Austin’s largest locally-owned financial institution, University Federal Credit Union (UFCU) is a provider of financial services to university students, staff and the businesses in the community.

UFCU recognizes that promoting the organization online to these audiences via social media makes good sense. So, as part of its overall social media program, UFCU has engaged FG SQUARED and monitoring technology provider Techrigy to develop and run its social media monitoring program.

UFCU seeks to tap into the relevant, timely discourse of the Social Web. At the same time — like so many other organizations who see the Social Web as a catalyst for growth — UFCU’s own resources are already fully committed to internal programs, the ongoing operation of its business, and its own attentiveness to a very high level of customer service. Therefore, any "new" program has to fit not only into a limited economic budget but also a limited capacity to undertake, manage, and capitalize on a new program of any type.

Social media monitoring involves the automated search, identification, and categorization of social media content. During the monitoring process, analytical tools use a combination of keywords, product names, and competitive terminology to locate and catalog the relevant social media content. Taking a further step, the underlying source content is linked to the found excerpts. Figure 1, shown to the right, shows a typical dashboard view of the social media results that are relevant to UFCU.

Beginning in November 2008, FG SQUARED began compiling a monthly summary of social web activity relating to UFCU initiatives and areas of interest. FG SQUARED separately analyzed the data and distilled the essential insights.

The Challenge
UFCU knows that people are talking about it: FG SQUARED had earlier presented direct evidence of this fact to UFCU senior management during a social media readiness assessment. The good news: The existing blog posts and social content out there regarding UFCU and its brand (built around its commitment to customer service) were positive. At the same time, a couple of specific posts provided a clear indication that, having had this knowledge earlier, the unchecked fallout from existing negative social content could have been contained.

By getting a chance to see members' attitudes firsthand and in real time via the readiness assessment exercise, UFCU recognized the fundamental attractiveness of a social media monitoring — and leapt at the opportunity to further raise the UFCU's level of customer service. By tapping its own desire to quantify this content and then using the knowledge gained to further tune its marketing and operations programs, UFCU could not only refine its own operations but also continue to add distance between itself and its competitors.

Making the need for social media monitoring even more timely, UFCU is gearing up for Conversion, the name given to its comprehensive, I/T-based services upgrade scheduled for the second quarter of 2009.

Conversion is a major software upgrade that impacts nearly every aspect of UFCU’s services, from ATMs to account statements to bill payment services. Obviously, a major consideration as Conversion begins is to prevent additional projects from overloading current resources. Adding to the criticality of monitoring: an estimated 24-hour timeframe during which members' funds will be minimally available. Thus, communicating in advance to members the significance of Conversion will be vital.

The use of social media monitoring is one way among several that UFCU will stay connected to its customers during this process. Beyond Conversion itself, UFCU will be able to monitor the acceptance of the effort and the subsequent perception of value deriving from this change. This comes about through the establishment of a pre-conversion baseline, and the subsequent comparison of post-conversion conversations and social content postings.

Social Media Monitoring Platform Selection
Facilitating the social media monitoring is a combination of self-service tools and an analytical practice area within FG SQUARED. This combination was very attractive to UFCU as the package requires essentially no support from UFCU beyond the initial set up and occasional review sessions to continually fine-tune the monitoring program itself.

For the actual monitoring, UFCU selected Techrigy's SM2 self-serve monitoring platform. The Techrigy platform includes an index of millions of social content sites across a range of media formats, and presents the results in an easy-to-read, "dashboard" format. All of these can be delivered to UFCU through FG SQUARED's Clearspace-based self-serve portal. Clearspace is a community development platform offered by Jive Software, and has been featured in other FG SQUARED case studies.

By monitoring the social web and combining this data with its own communications, UFCU will enhance its awareness of and be better able to capitalize on specific opportunities. Improved too, will be the organization’s own ability to tap innovative new services — for example, an ATM that dispenses a variety of bills — and boost general operations and process management.

Further, since Conversion monitors UFCU conversations in real time, management can immediately spot issues and address emerging comments through the channel in which they originated.

Drilling into the data, the figures below show the actual content and a view into the complete source for the posts highlighted. This kind of source visibility is essential in understanding and quantifying the contributors of the content, and therefore in understanding the role of specific influencers with regard to social content that is relevant to UFCU. In the figures shown, the author is suggesting an eminently practical innovation that is specific to university students.

Going further, UFCU is also interested in more general awareness — for example, understanding the degree to which consumers are talking about credit unions versus bank in light of the current economic environment is very important in tuning UFCU messaging. For all of these reasons, the ability to assess and track social content in real time is now part of UFCU’s marketing program.