Credit Cards and Social Media: Failures

This is the second part of a guest blog post by Michael Dolen.

Last week I shared 3 ways the credit card industry succeeds in social media. But what are some areas which could use improvement?

Here are not-so-great moves in the credit card space…

Most Counterproductive = Kohls

Jeff Bullas has a list of what he considers to be the top 10 Facebook campaigns and gives Kohl’s the number one spot. So how can I claim that such success to be a blunder? Well it’s a doubled-edged sword.

That huge success is a problem when it comes to the Kohl’s card. Why? Because as is the case with most store credit cards, the main incentive for getting one is usually just the coupons. The Kohl’s card doesn’t earn you cash back or points. Instead, you are given 15-30% coupons 12 times a year.

Meanwhile their Facebook page frequently features incentives, too:

Many people like/follow Kohl’s to snags offers which they frequently publish. I have heard from many people on my credit card forum who say they have little desire to apply for a Kohl’s card, since they can frequently find good promotions online from Kohl’s.

Furthermore, if you scroll down Kohl’s wall, there’s a good chance you will see some sort of complaint about their credit card account (I saw several when I looked.)

Conclusion? Kohl’s definitely gets an A+ for their astonishing 6 million Likes and having an active wall. However, it doesn’t appear to be productive when it comes to convincing people to get their card.

So the mistake they are making is operating their social outreach in a way that is counterproductive to promoting the card. However in all fairness, I’m sure the overall success almost certainly outweighs the damage done to the Kohl’s card.

Biggest Oops Moment = Chase Freedom

If you recall last week, I praised how great of a job Chase has been doing with promoting their Freedom card through social platforms. The exception is on Twitter.

Unfortunately what could be coined a big “oops moment” is that a diet website snagged the @ChaseFreedom handle before Chase did. So while the credit card’s presence is a home run on Facebook, it’s being hampered on Twitter:

This diet site is also using the domain chasefreedom.com and has “Chase Freedom” trademarked for the dieting niche.

Given the lackluster design of this diet site (to put it nicely) and the whopping 12 followers they have, it’s too bad to see them getting in the way of Chase’s (the bank) social media initiatives. However it appears the diet company registered the domain before the Chase Freedom card was ever created/launched, so that’s just one of those unfortunate circumstances.

Biggest Slacker = Bank of America

BofA’s performance in the social arena correlates closely with their stock price — both are underperforming the market.

In fact, I’m even having a hard time finding Bank of America’s official Facebook page. With my cookies blocked in my browser (a.k.a. neutral search results) this is what I see on Google:

Notice how spots 3 and 4 are not the most flattering. The 2nd slot goes to an informational page about the company that is derived from Wikipedia (Bank of America doesn’t operate the page). Thankfully the 1st listing is indeed their official page, but I don’t think they’re doing the best job with it.

For starters, the username “/buildingopportunity” isn’t practical. It should just be intuitive like “/bankofamerica” or “/bofa”.

Secondly, when I looked it wasn’t very organized. There are multiple identical posts. For example there were 2 identical posts (separated by only 3) which said: “Your opinion is important to us. Please help us improve this page by answering our short 5 minute survey.”

Want my opinion? Don’t post the same thing multiple times!

I would expect more of an effort from BofA, considering that up until very recently they were the largest bank in the country.