The Corner Office Advisor Is Live And Well Online

This morning on Twitter was just like every other weekday morning—lots of tweets offering links to valuable fresh content. At 8 a.m.CDT it was obvious that Russ Thornton, a former Merrill Lynch financial consultant and now fee-only financial advisor, had produced something my tribe of financial advisors had seen, liked and were now recommending in the form of retweets to their followers.

Russ often writes his own posts but this morning he created a post “What Should Investors Do Now?” and wrote a single paragraph introducing a video from Dimensional Fund Advisors. Little more than one hour later, that was the post being passed around the Twitter community of advisors.

And, that was a big win for Dimensional.

The 14th largest fund group in assets under management, Dimensional markets at a much lower volume than most large fund complexes. But this isn’t about marketing via television or billboards or email. This is a case study of content marketing using a delivery medium that consistently proves its viral quality.

Russ watched the 20-minute video on DFA’s site, noticed that it was approved for client use and chose to download it so he could upload it to Viddler.com, a video sharing site, to offer it from his blog. Even though the video has a date of first use of March 13, it was posted last night and may have benefited from some outbound marketing support from Dimensional. But a message from the company itself will not attract the same attention as an endorsement (a tweet, in this case) from Russ.

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Twitter Take-Out For Financial Services Marketers

The “art of the possible” is one of my favorite expressions. It’s an apt description of the work of financial services marketers who work in highly regulated and otherwise controlled environments.

Is Twitter.com is one of the many social media sites blocked at your company? We encourage you to work with your Compliance and IT leadership to find a way to be able to access Twitter and other social media sites at work. Participating in Twitter in real-time is the authentic experience, and our fervent hope is that you can someday fly like the Twitter bird.

(What’s Twitter? Some of you might have that question. Twitter is a means of posting content online in 140 characters—called microblogging because the posts are blog-like but with a finite character count. You'll find a lot of information on Twitter--which is experiencing phenomenal mainstream growth in 2009--on the Web. To start to learn about it, see the Wikipedia entry for the background and the current state of Twitter. Soon you'll be ready to move on to the Twitter wiki.)

Until the day when there’s peace in the world and social media sites are freely accessible by financial services marketers, Rock The Boat Marketing is introducing a new feature: a running Twitter summary of our RockTheBoatMKTG tweets. Think of it as Twitter take-out--if you can't go to it, we'll bring it to you. 

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The SEC Embraces Twitter–And With It Social Media

Those who yearn for regulated financial services organizations to participate in social media are intrigued by the SEC’s recent activation of a Twitter account. (A so-called “microblogging” platform, Twitter imposes a 140-character limit on users whose posts provide answers to the question “What are you doing?” For a basic introduction to the concept, see the Common Craft You Tube video or the Twitter entry at Wikipedia.)

So far, the SEC’s use of Twitter has been a tad tentative. As you can see in the screenshot below, the “tweets” are synopses of official press releases as opposed to insights on what the SEC is actually doing in real-time.

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