgan suffered an embarrassing debacle when it tried to hold a Twitter Q&A around the hashtag #AskJPM and angry customers responded with sarcastic insults.
In addition to being unpopular, banks are heavily regulated in what they can and can’t say on social media. Retweets, likes and shares of the wrong post can easily be seen as damaging endorsements, sensitive information can be inadvertently leaked and marketing copy is closely scrutinized for inaccuracy.
Socialware is a social media compliance platform that enables banks and other regulated industries to use social media without getting in trouble. The platform enables content moderation which lets companies disable specific features across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. In this way, employees can still get the benefits of using social media for business and not worry about getting themselves or the company in trouble.
Features:
Post moderation: Company admins can customize how many features they can allow employees to use through a central dashboard. These include turning off the options for photo tagging, commenting, liking and uploading images and video. To make things simpler, employees can be separated into groups with different levels of social media accessibility. For example, sales and marketing people can get more outbound messaging features while the accounting team only gets listening features, or vice-versa.
In addition, outbound posts can be monitored and sent for approval in real-time to ensure they don’t violate any legal or internal policies.
Profile management: For employees with public or consumer facing profiles, admins can review and edit employee profiles to include the appropriate legal compliance disclosures and ensure they are optimized for marketing purposes.
Marketing messaging and tracking: To enable employees to become advocates for the company, the marketing department can create a repository of digital assets for employees to use. This includes customized posts, images articles and other content that can be safely shared. This allows employees to talk about their company without worrying about saying the wrong thing or inadvertently saying something inaccurate. The platform also has basic analytics to see which posts are doing well and resonating with potential customers.
Archive all conversations: One of the biggest demands from financial companies is the ability to archive all records of digital conversations for compliance issues and Socialware’s platform gives companies the options of how much or how little they would like to record. Once it is set up, the system automatically records and backs up all the social media interactions.
Listen for life events and engage: Socialware’ssocial media listening capabilities allows sales staff or marketers to monitor the feeds of their clients and potential leads, keeping a lookout for life events such as weddings, birthday, job promotions or company moves. This allows a high degree of personal interactions and relationship building.
Integrates with CRM: Customer data from a company’s existing CRM platform can be integrated and shared with the Socialware software.
Who is using it?
Socialware customers include Morgan Stanley, Guardian Insurance and Edward Jones Investments.
Competitors
Social media analytics and management platform Sprinklr has recently started offering many of the same social compliance features as Socialware, which integrate with the wider capabilities of its social media platform.
Crisp is another service that provides social media compliance monitoring, doing it through a combination of algorithmic scanning and a global team of human monitors who watch out for threats, both internally and externally across owned social media channels.
Evaluation
With every brand chomping at the bit to get into social media marketing, Socialware provides a much needed service to companies that are highly regulated and extremely limited in what they can say online. Its user interface is easy to use for managers looking to approve posts or disable very specific features of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. When it comes to managing moderation features, Socialware’s strength is how simple all the menus are, and it doesn’t look like the kind of software that needs to much interference from the IT department.
What’s impressive about Socialware is how quickly a large number of employees can start using it. A recent Forrester Wave report on Social Risk and Compliance solutions singled out Socialware, saying, “with an average implementation size of 3,500 users, [Socialware] can cite some of the biggest, and longest-standing, customer implementations of all the vendors in this evaluation.”
It’s true that Sprinklr offers some of the same features of social compliance and content moderation, but its focus has always been on the marketing, especially to consumer brands. Socialware’s primary focus is on making sure the compliance is there, and the marketing is a secondary function. Even then, it’s more geared towards B2B, one-to-one style marketing, where personal relationships are key. It has the most impact on a platform like LinkedIn, which is meant to be used in a professional sense, rather than Facebook and Twitter, which most employees will use on their own time as well.
