The WellsFargovia Blog: Social Media Meets Merger Communications

VERY interesting article - do you applaud the effort of the banks to communicate via social media? I like the conclusion at the end of the article: "It’s usually helpful to take the long view in gauging the success of a new social media initiative, and this blog is no exception. Allowing a frank dialogue between customer and staff is a good start. Only time will tell where it goes from here."

Jan 8, 2009 at 01:13 PM ET

In the 12 years or so that we’ve been monitoring the retail financial services landscape, we’ve witnessed firms merging, splitting, and merging again. Since we’ve had financial accounts all over the place (banks, brokerage firms, mutual funds, etc.), we’ve witnessed this evolution from the client perspective. Sadly, the only consistent thing among all the mergers has been the overall lack of quality communication to customers about what the merger will mean to their accounts, fees, and so forth....

While this time around the circumstances might not be particularly happy ones, the recent mergers are among the first to happen in the age of social media and thanks to Wells Fargo and Wachovia, we’re going to get a taste of how social media can assist clients during the transition. On January 2nd, the first business day after the approval, Wells Fargo launched a new blog on its public site that features posts from employees at Wells and Wachovia.