7 Examples Of How Context Matters For Mutual Fund, ETF Marketers

You can’t control the U.S. mail. If your large cap growth promotion happens to arrive at a financial advisor’s office on a day when the stock market is tanking, well, that’s how it is. Shake it off—you didn’t know, how could you? Looks like that piece is not going to work as well as you’d hoped.

And, that pretty much sums up the powerlessness of a direct mail marketer. Moving on…

Communicating online is less forgiving. Digital marketers are assumed to have control of their online communications including not just the What but the When and even the Where and the How.

Add to this mix the fact that financial advisors are not just reachable online but also more knowable online. This heightens expectations that communications are relevant and appropriate.

The context of what's being communicated is an increasingly important factor to consider in the planning and execution of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing. 

“Context” is a concept that’s open for interpretation, and I’ll admit to taking some liberties below. But let’s start out right, with a definition, courtesy of an ebook from StrongView, Context Changes Everything.

StrongView explains context “as a combination of the consumer’s [client’s] disposition and situation, coupled with the business’s disposition and situation.”

Disposition refers to the essence of who a consumer is and includes demographic and behavioral data. Situation refers to dimensions that are constantly changing—location, social setting, sentiment and needs, for example.

“The relevance of a firm’s interactions is related directly to its understanding of customer context,” StrongView writes.

One of my favorite non-asset management examples: Do you remember when NetFlix accidentally released Season 3 of House of Cards in mid-February? Boston residents thought that was by design, as a consolation as Boston braced for another blizzard. Think of the goodwill engendered if that had been the intention. 

If you don't already, I’d encourage you and your team to begin to pay attention to context. Who knows how the Apple Watch is going to rock content marketers’ world, starting with tomorrow's pre-orders. But it seems a safe guess that “wearable” content delivery will make context-awareness even more important.

To urge you along, I offer the following list of how context can make a difference. It’s in no particular order and in a slightly different tone. I’ve let myself go snarkier than usual to make obvious to you the need for alertness on the part of marketers, supported by enabling technology including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation and Web, email and social analytics. Opportunities abound for relevant communicators. This is a partial, random list—surely, you can think of more?

What Not To Do

1. Overestimate The Compelling Value Of That PDF

Send a blast email with a link to a PDF at a time of day when you'd reasonably expect most recipients to be checking their email on smartphones. Do you communicate across multiple time zones? Right, well, you could stagger the email sends by location, drawing on regional information no doubt extractable from your CRM. It is more work. How important are those PDF opens to you?

1A. Burn Through Your New List

Use your hard-fought-for list of conference emails to email attendees while the conference is underway. Please don't. They won’t read your introductory message then, and all you've done is waste an opportunity. Conference attendees are battling to stay on top of their business emails, yours will be one they’ll be happy to quickly dispose of. Choose your time and message wisely.

2. Play Hide-And-Seek With People Who Are Already Stressed

Move your tax-related content from one place on the Website to another in the months between January and April. Oh, and don’t sweat the details about trying to map redirects to every single (likely Google-indexed) page. Are you trying to incur the wrath of your clients and the people who answer the phone lines at your firm?

The graphic below is excerpted from a Google Finance Trends infographic (link opens a PDF) that reports that tax-related searches are starting earlier in the year, and that more are happening on mobile devices. Plan your enhancements for during the off-season.

3. Dawdle With The News

Twitter is all about what’s happening now or maybe in the last 24 hours. A February tweet announcing the availability of your 12/31 communications is going to impress no one. That’s not what Twitter is for, I wouldn’t bother.

Did you see the number of firms that jumped on the Lipper award announcements last week? InvestmentNews published this list immediately after the evening ceremony March 31 and quite a few firms took to Twitter the very next day. Looks like Thornburg needed a full day but imagine how that ginormous image looked in a tweet stream.

That’s the way to do it. If your announcement is still working its way through your process, I’d say that ship has sailed on Twitter—the news was so last week. (Your timely addressing of bad news would be expected, too, but let's save that for another list, another day.)

Off-topic but I also really like TIAA-CREF’s use of its Twitter header image to promote its Lipper dominance. Where is it written that asset managers need to use a moody photograph of their headquarters as their Twitter image and never ever change it?  

4. Advertise 24/7 If You Can Help It

Pay for broad match AdWords searches all day and all night. Unless you are convinced that financial advisors are looking for solutions in the wee hours, I have one word for you: dayparting. Let the non-advisor (most likely) night owls amuse themselves with organic search results or run up some other firm's pay-per-click budget.

5. Get Caught Sleeping At The Wheel

Release a blog post on your firm’s philanthropy (or whatever) on the day the Fed raises interest rates for the first time in seven years. Throw your body in front of this if you have to.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a blog contributor offering a reaction post that day, don’t publish anything. It’s better to say nothing than to reach your blog subscribers—on a day when they’ll be paying extra attention to what you contact them about—with something that suggests that your team is either on autopilot or blissfully unaware.  

6. Just Stroll In There Like It's 1999

Fail to train your wholesalers how to check for LinkedIn profiles and updates (including links to blog posts), tweets and Facebook updates prior to calling on advisors. Advisors research their clients (and vendors) and you can be certain that they expect others to be doing the same due diligence on them. I may have mentioned this before.

7. Lump Everybody Together

Track and report on your Web visitors as one homogenous group, as if desktop, table and mobile sessions all yield the same experience. As if all visitors regardless of device have the same motivations or needs. 

If you were to segment the traffic, you would see some eye-opening differences.

Note: Blane Warrene, co-founder of Arkovi Social Media Archiving, now financial technology speaker and advisor and editor at large of TheDigitalFA, and I discussed the state of asset manager marketing on Blane’s Digital Well podcast last week. Blane is fun to talk to and it’s a freewheeling discussion (what was supposed to be 30 minutes turned into 40). If you check it out, here’s hoping there will be something in it for you.

What To Give The Mutual Fund, ETF Marketer—9 Elf-perts Weigh In

Now that the day of giving thanks is a distant memory and you’ve managed to score a few Black Friday/Cyber Monday bargains to give as holiday gifts, let’s talk about you. Specifically, what to give you, the mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer this holiday.

Oh, sure, I could stuff a stocking for you. I’d pack it with thousands more YouTube video views, hundreds more email subscribers, dozens more Webinar attendees and a healthy dose of ambition for all that has to get accomplished in 2015.

But that’s the small stuff. To make it a memorable year for you, I organized a small Gift Ideas for Investment Marketers crowdsourcing project.

“And what gift would you give a fund company marketer?” I asked a panel of merry elves hand-picked for their relevance and because I consider them experts in our world at large (sorry about the elf-pert mash-up, it couldn't be avoided). Feel free to put your tongue in your rosy cheeks, I added in my note although not in so many words.

The result, below, is so not the gift guide for someone who has everything. The asset management marketer doesn’t have enough of anything—there’s never enough time, money or resources to deliver what management, Investment Management, Sales, Sales Support and consultants want.

But, let’s suspend belief for a moment...Pour a cup of hot chocolate, turn the volume down on your computer (there’s one video that’s not completely safe for work) and let’s open these gifts. 

Note: It’s been said that a gift says more about the giver, and there is definitely some of that in these. Suffice it to say that marketers’ self-improvement is the contributors' overall theme. You’re going to have to get your sugarplums from some other group.

New, Improved Clients

From Tom Brakke (@researchpuzzler), CFA, consultant, writer and investment advisor who frequently comments on asset management marketing on his The Research Puzzle blog. Tom’s Letters to a Young Analyst, which I blogged about in March, would also make a fine gift for an investment marketing team.

"I'd like to give investment marketers a new group of clients [financial advisors] that will make their lives harder, but more rewarding, during 2015.

"Of course, getting a number of incremental clients would be a bonus, but I'm really talking about current clients changing how they make decisions, specifically by abandoning the near-universal tendency to chase performance. As it is, performance trumps everything, and marketers ride the ebbs and flows of performance-driven choices. (It must be tiring to bob around in that ocean, unless you have been "hanging ten" for a long time on top of a nice wave and have forgotten what it's like to fall off.)

"However, the 'harder' part that I mentioned is that devoid of the performance driver, clients would have to dig deeper to understand what's really going on at an asset management firm. That means getting beyond the pat descriptions of investment process and 'smart people' to see the messiness of the organization intersecting with markets. The reality of it, rather than a stylized model of it.

"More demanding clients would make for tougher, but more interesting, days for marketers. And, the chance for the best to shine in a whole new way."

Better Social Media Analytics

From Blane Warrene (@blano), founder of the Arkovi social media archiving solution (now RegEd), co-host of the Digital Well podcast, editor-at-large for TheDigitalFA and speaker and advisor on financial technology.  

“An area I've been exploring is finding more context in the use of social media. From my perspective, that reaches beyond the standard analytics. For example, a normal dashboard looks for engagement and then maps that to the possible influence and reach of those who are connected with your digital properties.

“I would put two new tools in the asset manager marketer's toolbox: ThinkUp and SumAll.

"ThinkUp uses a more plain English approach to giving you a view into daily interaction with your content. I also like the time shifting reporting—looking back and reminding you of what's worked in the past.

“SumAll is analytics 2.0 to me. Giving you the ability to combine and overlay metrics you might not have thought of or been able to do in the past. One example would be connecting statistics on social advertising with organic content marketing to evaluate the value of social ad dollars.”

Study Up On What Not To Do

From Lawrence P. Stadulis, Esquire, Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young, LLP, a specialist in “matters pertaining to the registration and regulation of investment advisers and investment companies under federal and state securities laws.” Every once in a while, I ping Larry with a completely random (for him) question regarding FINRA or Compliance and he’s been good enough to set me straight.

“How about a copy of that timeless and informative tome, How to Lie with Charts, by Gerald Everett Jones?

"I recognize that most folks tend to have a pretty good handle on this aspect of marketing so it might seem a bit boring at first. But I promise you that this book is positively loaded with invaluable tips and techniques to create the most misleading marketing piece possible and draw the admiration and attention of regulators, such as the SEC."

Marketing Survival Kit

From Rob Shore (@shorespeak), wholesaler training and coach of WholesalerMasterminds.com and an inveterate salesman, as you'll see in his gift. :)

"Created by recent graduates of a 12-step financial services marketing intervention program, and specifically designed for the home office marketer, this kit contains everything you need to improve the chances of your wholesalers emerging from group meetings victorious in both the message of the firm and furtherance of their brand in the field. 

"Inside this kit you'll find:

• slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte so that you never again create slides for your sales team that contain 14-point type, charts that simply can't be read by audience members, and graphics that do nothing to support or enhance the story your wholesalers are trying to convey.
• Wholesaler Masterminds Email Clinic so now you can craft emails that get opened, read and acted upon versus the mountain of product-pushing pseudo spam that is generated each day by well intending marketers across the land. 



• Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds for the marketer who wants to up his game using Garr's fresh approach, which has inspired millions to communicate more clearly, creatively, and visually.

"And, if you order before the next National Sales Meeting, we'll include Tequila of The Month Club to cope with the endless deadlines, demands and irrational requests of the internal clients that you serve every day.

"The Sales Force Marketing Wholesaler Survival Kit from ROBCO, because talented folks and sizable budgets don't always mean a great end product."

When You Need A Knowledge Boost

From a real, live (follow his @iamreff Twitter feed for action shots) fund company marketer: John Refford, Vice President, Strategic Marketing Technology, Natixis Global Asset Management – U.S. Distribution

"You’re a busy digital marketer, always asked to do more with less. What you need is a knowledge robot.

"Imagine you’re working on launching that fixed-income email campaign…but wait…you need to know how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, and you’re just too darned busy to pull your phone out of your pocket! Noooo problem. Amazon Echo to the rescue!"

How About Paying Attention To Where Your Ad Budget Is Going?

What I appreciate about this next contribution is that Brooke Southall, managing principal and reporter of RIABiz.com and @RIABiz, has his own platform and access to conceivably millions more readers. But here he's sharing a very targeted perspective for those of you who are outsourcing/offloading your media decisions. My broad exposure to advertising analytics after the fact leads me to believe that these comments have value beyond RIABiz' self-interest.

“With a large red bow I would like to present to asset management marketers a bottle of Tylenol—not for any headache they have now. It is for the one I would think they should court in 2015 by rethinking their strategy.

“Asset managers, with a few exceptions like T. Rowe Price, Invesco and Fidelity Investments, have used a low-neuron method of attracting new investors to their products—reserving larger lobes of the corporate mind for investing. Marketing has been treated as a necessary evil. This harsh assessment comes from our perspective of selling advertising to this constituency—often through the third parties hired by the asset managers.

“The prototype at these third-party firms is a 26-year-old who is at pains to be dealing with a business-to-business publication when the sexy, millennial thing to do is to work on consumer products. Their interest in financial wares or how they flow to investors is very low.

Understanding the difference between an RIA and a broker is not something a third-party ad agency will strain their mind to understand.

They know the client will be wowed by creative output and flash and numbers and "deliverables"—even if only illusory ones. In the online world, there is no reward system to that third party for the handful of super clicks an advertisement receives from the managers of large pools of money, i.e., billions in assets.

“Often enough an asset manager simply gets a list of publications and applies dollars across the board—rewarding the lowliest publications with higher buys because the pageviews are dirt cheap.

“This tendency is truly unique to the asset management industry. People who cross over to a trade publication that covers investment managers from, say an aeronautics trade publication, are dumbfounded by the lack of care applied to the spending of these precious marketing dollars. The ultimate proof they see in the advice industry is that there has never been a shakeout of the dozens of websites and print publications that serve financial advisors—though many of them are a shadow of their former selves because of a diminishing value proposition.

“I can only conclude that this confounding marketing practice of giving final discretion of dollars spent to uninformed outsiders, like other tendencies that come across as nonsensical, can be attributed to the residue of a culture of privilege.

“Asset management has enjoyed one of the great business models of the past 30 years—with high profit margins and terrific scalability. It has also existed in a very static world of distribution whereby stockbrokers held sway and acted in predictable ways.

“But with RIAs or quasi-RIAs supplanting brokers and asset managers squeezed by ETFs and a proliferation of other asset managers, the need to market like your lives depend on it has come to the fore. This is only complicated by print publications fading as online publications take up the slack. Telecommunications companies eventually learned that you can't trust local phone companies to handle cable quality from the trunk lines at the telephone pole across the yard to the living room. Marketers of investment management could pay greater attention, too, to who sees their marketing by concentrating on this 'final mile'.”

You Can't Afford Cold Feet

And now let's hear from Leslie Marshall (@LeslieAMarshall), Director - Events, Magazine and Social Media, Morningstar Inc., who can always be counted on to lighten up a room.

"For 2015, I would like to make sure my fellow #finserv #funserv marketers stay warm…with socks—the more colorful the better! With early cold temperatures, we can’t stay on our toes and think of fresh social media ideas and ways to work with Compliance if we have cold feet.

"To capture ideas and inspiration, I also love to give paper-based notebooks or agendas. Old-school? Sure. But there’s still something inspiring about putting pen to paper. In pure social media style, I found these on Pinterest: Kate Spade Bella Bookshelf and Replace the Fear of the Unknown with Curiosity.

"Here’s to an inspired new year!"

Financial Jargon Fighter

From Susan Weiner (@susanweiner and one of my anchors on Twitter), writer-editor and chartered financial analyst (CFA) “who helps financial professionals increase the impact of their writing on clients and prospects.” You can follow her thoughts on her InvestmentWriting blog, her @susanweiner Twitter account and in her Financial Blogging: How To Write Powerful Posts That Attract Clients book. 

"Investment marketers want to do the right thing. They want to use language that's easy for readers to understand. After all, that boosts the impact of their communications. But sometimes it's difficult for marketers to detect financial jargon. Or maybe they can't think of plain language to explain complex concepts.

"My recommended gift is Financial Jargon Fighter (FJF) software. Unfortunately, it exists only in my mind. However, the ideal product would go beyond identifying jargon. It would also suggest wording that satisfies even persnickety portfolio managers. Perhaps it could tap the mind of Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, one of the industry’s most influential advocates of plain language.

"Until an FJF is commercially available, impatient gift givers can seek a living, breathing Financial Jargon Fighter. A member of the marketers’ target audience can give invaluable feedback on communications. Marketers will get the most mileage out of these folks if they ask, 'Please explain my main point in your own words' to test reader understanding. Otherwise, their readers will parrot the marketers’ words back at them.

"Also, free tools, such as HemingwayApp.com and the SEC’s A Plain English Handbook: How to create clear SEC disclosure documents, may help to identify jargon and other bad writing habits."

Harmony, Peace And Some Stretching

With this contribution, Back Porch Vista Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Floyd makes his debut on the Rock The Boat Marketing blog. In the spirit of his message, here are both his Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. 

"If I had one wish that I could wish this holiday season, it would be for all the marketing and sales departments of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace. 

If you proceed to YouTube to watch this video (not embeddable), now would be a good time to turn down the volume on your computer.

"Maybe that’s a bit much, but in Steve Martin’s holiday wish is a nugget of truth: we need to connect. Our role as marketers in this space demands that we connect with our clients, customers, investors, and most importantly our internal alignment. So, my gift to a fellow marketer is a book, the courage to carry the message, and the imagination to tell our stories in new and creative ways.

"I'd give David Meerman Scott’s newest book, The New Rules of Sales and Service, because in 2015 we must see sales and marketing sing in perfect harmony. Success will require 'stretch' on both sides. As marketers, we have to embrace our role as technologists, marketers and community managers, and we have to 'join hands' with our sales departments to recast the vision of our departments within the business. Cheers!"

My thanks to these contributors who've given us a lot to think about. While you do that, I'll be back the week of December 15 with the final post of 2014—my annual roundup of the best of the year.

Archive Our Emails? LinkedIn-Using Mutual Fund/ETF Employees Push Back

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm adoption of social media has hit a bit of a bump in the road. Maybe it was bound to happen.

Overall, employees seem to have been tickled about their firms wading into social media—it wouldn’t have been believed possible when many employees signed on.

But because Marketing has tended to the nitty-gritty of how the corporate social accounts need to be managed, few employees have had intimate knowledge of the long reach of FINRA when it comes to communicating on other domains.

It’s only now that firms are beginning to empower wholesalers and other employees to actively participate (more than the establishment of a profile) on LinkedIn, the rest of the firm is being introduced to the cold hard fact that business communications on social networks fall within the purview of Compliance.

Based on multiple conversations I’ve had with marketers over the last several weeks, some employees object to Compliance requiring them to use their business email addresses as their primary email address on LinkedIn. And, some smart at the idea that all those communications will be archived by the firm.

Perhaps it’s an overstatement to appropriate the Gartner hype cycle chart here. Employee expectations have never been inflated, and I doubt there’s deep disillusionment now. But learning the implications of participation is reportedly giving employees pause and even stopping a few in their tracks. Those who insist on total control are opting out of LinkedIn altogether.

The whole "activation" phase leading to enlightenment and productivity is not going as smoothly as hoped. 

This discussion finds firms assuming some black-and-white positions (for registered employees) and navigating a gray area for non-registered employees.

I’ve reached out to three leading social media archiving vendors to get a better feel for how firms across the board are balancing FINRA requirements, Compliance and IT issues, and employee concerns. 

Since the beginning, the archivers have embraced the need to educate the market (see this 2011 report) and their contributions here are yet another example. None of their comments can take the place of legal advice, of course. Below you’ll also see comments from Blane Warrene, a friend and someone familiar with best practices from his work as co-founder of Arkovi, since acquired by RegEd.

Hope these help.

2 Approaches To 'A Lively Conversation’

From Joanna Belbey, Social Media and Compliance Specialist, Actiance: Financial services is an industry that has regulatory requirements that require firms to capture, archive and make e-discoverable all “business” electronic communications. These requirements are called “recordkeeping” or “books and records.” 

Joanna Belbey, ActianceThe regulators make it quite clear that “content is determinative.” Therefore, it doesn’t matter if it’s a corporate email from a firm-issued device, an instant message on a personal device, an update on a collaboration tool or a post on a social media site, if it’s a business record, it’s subject to recordkeeping requirements.

Firms are challenged to create policies that define the types of business records that will be captured and to use technology to support the policy.

Fifteen to 20 years ago, all firms had to worry about was email. Now the communications landscape is much more complex. To make it even more complex, employees may “channel hop,” i.e., have a conversation that starts on the phone, and then moves to email, instant messaging or even social media. In the end, the communications stream may need to be reconstructed so that regulators or litigators may understand the conversation in context.

Recordkeeping polices are always a lively conversation at regulated firms among Legal, Compliance and Risk Departments. The goal is to retain just enough to satisfy regulators, while limiting liability. After all, the more information you retain, the greater the risk that regulators or litigators will find something, and the more expensive it is for archiving and retrieval.

Based on the culture of compliance at a firm, here are two approaches that we’ve seen for InMail within LinkedIn:

1) Some firms elect not to retain InMail. For these firms, personal emails are posted as the primary email address, and non-business-related communications are sent through LinkedIn.

Employees post a message on their profiles such as "I cannot respond to any communications or questions about the financial services industry via LinkedIn. Please use my company email address for all business-related inquiries."

The use of InMail is allowed only to make connections and InMail is not to be used as a broadcast or “blast” medium. Any InMail received that is business-related is forwarded to the company email account and replied to via corporate email only.

This approach relies on clear social media polices, training and judgment on the part of employees. To mitigate the risk of non-compliance with recordkeeping requirements, firms need to put processes in place to spot check adherence to polices. 

2) Most firms elect to retain all InMail. For these firms, company email addresses are typically posted as the primary email address on LinkedIn and all communications (both personal and professional) are sent through LinkedIn. All communications are monitored and retained, regardless of whether the communications are personal or professional. 

The advantage of this approach is that processes are clear cut, can be automated with technology and resemble existing policies around email. The downside is that employees may object to their personal communications being archived and although it meets regulatory requirements, it may increase the risk of liability for the firm.

At the end of the day, every firm is different and will need to create recordkeeping polices and processes based on their culture of compliance and risk tolerance.

Planning To Use The Account? Archive It

From Victor Gaxiola, Customer Advocacy Manager, Hearsay Social, after conferring with the firm’s Head of Legal/Compliance: If the expectation is that LinkedIn will in any way be used for business, then it is appropriate for the business email address to be listed as the primary contact.

However, if the employee plans only to have a static profile, and will not be updating or sharing content that is business-related, then they can use their personal email address. In this case, a firm may ask the employee not to associate with the firm to avoid the risk of sharing a business-related post that would make them liable.

Victor Gaxiola, Hearsay SocialEmployees who push back on the use of a work email address as a primary email address—especially if the activity is being monitored or archived—stems more from a concern that they could be looking for work or applying for jobs, and they don't want any of that activity to be captured.

Use of the work email or personal email does not make any difference in the liability of the firm as much as the content the employees are sharing does.

Regardless of whether they use a personal or a work email address as their primary address, if the registered employee is using LinkedIn for business and is sharing content related to the industry, then the firm has a responsibility to monitor, archive and retain records of the activity. 

It's similar to the use of a private vs. company-sponsored device where the content is determinative—not the medium. This is covered in FINRA Regulatory Notice 11-39 (link opens a PDF).

Client-Facing Is The Test

From Bruce Milne, executive vice president, Socialware: In our experience, employers see a significant risk in regulated employees using LinkedIn for business purposes but using an alternate email address for conducting 1:1 communications. A few not-insignificant fines and censures have been levied against firms that allowed financial advisor-to-client communications to happen through alternate email channels.

FINRA has interpreted any use of LinkedIn for registered employees as "business use," so archiving, post-review and all the other compliance rules apply. 

For non-registered employees, however, the rules become less clear. The distinction that we have typically seen is that employees who are client-facing, who have communications with clients through LinkedIn, must use a firm address and track all communications.

Bruce Milne, SocialwareNon-registered employees who use LinkedIn strictly for personal use may use a personal email, and will not likely be archived (firms don't not want the additional risk of archiving personal information from peoples' social networks unnecessarily).

The technical process of archiving is neither difficult nor particularly expensive, but archiving personal conversations may create reputational, legal or other risks. In this instance, the standard is to require them to not use the name of their employer. 

We have received a few requests now for firms to extend the same access controls and compliance features that we provide to registered employees to all corporate employees on their work desktops, but only for the duration of their workday. If they use social media at work, the firms would like to limit what activities they can do (and monitor for data leakage, etc.)

But in their off-hours, the employees—using their own social network profiles on their own personal devices—are on their own recognizance. 

Best Practice: Acquire Voluntary Attestation

Blane Warrene, co-founder of Arkovi Social Media Archiving, now financial technology speaker and advisor and editor at large of The DigitalFA: There are a couple of challenges here. 

• There is mixed precedent set in U.S. courts regarding who owns the LinkedIn profile in general, as well as contacts acquired during employment with a firm. 
• If an existing LinkedIn account was in place, it is a challenge to try and force the employee to make the business email address primary unless the person is explicitly registered and subject to FINRA supervision and attests voluntarily to use their LinkedIn account for business purposes to the benefit of their employer. You have to also watch how the National Labor Relations Board approaches this as much as any industry regulatory body.
• Blane WarreneIt does open up the need to archive InMail, and that is also a challenge as folks have wide networks beyond the office and often communicate via InMail. This can bump up against myriad state and federal laws, statutes and guidelines.

A best practice would be: 

• Focus on assuring that profiles are set up optimally and compliantly.
• Have a clear policy, legally vetted, on who owns what data on LinkedIn when accounts are being used for business purposes and then acquire voluntary attestation to that policy for all participants.
• Be certain to offer up great tips, techniques and genuine relevant brand content that participants can share to seek engagement from their networks.

Do Google+ And Fund Companies Have A Future Together?

How much longer can asset managers keep their distance from Google+?

The table at right demonstrates the shallowness of fund company engagement on Google+ across the board. Of course, these companies have few followers—there’s almost nothing to follow! Vanguard stands out as an exception but more on that later.

Many fund companies have Google+ pages only because a Google+ account is required to establish a YouTube channel. Fourteen of the 24 names on the list have never posted an update.

From most of the other firms, there are relatively few public posts, almost zero sharing and, as you can see, followers in the low double digits. Engagement data for all the accounts can be found on AllMyPlus.com. It’s mostly goose eggs.

Fidelity Investments, the Mikey of the investment industry (Fidelity will usually try anything), has a page but it doesn’t have any branding, let alone any activity. I, and its 61 other followers, think this is its official page. Two titans on other networks, PIMCO and iShares, are distant also-rans on Google+.

Why is there such indifference to Google+? I can think of a few reasons. If you have other ideas, please add them in the comments below.

Not enough people, not worth the time

Since its launch in June 2011, Google+ has had its doubters. Critics continue to contend that the site is no more than a ghost town where accounts are created and then abandoned.

Google is steadily fighting back on two fronts. For one, it’s increasingly integrating Google properties. In addition to yoking YouTube channel creation to Google+, Google now requires commenters on YouTube to have Google+ accounts.

Google is also steadily enhancing the network’s features (e.g., post embedding, image handling and Google Hangouts—which I've loved for this business from Day 1), all of which help drive usage. In October 2013, Google reported that 540 million people were active across Google each month, and that 300 million people were active in the Google+ stream. 

With its growth trajectory, sharing on Google+ is on track to overtake Facebook sharing in two years, according to Searchmetrics projections.

Not enough relevant discussion

When you consider the composition of Google+ users, it could be tempting to conclude that investment topics would be out of place. According to a third quarter 2013 study by Global WebIndex, almost one-third of users are IT workers (and lots of them employed by Google, it’s believed). Since Day 1, it was reported that techies had found a new haunt.

And, not shown here but reported elsewhere, photographers and others in the visual arts gravitate to Google+ because of the gorgeous way it displays images.

Look at the chart of the bottom 10 types of people who use Google+ and you’ll see two groups that make up a significant percentage of investment firm clients—those in the 45-54 and 55-64 age groups.

Even top financial services accounts on other networks have relatively poor showings on Google+. One of the leading financial services Twitter accounts, Bank of America, has fewer than 23,000 followers on Google+.

Except…then there’s Vanguard. Vanguard’s Google+ page has attracted 770,000-some followers and 928,000 who have +1ed the page. Vanguard has six times the number of followers it has on Twitter.

Props to Vanguard for doing its typical outstanding job in consistently publishing engaging content, appropriate to the network. According to AllMyPlus.com, Vanguard’s single most popular posts have attracted 49 +1s, 18 comments and nine reshares.

Admittedly, this is nowhere near the same kinds of engagement numbers that some consumer brands rack up. For now, Google+ isn't where the home runs are being hit, just singles and doubles.

Vanguard’s success is unique, even among the largest brokerage accounts Charles Schwab (1,200 Google+ followers) and TD Ameritrade (963 Google+ followers).

But, presumably, Vanguard’s followers are people who are interested in investment-type content and could conceivably follow other investment-related accounts.

And get this: While Barron’s has no more than 100 Google+ followers and Yahoo! Finance fewer than 8,000 followers (maybe they’re not trying too hard on Google’s property), the Wall Street Journal has been circled by more than 3 million accounts. (Note the presence of senior decision makers in the top 10 users table above.)

With more than 6 million followers, The Economist account is #10 on the Google+ most followed accounts leaderboard, according to GPlus.com. The numbers lag what's reported on the Google+page but this line chart is a compelling argument against the ghost town claims.

Here’s one of The Economist's recent popular G+ posts. How is this content different from what your firm might share? Note that it attracted 644 +1s and 323 shares.

Not available to regulated firms

With LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook access, technology enablement was the first hurdle for most asset managers contemplating a presence on a site that wasn’t their own. Firms couldn’t make any plans unless they were certain they’d have a reliable way of archiving what they posted.

I doubt this has been the primary inhibitor to Google+ participation. But the ability to archive Google+ content has been slow in coming, confirms my buddy Blane Warrene, founder of Arkovi and most recently of RegEd. 

“The Google API is improving on the Plus front. Google initially released access to the individual profiles, and in mid-2013 to the Business pages. That makes a big difference as a firm can get the data to archive. Many of the known social archivers are adopting the G+ API as it sees momentum,” Blane says.

Although publishing to Google+ from a third-party app is still limited, the posts, interactive data (links, photos, videos et al) and engagement data all are now available, he says.

Nobody we know is there

Participation on Google+ offers significant, not-available-anywhere-else SEO benefits that alone could be justification for posting to it. But, as a social network, it also offers the lift that come when others support posts by +1s and sharing.

Even if hundreds of millions of users are on Google+, it can still be a lonely place when you post and all you hear is crickets.

I continue to be intrigued with a finding in a 2013 Putnam report on social media and advisors. Almost one-third of advisors surveyed (31%) said they used Google+ in the past year for business purposes. It was second only to LinkedIn, as I noted in a post last year. 

Financial advisors today have more of a business imperative to commit to Google+. Their brands need to be discoverable in local Google searches, and Google’s integration of Google+ accounts and whatever online content the advisors author play a key role in search engine rankings.

With archiving capabilities in place for them, expect more advisors to sign up for Google+ and spend some time there, whether browsing or posting content or taking part in communities and Hangouts.

As one measure of advisor activity, I checked two Google+ accounts that might be assumed to have strong advisor interest—+Michael Kitces, a financial planning thought leader, and +Bill Winterberg, a leading commentator on technology for advisors. Both accounts get a healthy level of engagement. 

In short, there are signs of relevant life on Google+.

Should you/can you commit?

In the last year, it’s become urban legend that financial services is the second most discussed topic on Twitter, after entertainment but before sports. Most recently, this was quoted to me from someone who heard it from his Twitter sales rep. I'd still like to see some data on that, but I do believe that if you’re an investment firm, you belong on Twitter, no question.

The Google+ decision to fully participate is not so cut-and-dried. You’d have to be convinced that there’s a community there that’s sufficiently vital to follow your account and then be continually active on Google+ to see and interact with your content.

And if you’re hoping for anywhere near Vanguard-type results, you’ll have to be all-in. That includes “listening” to what’s being said and exploring what's unique to Google+. Sharing others’ content—something practically no investment-related firm does today on Google+—may be needed, too.

May I be direct? In the two-plus years since Google+ launched, we just haven’t seen the kinds of efforts from this industry that other industries have made or that firms in this space have made on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Some firms have yet to even populate the About tabs of their Google business pages. Few of the firms that are posting are doing anything more than posting their YouTube videos or blog posts. Almost none have added the badges to their Websites or include the link to their business pages in their signatures, along with their other social identities.

Hanging back was a relatively no-risk strategy that worked on Google+ in its early days when probably no one was paying attention to you or your sketchy page. It may be time to revisit the decision. Google+ offers an increasingly attractive opportunity to raise awareness and broaden the reach for investment firms willing to work for it.

It’s your prerogative to take a pass on Google+. Just make sure that you have an updated understanding of what you may be forgoing.   

On Verge Of Acquisition, Pioneering Social Media Archiver Arkovi Looks Back And Forward

I guess you could call me a homer—I root for the home team when it comes to expectations about where financial innovation can come from.

For example, the reaction to last week’s announcement about Intuit opening up the APIs to its financial data service (underlying Quicken, QuickBooks, Mint and FinanceWorks) was irksome to me. The news was framed in terms of the opportunity it represented for start-ups. Why just start-ups and newcomers? I think there are plenty of innovative-minded types within financial services companies today looking to create something new out of what they know.

Enabling Regulated Firms' Participation

All of which I mention by way of easing into today’s post, which acknowledges the work and success of a few guys who were inside financial services and saw an emerging business opportunity: Namely, that regulated firms’ use of social networks would require a permanent archive to retain the records of communications of what the firms and the employees said on others' platforms.

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