On this episode, I am joined by social media lawyer Ethan Wall to go over the mistakes credit unions make when they use social media.
Visit The Social Media Law Firm at https://thesocialmedialawfirm.com/.
Listen now or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Hello, and welcome to the CU social strategy podcast. This is our third episode. And today I’m excited because we have a special guest to talk to us about how to stay in compliance when you are working on social media. So our guest today is Ethan wall, and he will be going over the five social media mistakes that he sees credit unions make. And Ethan is an award winning social media lawyer for credit unions at the Social Media Law Firm. He has helped hundreds of credit unions be social and safe by creating social media risk management programs, policies and procedures. He’s a frequent speaker for national and local credit union organizations and is frequently invited as a social media law expert on NPR, CNN, Dr. Phil, Larry King, and other television stations and news outlets. Hi, Evan. Thanks for joining us today.
Ethan Wall
Thanks so much, Jennifer. Happy to be here. Great.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
So we’re going to talk about some of the five mistakes that you’re seeing credit unions make on social media. Could you start by telling us a little bit about how you work with credit unions?
Ethan Wall
Sure. So I’ve been a social media lawyer for credit unions for about eight years now. Nice. Started in about 2015. My friend Amy McGraw from tropical Financial Credit Union down in South Florida, was on Kunis Board of Directors when she asked me to speak at the marketing and business development council on social media compliance. And I remember thinking to myself at the time, what the heck is social media compliance for credit unions at the time, I literally purchased a textbook on financial compliance, learned all about it back in 2015, read the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council social media guidance, then came to Vegas and presented on this subject on two different sessions. And the number of questions of people after the session that came up kind of blew my mind. And I realized, this is an industry that needed help from a social media law expert in this area. So for the last eight years, we’ve been building social media risk management programs for credit unions, in a nutshell, developing all the policies, procedures, guidelines and training to make sure that credit unions can be social and safe. And we do it on a fixed monthly fee for retainer work to make sure that they have everything that they need to get their social media campaigns up and running both effectively and safely.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
What I love about your story, is that how so many of us in credit unions got into social media in the first place is like, someone said, We should do it, we’re like, okay, I best figure out how to do it real quick. And that’s why it’s so nice that you have that service. And the you’re here to talk to us today about the mistakes because it’s so easy to make mistakes on social media, because even though it’s not quite the wild west out there, it still sometimes feels that way. And it’s so easy to say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person.
Ethan Wall
Yeah, and it’s it’s funny, you mentioned that because that kind of dovetails really into my first mistake, which is that credit union sometimes post first and ask questions later. I remember back when I first started doing this in 2015, it actually felt like the wild wild west. Yeah. Meaning we’ve got social media we know as credit unions, we should be on it. Engaging with members and potential members felt good promoting products and services felt like you’re walking through an old west town where you don’t know at any time if a if a tumbleweeds’ going to come out or a regulator is going to jump out of the window and point the finger at you for not following the rules because at that time, there weren’t really clear rules of the road for what credit unions out or can’t do. And so this was addressed by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council that came out with their social media guidance memorandum. In a nutshell, the memorandum was designed to let credit unions know, or put them on notice and say, Hey, in case you were unclear, all of the existing financial laws that apply to all different types of advertising also apply to social media. And regardless of whether you are a gigantic credit union, like Navy, federal, that just has branches everywhere. Or if you are a single branch, smaller community based credit union. Social media is a good thing to use, but the laws apply to you the same and you have to make sure that if you’re going to choose to be on social media, which I think is a great choice, you need to be able to follow the rules and follow the law. And so over the last eight years, it’s become more and more clear that existing laws apply to our social media technologies and new regulations are being developed all the time. And probably the biggest mistake that we can make, is executing a social media campaign, whether it’s running targeted advertisements, whether it’s asking for online reviews, whether it is no using people’s pictures or imagery of the general public, or celebrities or even of our employees or staff, but not asking ourselves first, hey, is this okay? What’s the procedures? How can we do so safely? So posting first and asking questions later, is kind of a big mistake, and one that I want to come out of the gate with, because it’s something that we’ve done often. And it could put us at risk if we don’t step carefully.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Absolutely. And that’s why I always ask that my clients send anything that I give them to post through compliance. You know, whether they’re using their in house compliance team, they’ve got someone like you, they’re working through their league, no matter who, you know, I’m pretty good at what I do. I’ve been doing it a long time. I’m good in that knowing the things to say. But we always need that second set of eyes.
Ethan Wall
With the compliance hat, exactly. It just makes sense to go through kind of that process. And whatever process works for your credit union is fine. There’s no one size fits all approach. So just making sure that you’ve got your checks and balances done is always a good thing.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Right. All right. So what’s the next mistake that you want us to stop making?
Ethan Wall
Yeah, so this one’s going to sound a little bit counterintuitive to the first one, but I would say the second mistake is sitting on the sidelines. You know, what happens is, now we know that the laws apply to our social media use, but sometimes members of our compliance department or legal department, or sometimes HR will get afraid, and say, Well, wait a minute, we don’t know exactly what we need to do. So we’re not going to do anything at all. And we’re going to sit on our hands. And we would rather let these opportunities pass us by. So we don’t take on unreasonable risk. And there’s some good fodder for that of, you know, we don’t want to put ourselves at an unreasonable degree of risk through our social media of content. But I think, at this day, and age and 2023, sitting on the sidelines, on social media, is going to make our competitors pass us by, whether it’s community banks, larger big banks, some of the new technology, banking solutions that exist, consumers have a lot of options and options are a good thing. And our credit union is not here to serve everybody that’s within our potential community. But we are going to be the great solution and oftentimes the best solution for many of members of our communities, but if they don’t know about us, they don’t know how we can help. We don’t know what we offer and they don’t know what makes us special, or they don’t feel like they are connected to us or know us. They’re going to go with another option. And this makes complete sense. I mean, going back to my my elementary school days, I was a nervous little kid. And when the school dance came around, I sat there on the side of the wall with my friends because I didn’t want to go out there and dance it up and make a fool of myself because I wanted everything to be perfect. But I missed out on great fun, great dances, great relationships as a result of it. And I think the same thing happens with social media is it’s okay to be cautious, and we want to be able to do things carefully. But I think sitting on the sidelines too long, will ultimately have a He really detrimental consequences for us because people are going to make decisions to to work with other financial institutions, which is a shame, because they may have been the right fit for us.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Absolutely. And, you know, the more research I see, the more people are using social media to make that first decision about whether you exist. You’re someone I want to do business with. And, you know, if, if you’re right for me, so not being there means all of these people are never going to know what you have to offer.
Ethan Wall
Totally. And people now spend more time on Facebook or social media than any other platform on the world. And I know that it’s probably transitioning more towards Instagram or other platforms. But people are, I think, almost shocked to learn sometimes that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. And that people just whether we like it, or whether we don’t like it, people are just using social media all the time, it’s become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. And so it just stands to reason that if we want to be a part of our communities lives, we need to be participating in social media in a way that aligns with us. And so, you know, give building up that courage, partnering with the right social media professional to be able to kind of help you take those next steps is really critical, because sometimes we’re afraid because we don’t have all the answers. You don’t have to do it ourselves. But there are experts out there like you that are able to step in and be that guide and show us how can we use social media in a way that’s really going to be aligned with our values, align with kind of who we are, and make that voice consistent and build a community that that people know, like, and trust that they’ll choose us when it’s time to make those big life decisions?
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Right? And how to how do you suggest that credit unions balance that that need to avoid all risks with the need to be there and be moving fast?
Ethan Wall
Yeah, people are going to think that we prepared ahead of time knew what my next point was, because, but we didn’t I promise. We were prepping for the episode. And I knew we’re going to talk about the five social media stakes, and I wrote, never sent them to Jennifer, or should we have prepped about this? But I love what you what you said, because the next mistake was being reactive, rather than proactive. And what I mean by that is not having a social media risk management program. Okay, because you said, How can credit unions have the confidence to use social media and move quickly? Without going through what you talked about the beginning, which is meant to I have to run every single comment on a Facebook post through compliance? It happened on a Friday, people are out for the weekend, someone’s asking, is our branch open on Labor Day? What do I do? Right. And so by being reactive to those situations, it’s hard for us to have the confidence to be able to move forward in a way because we don’t know what we should be doing. And so having a social media Risk Management Program, which is required under the law, if we’re going to be using social media, actually gives us the confidence to use social media in a way that is going to be keeping up with the lockstep of how technology moves, and how people expect communication to work, while also being able to put in reasonable safeguards in place. So I’ll give you an example. As part of the social media risk management program, we will always create what are called response guidelines or complaint procedures, basically, how do we handle questions, comments and complaints, whether it’s positive, neutral or negative on social media, because if we run everything through compliance all the time, and don’t give our marketing department or our social media professionals the freedom to be able to interact with people in a timely manner, then people are going to think we’re not responsive. We’re not attentive to their needs, and they’re going to, again, move elsewhere. But at the same time, we can’t risk saying something that’s going to be so unreasonably wrong, that we can get into big legal troubles. So how do we balance those things with a social media response guidelines, which is kind of one of the deliverables that we always either review, or we put in place, are going to have procedures to say if there’s positive feedback, here’s like a bank of pre approved responses. Our social media manager has the freedom to say, hey, we’re so happy to have you as a member of our community or Yes, we love serving, you know, XYZ county or so glad that this went well because that’s the Easy. If it’s neutral feedback, what are our branches hours are we open on Labor Day, we also have that when there’s negative feedback, there’s usually going to be two types. One is going to be, you know, acknowledging someone’s negative feedback and providing some sort of a supportive response. And by having a bank of pre approved responses, we’d be able to kind of move through that quickly. Or we might say, Look, if this is someone that has an ongoing legal matter, or if they are complaining about a particular person or branch, or if they fit in one of these circumstances, then we need to escalate this to a department head to somebody in particular, so that we can make sure we’re managing that in an appropriate way. And so what I like to think is that your program is basically a sandbox. And the sandbox says, Here are the guidelines from within which we need to play within. And so long as we’re within the sandbox, we trust our employees to execute our guidelines and our social media strategy in a way that works. And in the event that something falls outside of the sandbox sometimes, because these things will happen. It’s okay, we’re humans, but we review our activities on a reoccurring basis, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, or annually to make sure we’re doing things right. And then we make the appropriate types of adjustments. So I think that helps us keep up with that speed while still being safe.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Yeah, and I love that you said to have a bank of responses that are appropriate, because I think we’ve all seen that, where it’s the same reply to every single comment. And then, I mean, that’s almost worse than not responding quickly. Because it doesn’t make you look like real human people.
Ethan Wall
Yeah, that’s true. And that’s that is sometimes you just get into the habit of doing one go. And it’s easy. I even had that discussion. We were marketing our law firm recently. And we were just doing the same things over and over again, we said, Wait a minute, is it better for us to just not post this type of content? Because if people see it, they’re going to see it’s not really as engaged than our other pieces of content? Why are we going through this dogmatic approach of doing things the same way? Sometimes it’s helpful to have an outside perspective, to take a look at what is it you’re doing and saying, You’re doing this awesome, but this makes you look like a robot or AI? And, you know, that’s not what our members want. They want to have that personal touch. And that’s why they work with credit unions in the first place, is because we care. We’re members of the community, we’re all in this together, and our communications need to reflect that.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Absolutely. Okay. What is mistake number four,
Ethan Wall
I would say Mistake number four is not engaging with our employees. So, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth in 2015, when I started doing this, a lot of the response from senior management was fear. I’m afraid of what my employees might say or do because rightfully, the credit union can be held responsible for what their employees say and do on social media. But tying people’s hands together, and putting a muzzle over our best brand advocates is hurtful, because they can’t engage with us and engage with members of the community. On the other hand, we can’t have no guidelines, because then there could be risk of people saying the darndest things. And you know, there are new laws like the federal truth and advertising laws that govern online reviews that say if your employees are leaving you positive reviews online, but not clearly and conspicuously disclosing that they work with a credit union that could put the credit union at risk, because people don’t know that. And so, ultimately, we’ve developed something called social sharing guidelines, or social sharing procedures. And in a nutshell, we want to engage with our employees and empower them to build confidence to say, we would love for you to take our post and comment on it, we would love for you to share this canned food drive we’re doing for Thanksgiving, and post it on your personal timeline. And say like, you know, I love being a part of the ABC credit union community and it feels great to give back. However, we don’t want you to change the image or change the copy that we have written or we don’t want you to say things like we have the best rates in town. Because we don’t want you to accidentally put yourself or put the credit union or put our members at risk. And so I think coming at this with an approach of we would love for you to engage and here’s how and here are some common ways that people unknowingly make mistakes when they engage with us that could put us at a credit union or mmm prevent risk, and train our employees as part of our annual social media training, you get a lot of buy in, and employees feel like they’re a part of it. And they become our advocates in a way that is beneficial and social and safe and not in a way that puts us at risk or makes them feel like they’re not part of the process.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Right. And it’s something where you want to treat people the same way you treat them when they’re going to do a booth at an event, you wouldn’t say you can’t talk to people. In that situation, this is just a different way that we’re talking to our people.
Ethan Wall
Exactly. And of course, we probably wouldn’t put somebody in our booth that might be spouting harmful or racist things that’s out there. We probably wouldn’t be hiring people who do those things. But to have reasonable guidelines of like, Look, you might have somebody come up to you and say, Boy, I was a member of your credit union before and I had this negative experience. And we want to just empower our team members to know how to handle those situations. And I think, in running a booth, that would seem pretty reasonable. And I think we just extend that to our employees use of their personal social media, and how they interact with our social media, as well as that they feel like they’re a part of the process. And therefore sometimes they just don’t know about the risks and educating about that really helps, right. And I
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
think it’s really important to have, you know, an open door policy, even though it’s probably not going to be someone actually coming into your office, they’re going to be sending an email or something to say, hey, if somebody were to say this thing to me, What could I say back? So that people feel like they’re, they’re understanding, they’re setting the guidelines. They’re, they’re just part of the process of of creating the guidelines, not just, you know, taking them and doing them.
Ethan Wall
Yeah, I remember it was literally two weeks ago, I’m working with a credit union out in Washington, preparing their social media employee training. And as part of that, we talked about the do’s and don’ts. And they were very afraid when they looked at the slide deck initially, and they’re like, oh, boy, all of these don’ts, Won’t this create an environment that it makes it feel like we’re talking to them and not kind of having this conversation together. And we kind of re pivoted things to say, look, of course, we have to set the guidelines of what people can’t do. So they don’t share our trade secrets, or send out our customer lists or say bad things about our members. Like that seems pretty reasonable. But at the end of the day, we want to have this community have an open door inclusive environment. And what we think of an of an inclusive environment, an open door environment, we literally think of the open door and being able to walk into Jane, Jan, or John’s office. But now the water cooler is social media. And so having that freedom to know that I can ask these questions, and I can understand why we should or should not be doing things, it’s going to be really helpful, because I really feel like it’s the smallest of smallest majorities of people who want to hurt us, or say bad things. Usually, mistakes are just I didn’t know. And so being able to remove that barrier, by having that open door policy, an open feedback totally works.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
And I love the idea of, you know, doing role playing exercises, for things like this, because, you know, a lot of times it is that they didn’t know, but sometimes it’s that they didn’t think, like they just got hit with something that they’d never been hit with before. And they or you just say something to avoid, you know, avoid not saying anything and and that that can be it can be that you said the wrong thing.
Ethan Wall
True, this, it’s great to this because it really dovetails into that last lesson in a way and an example for that last lesson, which a mistake could be not keeping up with the law. Because social media advances so fast, the law is trying to catch up. And so one of the major areas that I’ve seen as a trend over the last few years, is that more and more credit union loan officers want to use their LinkedIn accounts, their personal LinkedIn accounts, to promote the credit union promote their expertise and develop business for the credit union itself. But a lot of them just don’t know that the same laws that apply to the credit union social media might also apply to their personal social media profiles, if they’re actively using it to conduct credit union business. And so this is the classic situation of I just didn’t know because they’re not trying to harm us, it’s they’re seeing other credit union are likely to seeing like other bankers that are out there loan officers saying they’re doing it. Why can’t I? So I’m just going to go back to the first mistake, which is post first and ask questions later. And so being able to keep up with the law and know, ah, this is a thing, we need our loan officers to be online, we can’t have unreasonable degrees of risk, how do we manage this together, and usually, it’s going to be with a set of guidelines for certain line of business or loan officer employees what they can or can’t do. But then the training program is interactive. And it allows them to ask the questions and gain understanding to say, Oh, these guidelines aren’t in place, because you want to hold me back these guidelines are in place is because you want me to do this in a way that’s going to be safe. And I can see that, oh, it’s not no, it’s, yes, we can do all of these things. But these are areas that we need to avoid, because it could create really big problems for us. And for you, we don’t want that to happen, because we know that it would only happen accidentally. So having an interaction and a buy in and keeping up with the law. I think it’s really marries everything together. And that’s no, that’s, that’s where you and I live in this world, you know, with a credit union that doesn’t have a larger in house marketing department, it’s so hard sometimes to keep up with, what are the new social media strategies that we need to be doing. And they need a guide like you to be able to come in and say, Look, Twitter is now x, Instagram has threads. Yes, tic tock and Snapchat are out there. But for our credit union, we should be focusing on these channels, because that’s where our members are. And maybe Snapchat schools are popular, or maybe threads is a new platform. But it doesn’t really fit as much as of our community as Facebook and LinkedIn, on Instagram do or something like that. So they come to you as that guide, because they just don’t know. And similarly, with this last mistake of not keeping up with the law, it’s really hard to keep up with all of these things. And that’s what social media lawyers for credit unions are for. My job is to be the one keeping up with that stuff. And not saying look, we need to over policy or over guideline or put too much red tape. But if we are going to be using email marketing campaigns, we mean, to comply with can spam laws, and sometimes these applied to messaging people on LinkedIn. So we need to make sure that we looped those different types of things in and so right up with the law, not just being an ostrich, and digging, I think is a good last last tip.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
I know. And I think you know, when we first started, there were just no guidelines. So people just did what they wanted to do. And then then we had to really pull it back and put in so many guidelines and policies. And now we’re in a period where we can hit that middle ground and do this in a way that works for everyone.
Ethan Wall
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And that’s, that’s, that’s what that’s a sweet spot, I think that we find in life with everything, perhaps you want to eat super healthy and exercise every single day, but then you don’t get to be burned out. Or we go to the completely opposite end of the spectrum and not care at all. And neither one of those things is going to be satisfied. But you you don’t know that until you go through your journey of life and say, here’s the sweet spot between complete total removal of all things that are pleasurable, and being doing something something unhealthy for me. And I think that in an age of credit union social media, we’re finally getting to that sweet spot where it’s not a free for all, where there’s no laws and guidelines. And it’s not let’s over policy, our credit union to death. Instead, it’s let’s hit that sweet spot by taking a reasonable approach that says, Yes, we can do these things. But let’s have safe guardrails in place to make sure we’re doing things safely. And then when regulators take a look into what we’re doing, they can see that we have the right policies, procedures and guidelines that were being proactive, rather than reactive. And that allows us to be social and safe. Absolutely.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
All right. Well, thank you for coming here and telling us the five mistakes that we all need to stop making. So to reiterate those top five mistakes.
- Number one is credit unions post first and ask questions later.
- Number two is credit unions sitting on the sidelines.
- Number three is being reactive rather than proactive.
- Number four is not engaging with employees.
- And number five is not keeping up with the law.
Where can people find out more about you and the services you offer?
Ethan Wall
Yes, thanks, Jennifer, for having me. So you can learn more about the social media law firm by going to the social media law firm.com. There is a whole area about how we help credit unions and if you’d like more social media, tips, resources and an update, you can always follow us on social media as well by looking for the Social Media Law Firm.
Jennifer Roland Cadiente
Perfect. All right. Thank you very much.
Ethan Wall
Thanks, Jennifer. Have a great day.