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Indian banks are just starting to get social online, with ICICI Bank taking a small lead of sorts. Currently not many Indian banks are leveraging the power of web 2.0 social media platforms to engage and connect with their customers. In a series which we kick start today, we’ll explore social media presence of some modern Indian Banks.

Let’s get started with ICICI Bank, the largest private bank in India.

WEBSITES

ICICI Bank has a decent parent website icicibank.com. Apart from their main portal, they maintain quite a few other web pages too. They specially have an active online presence of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs like ICICI Foundation, ICICI Elementary Education.

ICICI Foundation engages itself and the community in a range of socially relevant causes like child health and nutrition, elementary education for all, rural financing initiatives. Engaging the community in social causes helps to empower people and hence is a particularly good use of social media. In fact many social media experts believe that engaging people (be it offline or online), in causes relevant to them does a world of good to a brand than going for direct promotion. ICICI clearly seems to adhere to this school of thought.

BLOGS

We were not able to locate any official blog platform from ICICI bank. A custom blog providing the customers, employees and the management of the bank to connect, collaborate and share their views on subjects (banking/non-banking) relevant to them (or to the society) would have been great. (Blogs provide an informal communication channel where people openly discuss their views. This goes a long way in enhancing transparency of the brand.)

FACEBOOK

It was a little disappointing to see that no official fan page of ICICI Bank exists. However quite a few active pages are being run by its employees to collaborate. Their are a few hate pages too. Check them all here.

Their’s one official page of ICICI Foundation though. It seems to be just a month old but still a decent initiative. (Check it out here.) At the time of writing they are having 87 fans. Basically its just an informative forum about CSR initiatives of ICICI, but its good that they have atleast started off connecting in facebook (Facebook is emerging as one of the most powerful social networking platforms for brands to connect with their customers)

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TWITTER

ICICI Bank has a pretty decent twitter presence (Certainly when compared to that of other Indian Banks, which hardly exist on twitter). They are trying to connect with their customers through a feedback channel via their customer care twitter handle ICICIbank_care. However having a close look revealed that ICICIbank_care is just telling its customer to redirect their query to their email support :  care@icicibank.com for solutions. (Really wasting twitter’s power of realtime communication)

It’s twitter handle for it’s CSR initiatives appears to be pretty impressive though. Check them out here and here. ICICI Foundation seems to be a couple of months old, and has 71 tweets at the time of writing (decent for a CSR connect), with 120 followers. ICICI is also using twitter for its insurance products but we’ll cover insurance sector separately later.

SOCIAL BANKING POTENTIAL

While ICICI Bank does have a presence in digital media platforms (albeit small), a lot remains desired if they really want to unleash true potential of social banking.

Gartner defines social banking as an emerging approach to retail banking that makes depositing, lending and the connections between depositors, borrowers and financial institutions transparent. It has its roots in social/consumer trends, including social responsibility and social-network participation, and financial and banking trends, such as financial social networks, microfinance and personal finance management.

ICICI Bank (or for that matter any other bank/financial institution) needs to engage with customers on custom built financial social networks (FSNs) if they are serious about their digital presence. (Check FSNs examples from abroad to understand them better – Prosper, Virgin money, mint, wesabe). In addition as a next step they should now look at engaging customers directly for lending and investment purposes apart from their CSR initiatives through twitter and facebook. Engaging through other forums like blogs, wikis, podcasts, mashups, widgets may follow later, when the bank really aspires to become pioneers of the digital medium.

If you do know about any other digital platform which ICICI Bank uses and we have missed, please let us know.

For social media help get in touch with Aditya Prakash and Prasaad K S on twitter.

You can also email them here and here.

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Related posts:

1. Social Media Presence of Indian Telecom Majors- Part 2- Twitter Presence
2. Social Media Presence of Indian Telecom Majors- Part 1- Facebook Presence
3. Social Media Presence of Indian Telecom Majors- Part 3- Website and Blog
4. Social Media – The Dell Way
5. Social Media – The Power Unleashed