Eric Cantona’s Stop Banque/Bank Run
Eric Cantona’s recent challenge to ‘Kill the Banks’ has quickly spread around the world thanks to social propagation on the internet and the chord stuck by this celebrity. In an attempt to destroy the system, he is calling for everyone to withdraw money from banks in France and elsewhere on Dec. 7th, 2010.
The story broke here in the UK on Sun Nov 21st in The Guardian, and within five days, a number of campaign hubs were set up. His video on YouTube had received close to 200K views on YouTube and 15K shares on Facebook.
The story is being covered and commented upon on mainstream news sites and amplified frequently on Twitter. On Facebook, 22K attendees have already accepted to participate in the event in France. Whilst monitoring the spread of information using automated listening tools can give us a good idea as to the scale of exposure, they have yet to provide information as to how many people are indicating they will actually take part in the protest.
In spite of these uncertainties, the ability to monitor the reach of the story as well as analyse the comments made in relation to it, gives financial services brands more information about possible attacks than has ever been available before. If acted upon quickly, this information can help brands prepare for possible events, if not predict actual outcomes.
Whether or not Cantona’s campaign is successful, the mood it reflects highlights the need for change. Not only do financial services need to continue to rebuild trust with their stakeholders, buzz monitoring providers need to ramp up their offerings to create more intelligent predictive systems by gathering data from a wider range of sources and providing contextual analysis by way of more diverse metrics.
In this case, they need to provide information not only about what people are saying, but also behaviorial information (e.g. about whether or not they are opting in to attend events). A considerable amount of analyst time is still required to put all the pieces together manually as was the case with the information presented above.
