In the first example of our Blog and Twitter accounts
interacting, this article expands on Tweets issued by Bill yesterday (3 January
2013) and today. Gareth noticed
yesterday that the revised SIP 9 fee guidance notes had dropped off the R3 web
site. Knowing that a lot of you still
direct creditors to the R3 site for fee guidance notes, Gareth contacted R3 and
their IT people confirmed that they would get them back online as soon as they
could. Bill tweeted a warning that they
were down and confirmed that IT were looking into the issue. Gareth confirmed this morning that the fee
guidance notes are back online and Bill tweeted an update.
The story does not end there however. We are not exactly overwhelmed with Twitter
followers yet, so you may not be aware of the issue at all. Furthermore, whether you were aware or not, we
thought it was worth explaining our suggested approach to the guidance notes.
We suggest that whenever you are required to direct
creditors to the SIP 9 guidance notes, the best place to direct them to is your
own web site. We acknowledge that few
creditors actually follow the link, but if they do it makes sense to us that it
should be you that gets any resulting marketing benefit. If you do not have that option, then you may
well use the R3 web site or one of the regulators’ web sites.
Wherever you direct them, the approach that we suggest is to
explain that there are different guides for pre-6 April 2010 cases and post-6
April 2010 cases, and then direct them to the right set. In connection with
this, we suggest that is simpler for all concerned if you just use two sets of
guides, the pre-6 April 2010 set and the revised version that was issued early
in 2012 after the 1 November 2011 SIP 9 update.
Although that SIP update only applied from 1 November 2011 it is
suitable for all “new rules” cases and it is far simpler if you direct
interested parties to one version or the other.
Wherever you direct them, however, you should check
periodically that the link or address provided still works. For example, the new address for the R3
version of the revised fee guidance notes is: http://www.r3.org.uk/index.cfm?page=1210
. If the page number (1210) on R3’s
website should change the link would not work.
How often you check is up to you, but we suggest looking at least once a
month. Of course, if you use your own
web site then you are more likely to know when changes are made and can update
the links when that happens, without the need for regular checks.
We hope that this article helps you understand how the new
Blog approach will work and we’d be grateful for any feedback via email,
LinkedIn or Twitter about ways that we can further develop the link between our
Tweets and the Blog.
