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?

PIMCO, Janus Left Twitter Out Of The Mix When They Broke Their News

Well, that was disappointing.

PIMCO, the first U.S. asset management firm to take to Twitter (originally using @PIMCO_tweets as an account name) and still the asset manager Twitter account with the most followers, left Twitter out of the communications mix when it broke news on Friday.

On Friday, the firm issued a press release to drop the bomb that co-founder and chief investment officer Bill Gross would be leaving the firm and heading to Janus. Given Gross’ dominance at PIMCO and management responsibility for the $220 billion PIMCO Total Return Fund, this was material information for parent and public company Allianz. Of course, a press release was called for.

Similarly, Janus’ hiring of Gross warranted a press release from that firm and prominent janus.com home page treatment.

But neither PIMCO nor Janus sent a tweet about the Gross news. Yesterday and today, PIMCO posted tweets about the availability of a new article on the fund that Gross managed. The @JanusCapital account posted an unrelated tweet on Friday and nothing since.

Total Return Strategy Team; Q&A with portfolio managers Mather, Kiesel, Worah: http://t.co/UDxDtCUMaS

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) September 29, 2014

A new article, PIMCO Total Return Update, by Scott Mather, Mark Kiesel, Mihir Worah, is now available http://t.co/M8rAFpDb3L

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) September 29, 2014

One can only imagine the crisis planning that drove the communications and coordination surrounding the announcement. There’s the framing of the key messages for multiple audiences/stakeholders, the prepping of the spokespeople, the overall battening down of the hatches for the coming storm.

The “How do we reach them?” question immediately follows “What do they need to know?” in communication planning.

With the salient points already articulated for the press release and other talking points that were no doubt prepared, why weren’t there tweets—“Bill Gross leaving PIMCO” with the link to press release on its site and “Bill Gross joining Janus” with a link—from PIMCO and Janus, respectively?

I don’t get it. Does this reflect executive management lack of appreciation for Twitter and communicators’ failure to sufficiently advocate? Is there so much of a gulf between public relations and marketing? Has it been a while since the plan was updated and Twitter was somehow overlooked? 

This InvestmentNews coverage of advisors’ reaction by Friday morning illustrates what we should all know by now—the decision by PIMCO and Janus not to communicate on Twitter didn't stop the Twitter commentary. Also, see the full search results of tweets mentioning @PIMCO and mentioning @JanusCapital from Friday to Saturday. 

I use this blog to focus on successful strategies and tactics of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms. But I decided not to hold back today because if PIMCO—of all firms—doesn’t acknowledge the value of Twitter and its Twitter followers, I worry for other asset management marketers working to establish Twitter as a viable communications channel.

This episode provides an occasion to consider what’s in your plan regarding Twitter and communications with breaking news value.

Gross + Twitter 

There was nothing ever remotely social about PIMCO’s Twitter account. It followed exactly one, PIMCO-related account, never re-tweeted and never replied. @PIMCO gained an average of 76 followers a day based almost entirely on the fact that Bill Gross was known to write his own tweets. Back in the day, the account avatar featured not the PIMCO logo but a combined photo of Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, CEO and co-CIO. El-Erian, while gone from PIMCO, continues to be an active Twitter user.

Of course, the so-called Bond King could have scored an appearance in the investment media anytime he wanted. But Gross was early to capitalize on using Twitter to directly share micro-insights, some of which made news themselves. And, displaying more investment executive personality than any other asset management exec on Twitter, Gross often used Twitter to mix things up (see the Carl Icahn kerfuffle).

PIMCO gave Gross what appeared to be full rein of the Twitter account and he turned it into a must-follow. The notion that such an influential, successful money manager would consistently post pithy takes on the markets was irresistible for those looking for an information advantage. Gross’ use of Twitter raised the possibilities and expectations of other investment company Twitter accounts, I believe. And yet those 179,000 followers learned of Gross’ departure from somewhere other than Twitter. Sigh.

By the same token, by choosing not to share its enthusiasm with its 4,000 followers, Janus missed an opportunity to bask in what was mostly goodwill from Twitter this past weekend.

The Risk Of Marginalizing The Channel

Over the last few years, consumers, including investors and financial advisors, have learned to turn to Twitter when news of any kind breaks. Eighteen months ago, the SEC confirmed that public companies can use Twitter and other social media outlets to announce key information in compliance with Regulation FD. 

But is breaking financial news different for some reason? I asked this question in an AdvisorTweets blog post in May 2010, when the flash crash caught everyone by surprise, StockTwits was blowing up and yet the Twitter streams of most Establishment financial services providers including the NYSE continued on their merry, canned announcement ways without commenting on the one event that was drawing the country, even the world’s, attention. Granted, that was early in financial brands’ use of Twitter and the event itself took some sorting out.

There have been several minor events since, repeatedly prompting me to wonder why financial Twitter accounts avoid addressing the real news. To use Twitter to broadcast company news, corporate gift-giving, the availability of product communications but to avoid mention of the real news affecting your firm is to marginalize your followers and the channel. A Twitter account that serves as a go-to source of important information, even the historical record of your firm, has more value than a virtual bulletin board.

While many will have their eyes peeled on the assets in PIMCO funds and where they go, let’s some of us watch the @PIMCO Twitter follower count. Even more interesting: Whether the arrival of Gross will lead to Janus using Twitter in a more expansive way and the growth in followers that will result. 

Update: ZeroHedge this afternoon reported that all Bill Gross tweets have been deleted from the PIMCO account. 

Big News, Multiple Platforms: How PIMCO Addressed The Un-taper

Most of the time, exhortations to create asset management "newsrooms" are about content throughput and planning, overlaid on a commitment to communicate more frequently.

But make no mistake—to succeed in content marketing aimed at relevant, timely communicating, your team also needs to understand that some events require dropping everything. When the alarm sounds, you need the agility, the energy and the relationships in place to clear the decks and make the most of the opportunity.

This morning I'm admiring how PIMCO got the word out after the Fed's decision yesterday to delay tapering off on billions of dollars of bond buying.

Admittedly, it may be a lay-up to get Bill Gross on CNBC the day of a Fed announcement. And if the announcement had gone as planned, PIMCO's syndicating of commentary might have been less impressive. The firm already has significant content distribution relationships in place.

One Strategist, 2 Platforms, 2 Commentaries

Still, there must have been some hustling that went into the publication of two different Mohamed El-Erian pieces on two very different platforms—Financial Times and LinkedIn—on the day the news was made. Note the social sharing totals, which are the payoff for being on the spot when people are wondering what the heck just happened here.

In the meantime, guess what didn't get updated? PIMCO.com, which as of 10 a.m. Central had no fresh commentary related to the taper. Also and despite Gross's typical use of Twitter to make news (and he's doing that with tweets on Janet Yellen's prospects), the @PIMCO Twitter account has been used primarily for navigation, pointing followers to where the expanded PIMCO insights are.

I'd like to see the Website reflect the other-site content activity, or at least an embed of the Twitter stream. Also, the firm is missing an opportunity on LinkedIn. I wish the PIMCO company page, which has one-tenth of the followers that El-Erian has, would link to the El-Erian updates. As is, people going to the PIMCO site or LinkedIn company page (brand loyalists, ostensibly) are missing out.

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.