Banking Review

The social barometer of our times

Reviewing the conversation on Twitter from Monday night’s 4Corners program reveals two distinct camps of viewers. Widely viewed and widely tweeted, the program tweet stream has achieved great reach into the online world. Interest in the program was so intense that the follow-on forum conversation crashed as a result of too much traffic.

Two days on, debate about the program content and delivery continues. Some viewers believe the information was over exaggerated and a blatant case of fear mongering.

The tech savvy viewers were especially scathing of the content, the interviewees and film techniques used. They were merciless about phishing victim, Dimitri. Comments flew that if someone opens and acts on a phishing email then they deserve what they get.

Yet Dimitri is typical of many customers. He was in a hurry, didn’t check the email properly and handed over the details that some people freely disclose on Facebook. Catch even moderately tech savvy customers on a bad day and they too can fall for increasingly sophisticated phishing scams.

The less tech savvy viewers commenting on Twitter were concerned by what they saw and floundered with what to do to protect themselves from the many online fraud tactics explained on the program. Little information was given to help these viewers take control of the situation.

Anyone working in financial services knows of the stories and examples shown in the program and many others. Yet the audience reaction on Twitter demonstrates the customer attitude towards online security and the education programs of the past few years. Some customers now consider themselves experts and yet others are still coming to terms with the basics of security and the types of scams that exist.

The one obvious conclusion stated in the program was that ongoing education about online fraud is essential. Reading through the audience reactions it’s clear there is a fine line between educating and alarming.

The different responses show an increasingly difficult audience to communicate with about online security. All communication needs to cater to the novice audience as well as advanced tech savvy users.

The free flowing, genuine customer conversation about online security on Twitter is a new development. The conversation is real, unprompted and ongoing.

To understand what customers are thinking, organisations need to monitor more than their brand name and industry niche for mentions in Twitter. It will be interesting to see if #WebWarriors generates the same level of discussion during its broadcast on ABC1 Thursday 20th.