Vanguard CIO On Mobile, Innovation, Voice Biometrics

"The number of mobile users hitting our Website has doubled in a year and we expect it to nearly double again," Vanguard CIO John Marcante said in an Internet Evolution radio interview yesterday, available now on-demand.

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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.

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Vanguard's SEO Advantage

It’s been said that success comes from doing a lot of little things right.

Now I’ll concede that search engine optimization is not the primary reason that Vanguard sits atop the mutual fund food chain. But I recently noticed yet another online advantage that Vanguard has over most asset managers: Because it offers an extensive amount of content in front of the log-in to its financial advisor site, that content is well positioned to draw searchers to the site. (Having the resources to produce the content is another advantage, we should note.)

As you can see in the screenshot below from SpyFu.com (subscription required), advisors.vanguard.com ranked in the top 50 search results for almost 400 organic keywords last month. That—coupled with the more than 8,000 keywords driving traffic to Vanguard.com and 38 other Vanguard domains—is impressive. Other asset managers are doing well to rank 300 keywords for their Websites overall, again according to SpyFu.

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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.

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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

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