…but there’s no escaping it if you work in the retail financial services industry today. 

While initially slow to embrace this new vision of community, hardly a month goes by now without at least one company we track adding some type of social media element to its website. Scottrade is the latest firm to go Web 2.0. Launched in April 2008, the firm’s online community became accessible to all clients after a short period during which it was only promoted to ScottradeELITE clients (see the June 23rd e-Monitor Update for more information). As with any online community, Scottrade clients can use the site to interact with their fellow investors, creating blogs, joining groups and participating in surveys. Users are also afforded the ability to post photos and video or share other types of files with one another. Scottrade joins the ranks of American Express (The American Express Network), Bank of America (Small Business Online Community) and Charles Schwab (Money and More) as industry front-runners in this area.

As established financial services companies like Scottrade incorporate social media into their existing business models, the other side of this story centers on new firms that make online social networks a core element of their business model. The spring edition of Corporate Insight’s Consulting Insights Newsletter features a story called “Social Media and the Financial Services Industry” that focuses on two such companies: Covestor and Zecco.

While significant differences exist between their business models – Zecco is an online brokerage featuring a robust social networking application while Covestor is simply an online community – both sites give users the ability to track the investment decisions of their peers and discuss the reasoning of their actions. Up-start discount brokerage TradeKing also offers an online community but the feature is not fully integrated with the other functions available on the site as it is on Zecco.com.

FYI, if you’re interested in keeping tabs on TradeKing and Zecco, Corporate Insight’s e-Monitor service recently began tracking both.