Fresh off its announcement that it will spend $54.8 million to acquire Somerville-based Central Bank, Rockland Trust says it will put more than $1 million into a spring marketing campaign.

The campaign introduces the new slogan "Actions. Not Words," and the bank’s marketing folks have been planting seeds to that effect for weeks.

During an interview preceding the launch of the new campaign, Ellen Molle, Rockland Trust’s new vice president of public relations and marketing manager, told Banker & Tradesman she was attracted to the position because Rockland Trust "is a bank that doesn’t just say they’re going to do something, they actually do what they say."

To complement the marketing campaign, the bank is also launching a social media promotion to "engage the bank’s customers."

That means Rockland Trust "is encouraging its customers, across all business lines, to express how they think the bank embodies its new slogan… Customers can enter their responses through the bank’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages," the bank said.

But institutions that obsess over interest rate risk, credit risk and just about any other form of risk certainly can’t jump into social media head first. There are risks.

Rockland Senior Vice President and Director of Marketing Ralph Valente told Banker & Tradesman the bank "has done a lot of research on what makes sense from an outreach perspective."

Sean Mahoney, a partner at K&L Gates in Boston, told Banker & Tradesman that much of the risk for a bank establishing in a social media presence comes from "workplace issues."

But by this point, other than Rockland Trust, Mahoney said, very few banks in Massachusetts have not jumped into social media in some way or another. But from blogs to twitter, eachoutlet carries some level of risk.

"A high level employee with a blog; whatever’s on the blog can hurt the reputation of the institution," Mahoney said. Blog entries, tweets, posts on Facebook or LinkedIn can carry serious consequences "when someone is critical of their regulator, or somehow alludes to information that should be confidential. But those are things that can be controlled, or should be controlled."

It’s the customer that largely can’t be controlled.

Return On Investment

A successful social media campaign that results in lots of followers for the bank also carries with it the risk that large numbers of those followers will subsequently turn against the bank for one reason or another.

"There’s always the possibility for these folks to do something unexpected," Mahoney said.

Still, banks can’t simply leave social media alone, and banking conferences routinely include sessions dedicated to the subject.

Valente said Rockland Trust’s research found that its customers, potential customers and former customers were already online.

"People are researching banks, and they are turning to social media and recommending by word of mouth," Valente said.

So, Rockland Trust established what it calls a digital team to test ideas for how best to get the bank’s "story" out on those channels, Valente said.

The success or failure of these things is notoriously difficult to measure, but Valente said Rockland has, in the last couple of months, "seen a bump in the number of people coming to us via social media. It’s a good increase in terms of hits to our website pages and online applications. In another quarter, we’ll be able to tell how we’re doing otherwise."