San Francisco-based Hearsay Social Inc. has launched a new program designed to provide personalized guidance to financial services firms and their financial advisors on how to propel their social media strategies.

The program, called the “social business maturity model,” is currently being rolled out now to Hearsay Social customers, including firms and advisors in Canada. It starts with an interactive interview process between Hearsay Social team members and executives at financial services firms to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their social media strategies. The goal of the program is to provide a roadmap to move those strategies ahead and have advisors’ own social networking efforts benefit from the process.

“[The social business maturity model] allows us to identify areas of strength and areas of opportunity that will basically trickle down [to advisors] and provide the necessary tools and value that will augment the technology, which [could be] Hearsay Social or whatever the organization uses, to drive the three core business values,” says Abhay Rajaram, vice president of customer success at Hearsay Social.

Rajaram points to three key indicators that a robust social media program should deliver:

  • The level of new business an advisor is producing.
  • The growth an advisor is seeing in his or her existing client base
  • An advisor’s retention rate and whether clients are satisfied with the services they’re receiving.

There’s a connection between the growth in an advisor’s business and his or her use of social media use, Rajaram says. Specifically, he points out that Hearsay Social analyzes the businesses of advisors who are on social media and finds that those advisors’ results in those three indicators see double-digit increases over the level of advisors who are not active on social networking websites.

Analyses of advisors’ businesses before they joined social media and after the fact will also show double-digit gains in results in those three areas, he adds.

But before a process to try to produce those results can be developed, Hearsay Social will undertake a discovery process that will measure quantitatively how well a firm is doing in key areas such as the dedication to have or develop a team that’s focused specifically on social media; the level of support from a firm’s executive team; and the adoption of social media at the advisor level.

Hearsay Social will then develop a step-by-step guide on how the firm can push its strategy forward. The company uses research from more than 100 financial services firms throughout the world who have successful strategies in this area to provide a baseline for this guide.

This is a process that takes several months, says Rajaram. It involves making sure that there’s a foundation in place in which different departments in an organization — such as marketing and compliance — are working together. The process also includes an analysis to ensure steps to improve the firm’s social strategy are being delivered to advisors in a way that is compliant and easy to understand.

The introduction of a program of this nature is meant to help an industry that is lagging in the area of social media adoption, he says.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt or surprise the financial services space is a little behind when it comes to technology adoption and social media. Quite honestly, the producers, the advisors and the [life insurance] agents don’t necessarily have either the time or the expertise to learn and adopt new technology,” Rajaram says.

“The interesting dynamic that we’re dealing with, as an industry, is that while we have these limitations or hurdles that hold us back, what isn’t being held back is the expectations of our end customers,” he continues.

A new generation of clients has grown up with social media and expects a personalized level of service to be delivered through technology and social media, Rajaram says.