You may not have been keeping close track on this, but new research from Forrester finds 50mm tablet computers have been sold this year and another 100mm are expected to be sold in 2012. Further, about 25% of companies in the US plan to or have already given tablets to staff. In addition, Deloitte predicts 25% of all mobile devices purchased next year will be for corporate use. Let's face it, people really like the mobility these devices offer and the research shows this is certainly an area that will continue to see significant growth in the years to come.
Speaking of all things technology and security, you might be interested to know that studies now find 43% of IT teams say they have been targeted by social engineering attacks and 48% of large companies have experienced 25 or more engineering attacks in the past 2Ys. One common approach is for hackers to target corporate email through personal email accounts, such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. They get into the stream of forwarded email (some employees forward their work email to personal accounts) and personal services don't provide the same protection as work email systems. Hackers get in to the private accounts and can expose confidential company data, change passwords and other malicious activity. Another method that hackers may use is to convince people to open a work email to help another employee at another office. These can be false so beware. Technology brings us ease of use in life, which is terrific, but in some cases it also comes with potential risks.
Here's another technology idea you might want to consider when trying to capture new clients or help existing small business customers in capturing more customers of their own (and better supporting your loan payments). Analysis done earlier this year on 4,000 businesses, their websites and sales lead generation found some interesting things. Specifically it found that businesses with websites that have 400 to 1,000 pages generate 600% more sales leads and 900% more visitors than businesses with less than 100 pages. In addition, sites with more than 1,000 web pages generated 800% more leads than those with less than 100 pages. If you want to help customers boost traffic and opportunity through their web site, perhaps you might want to suggest they build it out a bit more to attract more eyeballs and delight the web crawlers.
When it comes to technology and social media, many bankers we talk to are still struggling to find their spot. If so, note that recent Citibank research found 90% of business executives surveyed by the bank were using social media of some kind for business purposes. That is huge, but the bank also admitted that it sees social media as a moving target, so it is still refining its approach. Citibank also felt social media was definitely a tool to reinforce its brand and enable messages to get out more frequently and quickly to target audiences. In another study by B2B Magazine, the top 5 social media marketing uses cited were branding (64%), building website traffic (55%), product or event promotions (54%), community building (52%) and customer feedback (52%). Nearly all companies playing in social media said the key to success was making sure you have a process to keep creating and feeding in content to keep customers coming back and interested. The former marketing head for Facebook says banks should advertise, highlight employee activities, showcase philanthropic initiatives and have an overall experience that includes incentives for participation to help build fans.
There are lots of technological advancements you can leverage or should be aware of that apply directly to banking and the customers that use your bank. Dabbling here and there to see what catches fire as you expand your understanding might be one way to go to get involved right away.