In our new report, "The ROI Of Mobile Banking," Forrester presents a flexible model to help eBusiness and channel strategy executives estimate the ROI of — and outline the business case for — their mobile banking strategies. The resulting return on investment comes to roughly 15%. While positive, the ROI from our model is far from a ringing endorsement of mobile as a money maker for banks today.

For the report, we use our model to estimate the ROI of a multifaceted mobile banking effort by a US-based retail banking provider with 500,000 deposit account customers. Forrester’s model includes eight modifiable inputs: four cost inputs and four benefit inputs. These cover the cost of developing, testing, and implementing mobile services, as well as the potential savings and revenue that a provider might expect from offering such services.

Our findings do not mean mobile banking initiatives should be scrapped. Far from it: Supporting the mobile channel is no longer optional for banking providers in most markets. Their customers and prospects — especially the younger set of Gen Xers, Gen Yers, and teen Millennials — will demand it. Forrester’s Technographics® research shows that 22% of US online adults say it is either “important” or “very important” that the deposit account provider they choose offer access to their accounts through a mobile phone or device. And more than a third of adults younger than 35 feel this way.

As this is my first blog post, let me begin with a quick introduction. I’m Richard Evensen, the new senior analyst with the Market Insights (MI) group at Forrester. I’ve been working in market and media research for over 15 years. During this time, I’ve done M&A and joint venture assessments, multi-lingual media analyses, competitive intelligence, customer research, and complex market/financial modeling.

I’m happy to be part of the amazing brain trust at Forrester and will be supporting MI professionals with research and guidance on customer satisfaction (CSAT), competitive intelligence, emerging markets, and research best practices.

Over the past several decades, I’ve experienced significant changes in our profession. For better or worse, we’re nowhere near our steady state. Dimensions that have changed, and will continue to change, are:

• Breadth. MI professionals cover an increasingly broad portfolio of responsibilities, providing insights across: industries, segments, geographies, product/service lifecycle stages, customers and competitors, and, now, real and virtual worlds. With high growth in emerging and online markets, competition increasing, and customers becoming more connected and savvy, MI professionals need to have very long arms and research reach.
• Depth. Our industry has moved from providing data to research to insights. Increasingly, MI professionals’ clients want actionable recommendations, which require a strong working knowledge of multiple business areas. As these demands grow, MI professionals need to move up the value chain.

Next week, Perry Cooper, senior vice president of Digital Media, is speaking at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago.  In preparation for this event, I had the opportunity to learn about how the NHL is empowering it fans and delivering demonstrable results using social media. 

The league is leveraging digital media in many ways to produce benefits for fans, sponsors and the NHL.  One such program was #NHLTweetup, which saw the league sponsor fan tweetups in locations such as Chicago, Nashville and New Zealand.  The program was run at minimal cost to the league; the investment included 250 man hours, 13 pieces of autographed merchandise and gift bags with a total value of just $1,000.

The power of combining Twitter and real-world events is pretty easy to recognize, but the NHL took the time to quantify it.  This program created results for the NHL in at least three ways: 

• Reach and impressions:  Out of 150 people who attended one NHL tweetup in New York City, 100 of them had Twitter personas that could be analyzed.  The NHL found out each fan had an average of 213 followers per person.  Extrapolating this across all of those who attended the international events, the league estimates that the program created impressions on more than 230,000 people via Twitter.  Of course, the social impressions didn’t stop there — the tweetups resulted in the most blog posts the sport had seen since the NHL Winter Classic. 
   

The other day I authored a blog post many found interesting, infuriating or both:  What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero!  I appreciate the great dialogue from the folks who offered feedback in blog comments and on Twitter.  Because this is such a hot topic and because the feedback was so thoughtful, this seemed worth further exploration.

In that blog post, I suggested that marketers approach the question of how much a Facebook fan is worth as if the answer is zero.  I said, “It is what companies do with fans that creates value, not merely that a brand has fans.”  I went on to suggest that marketers should recognize a difference between potential value and real value.  Like a coil that is compressed to store energy (an apt metaphor from my Twitter friend, Blair Goldberg), Facebook fans have little actual value until they are activated by the brand, just like releasing a compressed coil.