Where Are Advisors Engaging Today? Where Will They Engage Tomorrow?

If you build it, will they come? And by that I mean to ask: If your asset management firm follows Putnam Investments in building out a capability to empower your Sales team on LinkedIn (see last week’s post), will there be sufficient activity to justify the effort? 

An abundance of research, including a study published by LinkedIn and FTI Consulting last year, suggests that LinkedIn is financial advisors’ favorite social platform for business and especially for "cascading thought leadership." And, where advisors go, asset managers and their wholesalers eventually find a way to follow. The potential to use LinkedIn as a means of calling advisors’ attention to mutual fund and ETF provider content and even messaging has near irresistible appeal. Heck, LinkedIn has promise if only for reaching advisors in listen-only mode. 

But in order for actual interaction—in the form of content reactions and sharing—to occur on LinkedIn (beyond the to-be-expected boost in Website traffic), systems and procedures must be in place. Asset managers’ and financial advisors’ respective Compliance staffs must be certain that communications are happening within allowable and archive-able parameters on a social platform they have no direct control over.

The significant investment (team focus, time and hard dollars) required begs a few questions, which I’ve asked of RegEd Senior Vice President of Customer Communications Blane Warrene. Blane's comments below provide a point-in-time report of the extent of advisor social engagement as of July 2013. As he makes clear, this is a dynamic topic.

Blane WarrenePreviously, as founder of the social media archiving firm Arkovi, Blane had provided a glimpse of actual advisor social media activity by publishing a few infographics summarizing what its advisors were archiving. 

Arkovi has since been acquired by RegEd and the database is one of many archiving systems out there. But what advisors are archiving to RegEd may be generally representative of overall advisor activity. 

Blane, what does your archiving data tell us about how advisors are using LinkedIn? 

Warrene: Part of the "lean toward" LinkedIn suggests an initial comfort level. LinkedIn is viewed as a business and networking tool and, moreover, it was not considered social media before the phrase took new flight in 2008-2009. LinkedIn launched in 2004. So, there is a comfort that LinkedIn is understood and folks who may feel less savvy on other social platforms are confident they "get it" with LinkedIn.

From 2010 to 2012 advisors were making connections and some profile optimizations. In part due to the shifting feature set of LinkedIn and in part to the swell of commentary on the application of LinkedIn for business, in 2013 we see significant upticks in profile updates (embedded files one of those new features, as well as expanded data points, like Projects and Publications among others). 

Status updates have trended up quite a bit as folks are simply using their stream more regularly and sharing or creating content. 

Specific upticks:

• In 2011 LinkedIn accounted for 3% of volume in our archives, in 2012 it was 20% and now YTD in 2013 it’s 25%.
• The number of profile changes has doubled year over year.
• Skills use exploded as soon as the new features emerged (the nudge that LinkedIn provides when visiting certainly encouraged that.)
• Top two other areas of profile changes are Positions (not just job changes but edits to the profiles—i.e., adding new capabilities like slide shows and videos) and Education (extremely helpful for advisors seeking to tap their alumni connections network). 

According to the FTI Consulting/LinkedIn work, half of advisors “would choose LinkedIn over Facebook, Twitter or Google+ to cascade thought leadership if policies were not an obstacle, but only one in ­five has been able to do so.”

What’s the issue here? Are there levels of permissions granted by the broker-dealers, wirehouses, etc.—i.e., is it one thing to create a profile and another thing (more complicated to review and/or archive, hence available to fewer advisors?) to start interacting with LinkedIn updates?

Warrene: There are no issues with advisors seeing updates. Once a LinkedIn profile is approved (easiest) then all is good. Firms just need to monitor and retain the activity such as status updates and profile changes. 

At the wirehouse and broker-dealer level, we do see policy constraints around genuine engagement and content creation and this will stifle legitimacy in the long run (i.e., when a firm enables social and then allows its workforce to use only content the firm creates and distributes, without narrative or editorial freedom).

I understand the business reasons that might be influencing policies governing engagement but are there archiving technology hurdles, as well?

Warrene: LinkedIn does have a more layered approach with their API from a technical perspective—and many data points a financial advisor or a firm would want for discovery, compliance and reporting are quite inaccessible. Connections data is one example where, with more recent moves by LinkedIn, a popular tool [Job Change Notifier, which advisors relied upon to surface 401(k) rollover opportunities] is now shutting down. [See this post for background on new restrictions on LinkedIn's API.]

However, the data needed specifically for compliance is largely present, but an advisor or a firm will need to use a technology solution to get it, which pushes the burden of jumping through hoops for the data to the provider. 

One of the technology challenges of social media activity (and really, any of the modern digital actions that are not driven through a singular channel—i.e., Website or email communications) is that you have to juggle numerous mediums (audio, video, imagery, text et al) and multiple channels (first screen, second screen and now third screen—as in computer, tablet and smartphone.) This all has to be supported, captured and then normalized in a way any daily user can consume and interact with it.

No small effort. I've spent years immersed in the integrations, data and finding ways to keep this as simple as possible—and I keep learning something new daily (seriously). 

The other technical challenge is the pace. We track and adjust our solution weekly and monthly to pace the shifts on social platforms.  

For a forward look, as APIs mature some with large development communities it becomes much easier to resolve the compliance and data management challenges. Contrary to some conventional wisdom, the Twitter API is one of the best to work with. I would set Google as second (including YouTube) and Facebook right after. We get expansive data footprints from those tools. 

What kinds of advisor engagement do you see on the other top social networks?

Warrene: Today we see deeper engagement than on LinkedIn. 

• For Facebook, our latest stats show one-third of Facebook archive data is Facebook Mail—people want to communicate and engage. Likewise, 25% of Facebook archived data is comments, a nice uptick in engagement with our customers. 
• One-quarter of Twitter archive data is Mentions of our users and RTs of their content—a nice engagement ratio off the total.
• With Google+, also an approximate one-quarter of Plus archive data is engagement we track—+1s and Reshares of posts. Now that we've just added support for Business Pages (on July 8) we will see that number tail up. 
• As you might expect, photos continue to surge up on Facebook and now Google+ as it is just too easy to share photos there.

Last question for you, Blane. There’s at least one more barrier keeping this business—asset managers and financial advisors included—from engaging with the full capabilities of LinkedIn: Recommendations and endorsements. Both FINRA and the SEC explicitly prohibit testimonials, which is lamentable given that recommendations are key to most business-to-business connections. Any insights from your archive on those?

Warrene: Endorsements are such a murky territory—a client can endorse an advisor verbally or in writing (of their own accord) without issue. It is how business is done. It is simply the endorsement being visible to a wide, uncontrolled group that converts it into an advertisement. Those are clearly prohibited. 

However, every day I see firms that prohibit or limit social and yet their producers and advisors allow skills endorsements on their LinkedIn profiles. The murky part is that there is not a narrative endorsement—in essence it is a "like" on the advisor, suggesting he or she is good at that skill (i.e., budget planning, financial planning, public speaking...whatever).

Several advisors who are independent RIAs have said to me, “We won't turn ours off until our wirehouse competitor down the street turns theirs off." A reasonable statement. 

We urge folks to disable Recommendations on LinkedIn and for now, without further guidance, to turn off the Skills endorsements. Connections can still endorse—it just does not show who endorsed your skills. That said, we currently have 22,000 recommendations in our archives so not everyone agrees with our guidance. ;-) 

LinkedIn Game-Changer: Putnam Empowers Sales Team To Interact

Putnam Investments has taken the lead in changing the way that asset managers use the LinkedIn platform.

At a time when most other American businesses and their employees have seized upon the unique connection and networking opportunities afforded by LinkedIn’s massive database, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms have been holding back.

In the extreme, firms have prohibited even their most senior employees from identifying their place of work, as shown in a screenshot taken this week of a slice of an asset management executive's LinkedIn profile. This is not an exception—I count at least five firms that maintain a no-specifics policy related to securities licensed staff. In addition to requiring their employees to go incognito, many firms block workplace access to LinkedIn.com itself.

It’s common, however, for firms to allow limited participation—employees are permitted to create profiles that include specifics on the name of the company they work for and they're allowed to connect with others. And, many firms use LinkedIn Company Pages as another means of distributing content and posting job openings.

The significant missing piece has been the authority to interact within the LinkedIn environment, a capability that sales professionals instinctively want to leverage. This is what Putnam believes that they're making asset management social media history with. (I think they're first, too, but if you know different, please use the Comments space below to advise.) 

Pre-approved Or Wholesaler-Authored

Having conducted a successful 10-week pilot in the beginning of the year, Putnam recently empowered its 100-plus Sales team (including wholesalers, internals, national account and key marketing leaders) to post updates to LinkedIn. Individuals can choose to post pre-approved content from a library or write their own and submit it to a custom portal for Compliance approval. Responses to reactions made to the updates also flow through the same system.

Here’s a screenshot of an excerpt of the profile page belonging to Jerry Boucher, a Putnam internal wholesaler whose recent update was liked by six people. 

OK, if you’re a digital marketer working at an asset management firm, your head is exploding right about now, right? You know that this is the most powerful use of LinkedIn. No doubt you’ve been advocating for this at your own firm. 

A Channel To Themselves

Below are some details on how Putnam got there first, generously provided by Putnam Social Media Director Jayme Lacour and Marc Quintavalle, social media and brand marketing strategist. But here’s what I believe is the primary advantage that Putnam wholesalers have today over every other firm.

Like most social platforms, LinkedIn is best used one-on-one. LinkedIn’s marketing group has been aggressive especially lately in packaging awareness opportunities for companies and thought leaders. (It looks as if BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink had a successful debut with his first Influencer post on Tuesday, for example.)

But what do individual users—and especially financial advisors for whom LinkedIn is the #1 platform—most value? Information about their networks. Network updates are rich with customer and business acquisition opportunities for advisors. 

Advisors can see the network updates on the home pages of their LinkedIn profiles but the fact that updates are available via RSS feeds means that they can be monitored—and are—via a multitude of desktop, iPad and smartphone tools. By contrast, company updates are not part of the same stream, are no longer made available as RSS feeds and can be read only from within LinkedIn.

In other words, Putnam’s Sales updates are a natural part of the update stream that financial advisors most care about. Putnam today is the lone asset manager using a channel capable of commanding more advisor attention than the email blast, the wholesaler visit or the timely tweet.

By the way, from my perspective, the industry could do worse than follow a trail being blazed by Putnam. It's not likely to abuse its access, coaching its wholesalers to post no more than a few times a week. The updates are written in an authentic, non-corporate voice. They're relevant and appropriate for the platform. 

As Lacour says, "We understand the kind of content that works on a social level. It can be very difficult to go from very broad themes to the very specific, in terms of what will work as a LinkedIn update. You have to think about what kinds of interesting bits can be pulled out."

The IT And Compliance Resource Toll

Lacour says the initiative came together quickly, while noting that the foundation has been built over the last few years. Putnam social media, which is delivered via Putnam’s broker-dealer organization, includes the outstanding AdvisorTech Tips blog that features demonstration videos by wholesalers, and four other blogs on which Putnam has cut its content production chops. At the same time, wholesalers have been building up their LinkedIn networks and via on-site visits encouraging advisors to do the same.

“They’ve been talking the talk for a long time, and now they can walk the walk,” says Lacour.

Lacour says the largest challenge was the technology required to support a dispersed sales team while meeting both the business’ content and Compliance archiving, recordkeeping and supervisory requirements. Putnam declines to identify the firm it partnered with to build the technology solution.

Make no mistake: An undertaking like this has the potential to represent a significant additional burden on Compliance and IT resources, which traditionally provide sporadic versus continuous support to individual wholesalers. To date, Lacour estimates, less than 10% of the Sales team is creating their own updates to Compliance to review. Turnaround has not been an issue.

"Our Compliance team is 24/7, just like the rest of us," he says.

The more common scenario is that a wholesaler will have an idea or some color or context they want to provide in an update. They might tell Lacour, ‘Hey, this piece of content that you’re ignoring is important to us in the field,’ and we’ll make an adjustment” to the content in the pre-approved library.

Endgame: Lead Capture

The immediate desired effect of 100 Putnam employees posting updates to their networks is amplification. The content provided by a Putnam wholesaler produces an average of 3,500 impressions, 10 clicks on content and one interaction—a like or a comment. Such exposure benefits the individual wholesaler.

In the six weeks since the program has been up and running, the enterprise has benefited from a doubling in Putnam site traffic referred by LinkedIn. “I did not expect that to happen for a long time,” Lacour says.

But, the endgame is lead capture and not exposure, as Lacour confirms. When a LinkedIn member likes, comments or shares a piece of content provided by a wholesaler, the middleware provider captures the act using the LinkedIn API. If the reactor is qualified, the name is added to a CRM lead source funnel for the wholesaler.

The person who clicks on a link to Putnam Website content is tracked, as well. This can be especially useful in the case of an advisor who comes from an identifiable LinkedIn account, accesses the cookied Putnam Website and runs a fund comparison using Putnam’s registration-required FundVisualizer tool. Ding ding ding. All suggest bona fide engagement worthy of a follow-up.

What's next on Putnam's roadmap? Twitter empowerment for the Sales team.

When I learned that Putnam delivered on an initiative that other firms are also known to be working on, I reached out to Blane Warrene, whose social media archiving business was acquired by RegEd last September. Now RegEd senior vice president of customer communications, Blane is my go-to source on archiving-related issues, and I had some questions regarding the technology hurdles as well as advisors’ use of LinkedIn. He responded with so much data and insight on advisor use of social media platforms that I’ll be devoting a separate blog post to it next week. Think of it as a Part 2 to this post.

20 Content Highlights To Remember From 2012

I’ll never cease to marvel at the power of the written word. As just one recent example, I’m barely into Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, and Jobs’ life path has already been influenced by articles that appeared in two magazines (one in Esquire and the other in Popular Mechanics).

Content (to include more than just the written word in 2012) can be just so relevant, so provocative, so entertaining that it has an impact on us. We email a link to it, we tweet about it, we mention it in real life conversations, we conduct research based on it, we remember it.

The following is a list of 20 content highlights that I’ll take from 2012.

Click to read more ...

Videos Humanize Mutual Fund, ETF Firms—All That's Needed Now Is Viewers

When was the last time you went to the movies? And by that I mean, when did you last watch an asset manager video that you didn't have a hand in producing?

If it's been a while or...never, you are not alone as mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms' videos continue to languish in obscurity. While other brands in other industries consistently report success with video, investment firm-sponsored videos do well to attract three-digit view totals on YouTube. (See a lonnng Rock The Boat Marketing post on this from June of last year.)

But low viewership is not stopping firms from elevating their art, as this selection of recent videos suggests.

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Asset Managers Start To Say It With Pictures

“Hey, I read your ____.”

That would be the highest compliment that a family member could ever give me. After years of writing for various publications and companies, I’m still waiting to hear that a relative other than my sainted mother (she’d suffer through anything) read something that I wrote.

And yet the other day, I happened to mention something that I saw on an asset manager site to my recent college graduate niece. “Oh, I’d like to see that,” said Katy. And, the knife turned when she texted me later to remind me to send her the link.

Huh.

If you’re in the words business, as many asset management firms are, change is in the air. Signs are that the rest of the world, my family included, wants to see more than they want to read.

Click to read more ...