14 Investment Company Content Highlights Of 2014

Pay no attention to the graph below that suggests my excitement on Twitter plummeted from its high at the start of 2014.

I begin the Rock The Boat Marketing annual round-up of favorite content super-optimistic (is that better?) about the quality and range of content that I stumbled upon this year. So much so that I can finally limit this list to content highlights produced by and about the asset management industry alone.

That’s a change from previous years’ lists (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010), which included a handful of investment industry examples along with mainstream content gems. This year someone else can cover the Adele Dazeem Name Generator aka Travoltifier.

Unchanged is the need to acknowledge straight away that there’s no identifiable criteria being applied here. My favorite content, numbered below and yet in no particular order, made an impression that continues as much as 12 months after I first saw it. Whether it broke new ground, introduced new ideas, deepened my understanding or changed my mind, I found myself returning to this content, emailing links to it and finding a way to work it into presentations. 

1. Thank You For That Nice Introduction

Not so long ago, tampering with an investment company logo might well have been a fast way to meet the brand’s legal representation. The brand would never have publicly acknowledged yet alone embraced whatever travesty might have occurred.

That was then.

When, in February 2014, Jimmy Kimmel Live created a Kidelity Investments, Fidelity jumped on board. On Facebook and on Twitter, it shared the video and then deftly sought to use the mention to its advantage. Well played, Fidelity.

First the video and then the tweet.

. @JimmyKimmel This made us LOL http://t.co/hD52eKovYc but we don’t need to change our name to help new investors: http://t.co/SOdbIPMtBk

— Fidelity Investments (@Fidelity) February 5, 2014

2. Finally An Answer: About 3%

The rise of the “robo advisor” dominated financial advisor news this year, sharpening the advisory community’s focus on the value it provides.

Vanguard stepped up to help quantify the value in what has to be among the most valuable insight advisors were offered by asset managers in 2014.

Putting a value on your value: Quantifying Vanguard Advisor's Alpha was published in March (the table below is an excerpt from it).

3. And Where Did The Money Go?

This infographic is genius and yet why didn't anyone think of this before? We've all seen, produced and updated the classic Asset Classes Returns matrix chart (at right is J.P. Morgan's).

In February, Kurtosys presented 10 years of fund flows into various asset classes. Shown below is just an excerpt.

4. The Keynote Speaker Becomes A Meme

Just before the mainstream adoption of social media, the event experience was getting a tad predictable, wasn’t it? Presentations prepared weeks ahead were delivered by expertly polished speakers, most of whom seemed oblivious to the audience. They were on, they were off and then they were on their way to the next gig.

Social media gives conference attendees a voice, thereby introducing an accountability edge to the experience. Plus, event content-sharing includes the stay-at-homes who can easily follow along.

The Morningstar conference machine was humming along that day in June when PIMCO’s bond king Bill Gross took the stage wearing sunglasses and delivered some far-reaching (from The Manchurian Candidate to Kim Kardashian) remarks.

Before social media, reporters would have reported on Gross’ comments, of course. But I believe the sustained social attention—including the industry’s very own meme created by Michael Kitces—ramped everything up.

It seemed to set in motion the events that culminated in Gross leaving PIMCO for Janus, a September episode that was riveting to watch and, for some of your firms, benefit from.

5. Take Your Time, Stay A While

This was the year that asset managers joined other brands in wading into what’s called native advertising—content sponsored by an advertiser that looks as if it could be editorial.

One of the best examples has to be Goldman Sachs Interactive Guide to Capital Markets. The guide debuted on the New York Times site in February and now also lives on Goldman’s.

The top metric on this, according to what Amanda Rubin, global head of brand and content strategy at Goldman Sachs, told Contently, is time spent.

6. Act Like You're Human

Easier said than done, especially if you’re a quanty portfolio manager, or at least that’s been my observation. That’s why this Van Eck portfolio manager selfie from October tickled me.  

PMs Fran Rodilosso(far L) and Eric Fine(second from L) wind down an eventful EM bonds roadshow in SF. Thanks to all! pic.twitter.com/wNvNuVCCKW

— Van Eck Global (@VanEckGlobal) October 27, 2014

Ellen De Generes and her Academy Award cronies are actors. Mugging for cameras is what they do, we shouldn’t be surprised. But when money managers think to use (or even if they were cajoled) a relatively new platform to be social and show a little personality, that’s cool.

Nobody retweeted this, though, it’s often pointed out to me. While that’s true and I wish someone had if only to encourage Van Eck, it’s not always about the retweet. Imagine seeing this tweet in your stream—four guys squeezing into the frame while taking care not to obscure the bridge behind them. This is cute. My bet is that it prompted a smile from those who did see its one and only appearance, making the kind of incremental positive impression that can be achieved on Twitter.

Sometimes you just deliver a message, you don't always get a receipt.

7. How Soon Before We’re Really All Working For Google?

In his searing contribution to the otherwise jolly What To Give The Mutual Fund, ETF Marketer—9 Elf-perts Weigh In post (vive la difference), RIABiz’s Brooke Southall made the point, “Asset management has enjoyed one of the great business models of the past 30 years—with high profit margins and terrific scalability…[But] the need to market like your lives depend on it has come to the fore.”

While Brooke’s focus was on the uninformed purchase of online advertising, it applies, too, to what may be the most intriguing story of the year: the Financial Times’ September report that Google two years ago hired a financial services research firm to assess how to enter asset management. 

In your work optimizing your sites for search rankings, including via mobile devices, digital marketers may already feel as if they're working for Google.

Here's a short list of possible advantages that Google could enjoy as an asset manager:

• For investing, data on search volume for specific words or phrases to time the market 
• For investing, use of its satellite imagery to predict company earnings
• To distribute other firms’ funds
• For relevant, even personalized marketing based on what it knows about individuals' search patterns

Watch this space. 

8. Yes, Do Dignify With A Response

When something critical is written about an asset manager, the standard response is to turn the other cheek, to not engage. But there may be times to do the opposite, given the long life of discoverable Web pages.

This year saw a few firms standing up for themselves in public ways.

To wit: 

• In September, AdvisorShares distributed a press release about a five-star rating on one of its ETFs. In response, ETF.com writer Dave Nadig cautioned readers not to be "starstruck" about that fund. And, AdvisorShares CEO Noah Hamman took to his AlphaBaskets blog to respond to Nadig point by point. Wow.
• No mutual fund company takes on Morningstar just because. But Royce Funds’ apparent frustration (“while both our investment philosophy and process, which date back to 1972, have remained steady over the years, most of our funds have experienced frequent movement in and out of Morningstar's equity style categories”) prompted the firm to research how common it is for funds to move between categories. 

The whitepaper and accompanying blog post How Morningstar Category Flux Impacts Peer Group Analysis concludes, “Our research suggests that a fund's category is changed far more often than seems commonly acknowledged, and this should be a consideration when screening, evaluating, and/or monitoring portfolio performance.”

A subsequent video (not embeddable—click on the image to go view it) presented an interview with Director of Risk Management Gunjan Banati sits down with Co-Chief Investment Officer Francis Gannon.

9. After The TV Commercials, Content Comes Next

We don’t ordinarily think of advertising as content, but the John Hancock Life Comes Next series of intriguing television commercials are cross-channel. They serve as teases that lead to the microsite where three endings are offered for each, backed by related content.

Veteran advertisers like John Hancock know how to create commercials that are evocative, and these are terrific. If the overall program is succeeding in engaging viewers in the follow-up content and #lifecomesnext Twitter conversation, they’ve crossed a frontier not many have.

10. Dare To Be Different

Who says you can’t mention product in your blog posts? Lots of people have, over time. The idea is to engage with content that's a level above product.

But this isn’t a hard and fast rule for a business whose business is to manufacture products. Technology companies, for example, blog about their product innovations and updates.

There’s nothing poetic about this January Direxion Investments post but it’s straightforward in connecting forecasted trends with ways to use ETFs to play them. Why not try sales ideas as blog posts and see what happens?  

11. It Takes A Community

I liked Jay Palter’s Top 250 Financial Services Online Influencers That You Need To Know post for a few reasons:

• Most obvious: The list itself, published in March, is a good place to start if you’re wondering who to follow on Twitter. Finserv isn’t as showy and prolific as others, and you could burn up a lot of time before finding these accounts on your own.
• The very ability to create a list of 250 names of individuals focused on the regulated financial services industry (broader than just asset management) flies in the face of those who believe not much is happening with financial services and social media. There is a community, in fact.

Lots of smart people have seized on social media for its potential to improve information exchange and overall communication, and the focused content sharing by these Twitter accounts helps foster that.

• Jay gives a good tutorial on how you might use Little Bird to create your own list of influencers for use in market intelligence. The exercise can help you see the value of optimizing your firm's social accounts with relevant keywords and hashtags that will help others find you.

12. The Benefit Of Looking At Your Own Data: The Sequel

One of 2013’s content highlights was TD Ameritrade’s creation of the Investor Movement Index, based on a sample of the firm’s 6 million accounts. It “raised the bar for other investment companies whose proprietary data contains insights when aggregated,” I wrote.

It’s back in the list this year because of a Tumblr post by Nicole Sherrod, Managing Director of Trading at TD Ameritrade, published on Yahoo! Finance. Sherrod used the actual data to challenge sentiment survey results. You have to love this subhead: "Is Investor Sentiment Like the Truthiness of a Tinder Profile?"

What people tell the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) Investor Sentiment Survey that they’re doing is one thing, Sherrod writes, and is volatile. 

But, she says, “What they actually are doing is reacting fairly consistently…Now you can see why we built this index. The IMX gives a view of reality with empirical data that shows what retail investors have actually been doing.” 

13. A Definitive Study On Social Media And Financial Advisors

At this point, financial advisors’ use of social media has been a preoccupation for several years. Early on, it was enough to know that some percentage of advisors considered social media appropriate for business.

But as interest heightens among asset managers, broker-dealers and vendors, questions about advisor participation have necessarily gotten more granular. We are well past high level issues. Given the investment that’s being made in content development, training (firm/advisor) and increasingly advertising, we need to know who’s doing what where and why.

Last week Putnam shared the first of the results of an extensive survey that reports on some issues not previously researched and digs into questions just superficially covered previously. These details could provide the insight needed to optimize your strategy.

LinkedIn, for example, gets all the ink and its dominance among advisors is unquestionable. But note this finding from the full report that the highest percentage of advisors considers Twitter the best network for “cascading thought leadership.”

There is a lot here worth your attention, given the survey’s finding that more than half (56%) of advisors now say that social media plays a “somewhat significant to very significant” role versus 35% just one year ago.

(By the way, after I tweeted some of the findings last week, a few people asked whether Putnam is a client. No, it isn’t and never has been. I was excited to see the new data—and yet no exclamation points were used.)

14. Bond Lessons As Performance Art

When you’ve got it, flaunt it.

This iShares video plays to the performance chops of fixed income strategist Matt Tucker and troupe. BONDing is a 2014 asset manager video series (just two to date) that investors will both learn something from and enjoy. My favorite moment in the video below comes at 1:40. Watch for the hand, that's just people having fun. Mutual fund and ETF videos could use more of that.

Bonus: More?

Inspired after reviewing the 2014 content that has stood the test of time? Download Synthesis Technology's Win The Investment Marketing Game, a 20-page e-book that I was pleased to participate in.

This will be the final post of 2014. My sincere thanks to all who contributed to and followed the blog this year. I wish the happiest of holidays to you and yours. Meet you back here the first week of January 2015.

Asset Managers Dominate #FixedIncome Tweeting Post-Gross

After this post, I’m going on a PIMCO/Bill Gross/Twitter diet, I promise. But, I was looking at some data this week that was too rich not to share.

First, the September 26 announcement that Bill Gross was leaving PIMCO to go to Janus spiked interest in “Bill Gross” as a search term but not so much fixed income. This is according to the Google Trends U.S. data shown below (click on the image to see the data more clearly on the site).

Interest in Janus was far above average search interest while still lower than "Bill Gross."

On Twitter, where Gross' early use of the @PIMCO account influenced how other asset managers began to use Twitter to deliver timely, relevant micro-insights (see post), the news gave a healthy bump to the use of the #fixedincome hashtag.

In the period between September 29 and October 22, 189 users sent 310 tweets with the hashtag, according to Keyhole.co.

The RiteTag graph below of tweets and retweets shows a rush to #fixedincome, relative to its average volume, that has since petered out. 

Competing With Content

Here's what I was interested in. We saw some opportunistic fixed income advertising from fund companies in the days immediately following the news. And, of course, the email factories were working overtime. Did asset managers figure among those jockeying for what would be a burst of fixed income attention on Twitter?

Why yes, they did. The screenshot below from Keyhole.co shows the 32 accounts that used the #fixedincome hashtag most frequently. Twelve belong to asset managers, with @FidelityAdvisor, @NuveenInv, @WFAssetMgmt and @PutnamToday four of the top five accounts. Other firms participated at a lower level. 

In all @FidelityAdvisor sent 37 #fixedincome tweets, most in support of Fidelity Advisor Total Bond Fund. 

@BlackRock takes the honors as the account producing the top #fixedincome tweet (shown below), drawing 18 retweets and 38 favorites. @FTI_US, Putnam and @HartfordFunds were #2, #3 and #4 ahead of @SquawkBox. Sweet.

An investor's dilemma: Net worth and liquidity up, but #fixedincome market slowing down. What to do http://t.co/EnmfOdKmsk

— BlackRock® (@blackrock) September 30, 2014

Everybody Gains

What did the news do to @PIMCO’s enviable follower count? It's happy news all-around.

After a dip—there’s likely some correlation between fund flows and Twitter followers—@PIMCO is back on the rise again, according to TwitterCounter.com.

Meanwhile, @JanusCapital experienced a growth spurt in followers, although still trails @PIMCO by about 174,000.

You Got This

There are very few lightning-in-a-bottle moments for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies using social media. There’s been no equivalent of seizing the opportunity of a dark stadium to promote dunking an Oreo cookie and watching the Twitter account grow by thousands overnight, for example.

But communications windows open and close on Twitter, and there can be opportunities for alert and agile investment brands. 

On this single hashtag over the last four weeks, more than a dozen fund companies showed up and dominated in a way that rarely happens elsewhere online. (Unfortunately, paying for placement is the only way for many firms to get on page 1 of search rankings of key terms. Other brands got to most of the premium terms first and they’re not budging. See post.) 

For some perspective, fund companies use other hashtags and many to a greater extent. Event hashtags get lots of pick-up, as Morningstar's Leslie Marshall has documented. And, it’s not as if @BlackRock hasn’t been retweeted 18 times before—its maximum is 155 RTs. 

Still, this was a collective demonstration of the communications possibilities for asset managers:

1)using somebody else’s platform

2)and a lightweight, quick turnaround medium

3)to access an "audience" that others helped build and maintain

4)without being constrained by a frequency cap (i.e., Fidelity could have never sent 37 emails in the same time period)

5)to be relevant on a topic

6)that targeted others (financial advisors, media and other influencers) had hyper-interest in and were seeking commentary on.

For those of you in the mix, I hope something good came out of your participation. As for those of you still on the fence about Twitter, does this episode make you any more interested in chiming in?

What’s It Like To Work At….?

Bill Gross can’t be the only asset management firm employee who’s wondered whether the grass is greener somewhere else. Fortunately for job-seekers inside and outside the investment industry, “careers” videos are becoming prevalent both on LinkedIn Career pages (a paid service) and domains.

(By the way, do you remember when LinkedIn used to publish key statistics about employers, based on roll-ups of individual profiles? At right is a screenshot example of the beta feature in 2009. As its database has grown, this would be even more reliable now. But I digress.)

Of all the storytelling that’s being attempted by digital marketers nowadays, the careers videos are among the best work. It helps to be working with people and emotions.

Which is not to say that these are easy to produce. There are too many stakeholders and too many balancing issues (which locations, which businesses represented, how much diversity is enough) to expect to get these done in short order. Once created, however, they seem to have a fairly long shelf life.

Do you work for a smaller firm? Don’t take a pass just because you don’t do a lot of hiring. These videos are as much about conveying the culture of a firm (important to clients and prospects, too) as they are about appealing to job-seekers. And, as we’ve seen with lots of other online videos, low budget and informal videos can be powerful and effective. Maybe you already have some video that can be repurposed.

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows everywhere? Even if the videos do present an idealized view of a workplace, I’m a sucker for these.

Forward: No To The Status Quo

“We like people who are going to step back and question how things are done,” says Forward CEO Alan Reid. Enough said, although this 2:45 video elaborates.  

Fidelity: The Longest Personal Relationship

Fidelity is a bigger employer than most, which explains why it has a Jobs subdomain and a media library of no fewer than eight videos. My favorite features long-term, blissfully happy employees at a 2013 Employee Service Recognition ceremony. I love everything about this, including the snazzy jazzy music.

Putnam: Smiling And Dialing

Smile and dial, that’s the motto of the “people” people who are on the phones at Putnam. 

They Are Franklin Templeton

Did somebody say “integrity”? Yes, they did, over and over again in this Franklin Templeton video.

AQR: Stimulating Work

On its site, AQR features videos highlighting three employees. This "Why AQR?" video shows a vice president on the global alternative multi-strategy team discussing the stimulating environment, including working side by side with her Wharton undergrad accounting teacher. The videos aren't able to be embedded, just click on the image to go to the video-serving page.

Morningstar’s The Coolest Thing

The assumption of this Morningstar video is that job-seekers are hoping to find a “cool” employer—so Morningstar delivers, along with bagels apparently. 

Baird: Teaching Underwriting

Robert W. Baird makes quite a few culture and employee benefits points in this 2011 profile focused on a single investment banking associate. It’s one of 12 video stories in the Careers section of the Baird site. 

How Soon Will Asset Managers Be Texting Advisors?

If financial advisors are planning to communicate with their clients via text in the next five years—as reported in recent InvestmentNews research—will they also be expecting to text with fund companies?

Here’s the survey data that prompts the question. InvestmentNews also reports that 20% of surveyed investors under the age of 45 expect to be communicating with their advisors via text in five years. 

Note that direct, personal communicating via text is practically swapping places with communicating via U.S. postal mail.

In a May post, BlueLeaf made the argument for the convenience of advisor/client texting:  

“You have a very busy day on the road, but need to contact your client about something quick. You don’t want to call and leave a voicemail in the chance that they won’t listen to it in time (or at all). Email’s no good either, as they could potentially miss important information about your upcoming meeting. You need a tool that will help you to make immediate contact to leave your brief message.”

All of the above could apply to wholesaler-to-financial advisor communicating. Texting provides for a direct, time-sensitive communication that other means don't.

And, I dare say (and the reason for the mention of SMS messaging here), Marketing might well tiptoe into permission-based texting.

But in five years? Five years in this industry is like tomorrow in others. Is it on your firms’ roadmap?

I’m aware of firms that offer text messaging capability related to: 

• Shareholder accounts (see T. Rowe Price)
• Retirement accounts (see Vanguard)
• Retirement account enrollment via text (see The Principal)
• The availability of market and economic commentary (see Northern Trust)
• A whole host of commentary and reports and fund event options (see Fidelity) 

This is almost the same list of automated content pushes that I offered in my 2012 blog post on the topic. I haven’t heard a peep yet about firms adding SMS to their call center support, enabling wholesaler-to-advisor texting or organizing for opt-in marketing communications by text.

Not A Regulatory Concern

Evidently, texting does not break new regulatory ground.

“We haven't talked about text messaging in a while,” says Theresa Hamacher, president of NICSA. “It doesn't seem to present any new areas of concern from a regulatory standpoint. My sense is that texts and emails are lumped together and handled similarly. Social media is a much bigger issue, since it's more public and harder to capture.”

How would a regulated enterprise support one-to-one (as opposed to automated) texting? I found this 2011 video about a SalesForce app that will help you visualize how a CRM might enable the communication, in the same way that a CRM supports Sales' emails. This is just for illustration, note. I know nothing about SMS Magic and have no idea whether this developer's storage of the outgoing and incoming text messages would meet FINRA recordkeeping requirements.

For Wholesalers' Best Clients

In fact, wholesalers today are using text but “only for their best clients with whom they have a relationship,” according to Rob Shore, founder of Wholesaler Masterminds.

"The great wholesaler understands the various methods of effectively communicating with their advisors and, today, texting is one of those options. That said, if wholesalers launch into a texting dialogue without knowing that this form of outreach is welcomed by the advisor it will backfire. Spam texts are more invasive than spam emails," Shore says.

True that, Rob.

(I appreciated being able to create the images above on iPhoneTextGenerator.com, but future asset manager texting will almost certainly take place on 4G-plus devices.)  

Cross-Functional And Complex

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers are well aware of 1)the high reliance of advisors and investors on their phones and 2)the immediacy and impact that text messages have. In fact, these SMS messaging stats have been cited so frequently that the date and the source have long since been shed: Reportedly, 98% of text messages are read and responded to within 1.5 minutes versus 2.5 days for email.

Texting offers the potential to improve the relevance, timeliness and even usefulness of what's being communicated. At the same time, preparations for texting will need to be cross-functional and will be complex. My assumption is that these are in the works at least a few firms.

Do you work for the rare firm that has established an SMS capability already? If so, please let us all know below. Others' thoughts are welcome, too.

Heartbleed Bug: The Less Said, The Better?

I want to tread carefully on this. Online account security is nothing to trifle with. In all likelihood, concern over the Heartbleed security bug has seized the attention of the very highest levels of your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) organization.

The timeliness, frequency and depth of what your firm communicates about your own and third parties’ systems’ status, including vulnerabilities and patches, is a function of your culture and of your executive management including your IT, Legal and Communications leadership.

Understood. At the same time, I’m guessing that your Sales and telephone staffs have been armed with scripts for institutional investors, financial advisors and individual investors since the hole in Internet security was revealed in late March/early April. The relationship managers who serve those constituencies no doubt demanded “something to tell them,” and they’ve received what they asked for.

Why haven’t more communications appeared on Websites and in social media account updates? Two weeks after the initial report, I’ve seen just a handful of communications. Not all are on Website home pages, and even fewer have been part of the Twitter or Facebook update streams. 

The media has been continuously warning people to change the passwords on their financial accounts and other accounts where they may have used passwords also used on financial accounts.

Two-thirds of all Websites are reportedly affected. Among fund companies specifically, no less than American Funds has disclosed that it had an issue.

In the screenshot below, you’ll see that one person asked about Heartbleed in an April 10 comment on an American Funds' Facebook update about something else. And, you’ll see the April 14 note that American Funds posted on its Website acknowledging a “very narrow of risk.” According to reports yesterday, American has emailed clients suggesting that they change their user information, password, security image and questions, and delete their browsing history and cookies.

This is unfortunate and, American Funds was obliged to communicate the risk to its clients.

If your firm hasn't already fielded calls about Heartbleed, American Funds' notification to its 800,000 mutual fund shareholders and their advisors likely will heighten concern and result in questions.

At times we've all wondered, “What do our clients really want from us?” In this instance, isn’t it predictable? Isn’t it logical to expect that clients arrived at mutual fund and ETF Websites or checked Twitter feeds looking for Heartbleed information?

Even if your firm's systems have not been compromised. Even if you don't operate a brokerage business. Even if your firm uses a third-party transfer agent for shareholder servicing and all your site does is provide a link to that site. Even if IT scoffs at the question whether the passwords to your advisor Website could have been hacked.

Your client is not likely to be making these distinctions. 

'Controlling The Message'

At one time, brands sought to control the size of the attention given to an issue by limiting what they said. That’s not available anymore, if it ever was. And, there's the false security in believing that an offline communication can remain under the radar just because it isn’t made available on the Web.

In delivering the self-publishing capabilities that enable individuals to share brands’ marketing news, Web 2.0 has also empowered individuals to share a full range of information with each other. In this space, we know that financial advisors tweet advisor-only conference calls and upload to their blogs images from restricted distribution publications, for instance. Shareholders regularly complain about firms' password protocols on Twitter.

On the subject of Heartbleed, citizen contributors to both Bogleheads.org and a Morningstar forum took it upon themselves to check some fund Websites on a Heartbleed hacker checker. One result, according to the posters’ claims, was that TIAA-CREF failed the test of its site. See this and this. In fact, according to a syndicated press release that appears on this Web page, TIAA-CREF at one point issued a statement denying online reports of Heartbleed vulnerability.

Like it or not, there is no such thing as keeping something quiet or controlling who or what is going to pass a communication or even an observation on. There is no flushing search engine results.

In your organization, nobody knows this better than Digital Marketing. Even when there’s nothing to report, say something because your clients want to hear from you and you know that the Website or your Twitter or Facebook page is where they’ll come to. A clear, adequate communication on the Web will keep the call volume under control, and will facilitate the peer-to-peer online communication already underway.

Marginalizing A Digital Presence

Less important for your clients but important to the contribution your work can make: A de facto policy that reserves Web and social communications for only what’s required (fund updates) or marketing-based (commentaries, appearances, announcements) marginalizes the potential value of having an open, 24/7 digital presence.

Every once in a while I hear from someone who asks why I haven’t adopted the term “social business” instead of “social media”—the implication being that brands have evolved beyond social media. I disagree. The pages of the calendar may have flipped, but this has yet to become a social business.  

Four years ago, I was surprised when more financial Twitter accounts didn’t use their Twitter accounts to communicate about the flash crash. But that was too early in the history of asset managers and social media, the news itself was confusing, firms weren’t ready.

Little more than a year ago, PBS ran a documentary about retirement funding and the expense of retirement plans. Most asset managers chose not to comment, despite the fact that the show consumed online commentary for a while. It was controversial and complex, and no firm was compelled to jump in the fray.

This slower developing Heartbleed issue, on which few fund firms were directly impacted apparently, was an opportunity for a firm to demonstrate the attributes of being social—transparency, accountability and authenticity among them.

The relevant, financial services-focused online conversation these last two weeks has been about Heartbleed and the security of financial assets. Others have had plenty to contribute, and more firms could have joined in, even if only in an informational/educational (change your passwords!) role.

It's strange to land on a financial site with no front-and-center acknowledgment of Heartbleed. Forgive me. But even to someone who knows better, the firm seems out of touch, at best.   

The topic is too hot right now for you the digital marketer to call the question internally and advocate for your “constituency.” But if you agree that it’s time to challenge those who believe “the less publicly said, the better,” you might start to think about what it will take to get your firm to think more expansively.   

To help you make your case, here are a few examples of firms that have communicated something. 

Fidelity Pop-up

T. Rowe Price Splash Page Violator

OppenheimerFunds Timely Topic

Vanguard Home Page News Item