Here’s an exercise for you. Nip out to your garage, fire up your Delorean time machine making sure the Flux Capacitor is in full working order, and head back to 2005.
Skip the General Election – spoiler alert: the Labour Party win again – and instead touch down in your local neighbourhood and go to your nearest advisory practice.
If you were in this market at that time, please don’t go back to your own office as the consequences of bumping into yourself could be both depressing and catastrophic.
Instead head into a competitor’s office – look, they didn’t have hair back then either – and hang around the water-cooler in order to converse with the employees. After getting over the funny looks about your clothes, drop in the following phrase – ‘compliant tweeting’ – and see what sort of reaction you get. I anticipate you will be met with looks of utter confusion and be sent on your way with the words, “Keep taking the tablets”, ringing in your ears.
The reason of course is quite simple. Back then ‘tweeting’ was simply the preserve of the birds and ‘compliant tweeting’ was either assumed to be the talk of a mad-man/woman or the name of a particularly unsuccessful prog-rock band from East Anglia.
Fast-forward a year however, head to the West Coast of the US and you might bear witness to the start of a journey that began nine years ago this very month when Twitter was created by its founders and launched four months later.
Over the years I have been involved in a number of IT projects and let’s just say that on some of them we barely came up with the ‘About Us’ page in four months, let alone the whole site. Even if Twitter is made up of content from its users it’s still one hell of an achievement to get going that fast.
Jump in the Delorean and nip home to the present day and you would be hard-pressed to think of too many other global businesses which have flourished, become so ubiquitous and, as I think those in the know say, ‘captured the zeitgeist’ as Twitter has.
The importance of all this is the way we use social media – Twitter in particular. It’s a communication tool and, especially from a business point of view, it’s increasingly the case that (done correctly) it can boost a firm’s activity and volumes. The big issue is how firms (and individuals) go about sourcing that business and therefore, in the intermediary and financial services market this meant that a regulatory view needed to be taken because there are clear rules around promotions, what they can and can’t contain and the responsibilities of firms and individuals who issue such promotions. Could such rules translate effectively to social media?
Last month the FCA came up with its own guidance on how firms should tackle their social media output in particular regarding what constitutes promotions/advertising. Thus the phrase ‘compliant tweeting’ was born and, while I’m not going to go into the specifics of the guidance (as there’s a handy news story on this very site which does a very good job of explaining it all), it would certainly be worthwhile to anyone who is active, or is even considering dipping into social media, to make sure they are aware of the regulator’s expectations.
I’ll be completely honest with you. On reading these guidelines part of me does feel like the social element of ‘social media’ is having the life sucked it of it. However, I think we all understand the need for ‘clear, fair and transparent’ promotions and to ensure customers who come to a business via, for example, a tweet are not being misled in any way.
Therefore, if you are tweeting out business adverts, highlighting rates, discussing amazing offers and effectively putting your services and wares out into the social media sphere without due care and attention, you are going to need to rethink your strategy. Be it an individual within a firm, or the firm’s activity itself, this avenue will be policed and action will be taken if the regulator decides rules have been infringed.
If it reaches that point then you’ll probably be wishing you had a Delorean time machine to hand in order to make a quick getaway. Great Scott!
