The Next Wave: Asset Manager Executives Take To Twitter

When Nuveen joined Twitter last week (@NuveenInv), it became one of a dozen asset management firms that maintain at least one account for an individual executive in addition to a corporate account.

The Demand

If you work for a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) company and your job includes social media, this development is no surprise to you. From what I hear, thought leaders are chomping at the bit to “get out on Twitter” and are attempting to enlist the help of any random body in Marketing to get it done. Their gravitas notwithstanding, thought leaders have to wait in the Legal/Compliance/IT queue for social media enablement and archiving.

On Twitter, a few users are even asking for accounts to be created for some of the industry’s bigger names. DoubleLine Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer Jeffrey Gundlach is at the top of that list, based on my unscientific monitoring. Gundlach also has the unique distinction in this space for having inspired a fake Twitter account: @fauxGundlach. Until an official @Gundlach account surfaces, users will have to be content using the #Gundlach hashtag.

A Twitter List

Here’s a list of the mutual fund and ETF executive Twitter accounts that I know of. (If I’ve missed any, please advise below.) All of the names below have been added to a new Rock The Boat Marketing InvestmentMngrs_Execs Twitter list. In addition, I’m including them on the InvestmentManagers Twitter list that I maintain, for the broadest way to follow asset managers’ presence on Twitter. 

By my count, Invesco has the most individual accounts, followed by First Trust (we Illinoisans love us some Twitter!). Even PIMCO, where the industry’s most prominent individuals (Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian) post using @PIMCO, has an individual account.

Note that the list includes investment strategists, economists, a product strategist, retirement specialists and just two CEOs. Seventeen names representing a $15 trillion industry? There's a lot of room for growth here, and I believe this is the next wave of what firms will be doing on Twitter—introducing many more voices. (And, recall that Putnam has said that its wholesalers are heading to Twitter next.)

The Advantages

There are quite a few advantages to launching an individual account. 

• It's straightforward. While a corporate Twitter account typically precedes the launch of an individual account, it’s not always in that order. A few firms have found it easier to launch an individual account first. 

“What would we tweet about?” and “Who would do it?” are two show-stopping questions easily answered when a thought leader account is envisioned. 

• Additional followers. People will follow investment strategist accounts who won’t follow a corporate account. Savvy Twitter users, including most financial advisors, know that corporate accounts come with a lot of promotional and/or non-relevant updates. An individual account can elevate brand awareness in its own way. Be aware, though, that Marketing can expect some interesting times as you try to sort it all out. 

Here’s a screenshot of the limited (12%) overlap between the First Trust corporate account (with many fewer followers) and the @wesbury account of Chief Economist Brian Wesbury. People who follow Wesbury get an earful of all kinds of stuff, some on-brand and some—I’m guessing here—far afield. (See a related post from May 2012: 3 Ways Asset Manager Tweeting Is Evolving.) 

• Specialization. A specialized account has extra appeal for those who focus on Twitter. This is just another instance where total follower counts mean little. Example: If I were a reporter following the retirement business or a financial advisor focused on it, Invesco’s Tom Rowley account would be a must-follow.

• Personality and tone. Some corporate Twitter accounts do a terrific job with brand voice and personality but it can be a struggle. By contrast, an individual account has just one, authentic personality to think about. Personal accounts attract more interest and engagement. 

The catch for asset managers: Even more so than for corporate accounts, people are going to talk to individuals and they are going to want to hear back, too. The individual who has authority to post but not re-tweet or reply has his or her hands tied in a way that will limit the success of a Twitter strategy (the non-responsive @PIMCO account being the exception).

The Twitter platform is every bit as able as CNBC to host an exchange between investment or product strategists. Why couldn't this happen?

The unleashing of egos on public platforms without a referee is not for the feint of heart, by the way, as hinted by this exchange yesterday between Virtus' Joe Terranova and someone complaining about a missed forecast. 

@Aftermath_2012 think I did better than that w my mea culpa on Gold not pulling back another 20% by the end of the year

— Joe Terranova (@terranovajoe) August 12, 2013

Who’s Doing The Promotion?

I know of other employees of asset management firms who are on Twitter. They’re not in spokesperson or high visibility positions, however. And, their Twitter bios either omit mention of their employer or explicitly state that they speak for themselves only. If you’re on Twitter but want to stay under the radar, rest assured that I will keep it to myself until you change your status.

The bios of the accounts on the list above expressly mention their official roles, and the tweets have to do with their roles. But if they're not supposed to be a secret, I wonder why these have such low visibility. Few of these accounts are mentioned either in the account bios or on the Twitter backgrounds of the corporate page. There's practically no embrace of them (e.g., a display of recent tweets) on the firms' Websites.

An exception: Check out the prominence Oppenheimer gives its three Twitter account feeds at the bottom of the home page of its site. 

Do corporate entity issues prevent the accounts of some of these firms from acknowledging the accounts of an employee affiliated with a different subsidiary? I suppose that could be what it is.

But, if it's an oversight this is easily addressed. Just as a firm can’t afford to have individuals taking to Twitter without jumping through the required hoops, neither will a firm want to see what happens when Twitter account promotion is left to an individual’s devices. Thought leaders can be pretty creative, remember.

My recommendation: Make sure your individual Twitter account implementation plan considers how to give it presence and ongoing marketing attention. 

Which mutual fund or ETF executives would you expect to see soon on Twitter? 

The Challenge Of Making Remarkable Content

Five, maybe six, years ago, many asset management marketing communications teams were fairly satisfied with their approach to their work.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms had corralled the words and numbers that populated their run-rate communications, mapped the review and approval processes, and implemented systems designed to assure consistency, timely automated output and even cost-efficiencies. Comparisons to donut-making were not far off.

All of the hard work invested to get to that place was by no means wasted, and enables a significant communication effort today. In the years between 2008-ish and now, a content factory-like approach has also been put in place to support the heightened demand for firms' thought leadership content pieces.  

But, our work is never done. In 2013, the marketplace’s expectations of content have advanced. Increasingly, the requirement is to create content that’s “remarkable.”

What’s required to create remarkable content is too new to be scripted, let alone engineered. Unlike the routine production of largely text-heavy communications for physical and virtual literature shelves, it's exception-based. The pursuit of remarkable content typically extends time to market (except when market conditions require accelerating it!), taps random groups and individuals not typically part of the communications creation chain, invariably increases costs and yields inconsistent results. 

If most other communications are donuts, think of remarkable content as souffles. But oh, the rush (and rewards) when a piece of content satisfies!

The Formula

There is no prescribing a formula for what makes content remarkable today. It’s likely to be visual, more likely to be non-text than text, may tell a story and may strive to move the content consumer, whether in laughter, empathy or sympathy. It’s often ambitious and in that ambition runs a very real risk of falling flat.

Sorry, this doesn’t help much, does it? If you’re like most people, you know remarkable content when you see it—whether you find it yourself or receive an endorsement of it from someone you know. In that spirit, here are three examples of non-industry content that I (along with many, many others) have LOVED or otherwise found remarkable lately, along with some comments for you. 

Help Us Experience Something

Horse races can be thrilling, but watching them on television or even in person is not a wholly satisfying experience.

Two days after this year’s Kentucky Derby, the digital sports information company Trackus published this video of the winning horse’s path from an over-the-shoulder perspective behind the jockey. It’s exhilarating to view, especially for those who watched the race and saw the jockey making his move right around the 1:17 mark. More important, it adds to the spectator's understanding of how thoroughbred races are run.

Simulating the experience of an investor is tough stuff, which is partly why this industry for so long defaulted to photos of silver-haired seniors on sailboats. In form and substance they're anachronisms and fall short of the kinds of communicating that's called for today.

Starting with Web-based portfolio tools and calculators, the industry has been trying to help investors visualize. Last year Merrill Lynch produced its Face Retirement Tool, which enables people to age a photo of themselves. And, Vanguard’s My Life Ticker campaign, released this March, aims to help investors focus on why they invest and the key factors in their investment success.

There is still lots of room for your firm to offer its own take.

Share Data That Only You Have

I challenge you to bounce off the YouTube Trends Map—you can’t, you won’t! Google’s sharing of the most popular YouTube videos right now, as filtered by location, gender, age group will keep you riveted well longer than five seconds. And then you might bookmark the URL or email/social share to others. It is remark-able.

We see limited data sharing in this space. Every quarter Fidelity produces an analysis of its 401(k) accounts as sort of a time and temperature report on workers’ readiness for retirement. PowerShares shares its ETF inflow data as well as its most viewed Website pages for the week.

$SPLV was the PowerShares #ETF with highest net inflows in April.View more in the Connection: pwr.sh/con

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 22, 2013

Most viewed funds on powershares.com this week: $QQQ $PKW $BKLN $SPLV $DBC

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 24, 2013

Data can tell a lot of stories in this business. There’s much more firms can do to creatively present the data they can share.  

It Wouldn’t Kill Us All To Enjoy A Good Laugh

Stipulated: Asset management marketing, financial communications in general, is serious business. But surely there are moments for levity.

Check out the yuks on this unsigned Tumblr blog of animated gifs, “Thoughts Of An IRO: If investor relations professionals could act freely.” (Below is just a screenshot, click on it for the full effect.) There would have been no better format to capture the spirit of this. 

I’d be surprised if there’s much LOLing at the asset management content being published today, but smiles and chuckles? It's still slim pickings when trying to find content that’s created to amuse. A few examples include the efforts made in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' Daily Advantage e-newsletter, SEI’s sharing of photos in its annual ugly sweater contest or the occasional asset manager (namely, @AdvisorShares and First Trust’s @Wesbury) tweets. 

Humor is essential to relationship-building. It’s not just other industries that are incorporating humor into their online communications, it’s financial advisors and firms that serve financial advisors, too. Check out this video from Bob Veres, editor/publisher of Inside Information.

For how much longer can we avoid humor, even while striving to produce more natural investment communications? The introduction of levity is a next frontier for asset managers seeking to optimize and humanize the reach of what they have to say. 

As a matter of fact, just in case this post didn't evoke any emotion on your part, I will close now with an amateur video that I am certain will endear itself to you as something remarkable. In your content planning, don't be too quick to rule out turning to animal videos. Just don't dwell on the words in this one.

Bonus update: Compelling content was the focus of a May 30 Webinar I participated in, along with Morningstar’s Leslie Marshall and financial advisor marketing consultant Kristen Luke. The discussion “Social Media Content Beyond 140 Characters,” as moderated by Blane Warrene of RegEd, covered a lot of ground, as you'll hear in the replay embedded below. 

3 Ways Asset Manager Tweeting Is Evolving

Asset manager tweets have gotten more interesting in the last several months. Here are three ways I see the mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) tweeting evolving.

• In the content that’s being shared
• In prompting people to talk back
• In engaging in dialogue

Click to read more ...

10 Examples Of Mutual Fund, ETF Content In The Wild

Across the industry, there are plenty of signs that mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers are increasingly packing up their content to go.

Social media represents all kinds of threats to the status quo of investment management marketing, but content syndication as a concept is not one of them. For years, money managers have made their strategists available for media appearances, bylined articles for others, and sponsored and distributed research findings. I throw my gentle jabs at those of you whose sites are largely archives of Adobe Acrobat files but even content distribution via .pdf is a form of syndication.

Click to read more ...

Your Talking Heads Don't Have To Be Dead-heads

Look, videos on some asset management sites are starting to show some life.

One out of five online video viewers say they now watch less TV on a television set due to the time they’re spending watching online videos. That’s according to the Magid Media Futures™ 2009: Opportunities In Online Video study. Pew says online video-watching now surpasses participation in social networks.

But, let’s be honest. It’s a stretch of the imagination to think that mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web sites are reaping the benefits of heightened interest in online video. The state of the art right now in our industry features two guys reading a script on a Teleprompter over one another’s shoulders.

Would you turn off TV to watch those videos at the end of a long day? They are…hmm, how to put this?...not what you would watch before you sleep, maybe for help in getting to sleep.

We’ve recently stumbled upon videos on three sites that dare to be different. They feature talent with a pulse, they’re not framed in teeny-tiny boxes on the site and, well, they’re interesting.

First Trust's Economic Commentary
First up is First Trust Portfolios’ Wesbury 101 - Economic Video Commentary. "This Is Not a 'Sugar High'" featuring Chief Economist Brian Wesbury is the second such video published on FtPortfolios.com this month. Wesbury delivers an animated commentary, and we especially like the inclusion of charts and graphs in the video. If your videos aren't including graphics, why even bother? You could get by with less fuss and expense with a podcast and a headshot.

Oh and who called our attention to this? Financial advisor Adam Zuercher when he tweeted about it to his 360-some followers, illustrating the viral quality of video and the reason you want to offer it on your site. Note that the video can be downloaded.

Click to read more ...