Do Google+ And Fund Companies Have A Future Together?

How much longer can asset managers keep their distance from Google+?

The table at right demonstrates the shallowness of fund company engagement on Google+ across the board. Of course, these companies have few followers—there’s almost nothing to follow! Vanguard stands out as an exception but more on that later.

Many fund companies have Google+ pages only because a Google+ account is required to establish a YouTube channel. Fourteen of the 24 names on the list have never posted an update.

From most of the other firms, there are relatively few public posts, almost zero sharing and, as you can see, followers in the low double digits. Engagement data for all the accounts can be found on AllMyPlus.com. It’s mostly goose eggs.

Fidelity Investments, the Mikey of the investment industry (Fidelity will usually try anything), has a page but it doesn’t have any branding, let alone any activity. I, and its 61 other followers, think this is its official page. Two titans on other networks, PIMCO and iShares, are distant also-rans on Google+.

Why is there such indifference to Google+? I can think of a few reasons. If you have other ideas, please add them in the comments below.

Not enough people, not worth the time

Since its launch in June 2011, Google+ has had its doubters. Critics continue to contend that the site is no more than a ghost town where accounts are created and then abandoned.

Google is steadily fighting back on two fronts. For one, it’s increasingly integrating Google properties. In addition to yoking YouTube channel creation to Google+, Google now requires commenters on YouTube to have Google+ accounts.

Google is also steadily enhancing the network’s features (e.g., post embedding, image handling and Google Hangouts—which I've loved for this business from Day 1), all of which help drive usage. In October 2013, Google reported that 540 million people were active across Google each month, and that 300 million people were active in the Google+ stream. 

With its growth trajectory, sharing on Google+ is on track to overtake Facebook sharing in two years, according to Searchmetrics projections.

Not enough relevant discussion

When you consider the composition of Google+ users, it could be tempting to conclude that investment topics would be out of place. According to a third quarter 2013 study by Global WebIndex, almost one-third of users are IT workers (and lots of them employed by Google, it’s believed). Since Day 1, it was reported that techies had found a new haunt.

And, not shown here but reported elsewhere, photographers and others in the visual arts gravitate to Google+ because of the gorgeous way it displays images.

Look at the chart of the bottom 10 types of people who use Google+ and you’ll see two groups that make up a significant percentage of investment firm clients—those in the 45-54 and 55-64 age groups.

Even top financial services accounts on other networks have relatively poor showings on Google+. One of the leading financial services Twitter accounts, Bank of America, has fewer than 23,000 followers on Google+.

Except…then there’s Vanguard. Vanguard’s Google+ page has attracted 770,000-some followers and 928,000 who have +1ed the page. Vanguard has six times the number of followers it has on Twitter.

Props to Vanguard for doing its typical outstanding job in consistently publishing engaging content, appropriate to the network. According to AllMyPlus.com, Vanguard’s single most popular posts have attracted 49 +1s, 18 comments and nine reshares.

Admittedly, this is nowhere near the same kinds of engagement numbers that some consumer brands rack up. For now, Google+ isn't where the home runs are being hit, just singles and doubles.

Vanguard’s success is unique, even among the largest brokerage accounts Charles Schwab (1,200 Google+ followers) and TD Ameritrade (963 Google+ followers).

But, presumably, Vanguard’s followers are people who are interested in investment-type content and could conceivably follow other investment-related accounts.

And get this: While Barron’s has no more than 100 Google+ followers and Yahoo! Finance fewer than 8,000 followers (maybe they’re not trying too hard on Google’s property), the Wall Street Journal has been circled by more than 3 million accounts. (Note the presence of senior decision makers in the top 10 users table above.)

With more than 6 million followers, The Economist account is #10 on the Google+ most followed accounts leaderboard, according to GPlus.com. The numbers lag what's reported on the Google+page but this line chart is a compelling argument against the ghost town claims.

Here’s one of The Economist's recent popular G+ posts. How is this content different from what your firm might share? Note that it attracted 644 +1s and 323 shares.

Not available to regulated firms

With LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook access, technology enablement was the first hurdle for most asset managers contemplating a presence on a site that wasn’t their own. Firms couldn’t make any plans unless they were certain they’d have a reliable way of archiving what they posted.

I doubt this has been the primary inhibitor to Google+ participation. But the ability to archive Google+ content has been slow in coming, confirms my buddy Blane Warrene, founder of Arkovi and most recently of RegEd. 

“The Google API is improving on the Plus front. Google initially released access to the individual profiles, and in mid-2013 to the Business pages. That makes a big difference as a firm can get the data to archive. Many of the known social archivers are adopting the G+ API as it sees momentum,” Blane says.

Although publishing to Google+ from a third-party app is still limited, the posts, interactive data (links, photos, videos et al) and engagement data all are now available, he says.

Nobody we know is there

Participation on Google+ offers significant, not-available-anywhere-else SEO benefits that alone could be justification for posting to it. But, as a social network, it also offers the lift that come when others support posts by +1s and sharing.

Even if hundreds of millions of users are on Google+, it can still be a lonely place when you post and all you hear is crickets.

I continue to be intrigued with a finding in a 2013 Putnam report on social media and advisors. Almost one-third of advisors surveyed (31%) said they used Google+ in the past year for business purposes. It was second only to LinkedIn, as I noted in a post last year. 

Financial advisors today have more of a business imperative to commit to Google+. Their brands need to be discoverable in local Google searches, and Google’s integration of Google+ accounts and whatever online content the advisors author play a key role in search engine rankings.

With archiving capabilities in place for them, expect more advisors to sign up for Google+ and spend some time there, whether browsing or posting content or taking part in communities and Hangouts.

As one measure of advisor activity, I checked two Google+ accounts that might be assumed to have strong advisor interest—+Michael Kitces, a financial planning thought leader, and +Bill Winterberg, a leading commentator on technology for advisors. Both accounts get a healthy level of engagement. 

In short, there are signs of relevant life on Google+.

Should you/can you commit?

In the last year, it’s become urban legend that financial services is the second most discussed topic on Twitter, after entertainment but before sports. Most recently, this was quoted to me from someone who heard it from his Twitter sales rep. I'd still like to see some data on that, but I do believe that if you’re an investment firm, you belong on Twitter, no question.

The Google+ decision to fully participate is not so cut-and-dried. You’d have to be convinced that there’s a community there that’s sufficiently vital to follow your account and then be continually active on Google+ to see and interact with your content.

And if you’re hoping for anywhere near Vanguard-type results, you’ll have to be all-in. That includes “listening” to what’s being said and exploring what's unique to Google+. Sharing others’ content—something practically no investment-related firm does today on Google+—may be needed, too.

May I be direct? In the two-plus years since Google+ launched, we just haven’t seen the kinds of efforts from this industry that other industries have made or that firms in this space have made on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Some firms have yet to even populate the About tabs of their Google business pages. Few of the firms that are posting are doing anything more than posting their YouTube videos or blog posts. Almost none have added the badges to their Websites or include the link to their business pages in their signatures, along with their other social identities.

Hanging back was a relatively no-risk strategy that worked on Google+ in its early days when probably no one was paying attention to you or your sketchy page. It may be time to revisit the decision. Google+ offers an increasingly attractive opportunity to raise awareness and broaden the reach for investment firms willing to work for it.

It’s your prerogative to take a pass on Google+. Just make sure that you have an updated understanding of what you may be forgoing.   

E-Delivery Disappointment: Investors Aren't Budging And Advisors Don’t Care Enough

If the IRS, family physicians and commercial banks all are managing to convince their clients to adopt e-delivery, why has the brokerage business so far come up short?

That’s a focus of research released last week by Pershing. Its “Closing the E-Delivery Gap” whitepaper bemoans the truly disappointing rate of electronic document adoption within the securities industry.

As a whole, the investment business is behind. In 2011, the broader Dalbar, Inc.’s e-Delivery Benchmarks study, which surveyed mutual fund, variable annuity, life insurance, employer-sponsored retirement plan firms and brokerage firms, reported less than 10% adoption—see my post at that time).

Pershing’s report discusses research that it commissioned from Beacon Strategies, a research and consulting firm. The Beacon work identified a gap between expectations of the brokerage firms it surveyed and what is the status quo.

Almost nine out of 10 (88%) survey respondents called e-delivery an important initiative. More than half (53%) expect investors to sign up for e-delivery of at least one communication. But, as the below graphic distributed by Pershing shows, “no service yet achieves adoption equal to even half of the expected level.”

These findings were published in a press release. They're expanded on in a whitepaper available by registering on Pershing’s site. Read it yourself and you’ll get the sense that the custodians are just about at their wits’ end.

Who's On The Team

The paper includes extensive discussion about why investors would adopt e-delivery (it's not for environmental reasons—just 21% care about that) and why they would decline it (security is a concern). Incentives and best practices to drive adoption are reviewed.

Here’s how Beacon assesses the involved parties: 

• Custodians are the group with the greatest economic incentive to promote e-delivery. And yet, Beacon says the best practices that custodians have in place to support the initiative are “not totally on target.” They base this on consumer response data and the overall adoption rate. 
• While acknowledging the technophiles who know firsthand the benefits of adopting new technologies, the report calls out advisors who are lagging behind in promoting e-delivery because they’re “constrained by technical and behavioral reasons.” Financial professionals' "lack of knowledge or support" tops the list of obstacles to e-delivery adoption, cited by almost half of the Beacon survey respondents (46%). Apathetic advisors rank higher than security issues. 
• Investors are described as the least committed group, characterized by their “lack of knowledge, overall indifference and the inability to change old habits by both advisors and investors.”  

Paper Isn’t Free

“Someone should have to pay for the paper.” That, the report says, is the position that custodians and other financial organizations are taking.

The cost of a paper securities business is enormous. The all-in cost of printing, mailing, handling, filing and disposing of a (full version) 40 plus-page prospectus or semi-annual report is estimated in the range of about $13 to $18 per piece. Such a waste of money, time, effort and resources.

Today, according to the report, custodians use three methods to encourage e-delivery adoption: charging retail investors (58%), charging advisors (33%), and offering a financial incentive to retail investors (42%). But again, the status quo has yet to make an impression.

In the context of slow and lagging electronic document adoption, what’s going to light the fire? Will it be a shift of more cost to investors and/or advisors?

“Charging investors for paper delivery—as little as a few cents per document—could go a long way to increase their cost-consciousness. If an investor were charged even a few cents for a physically delivered paper statement, or even more radically, charged for a 40 plus-page prospectus, then the investor would be presented with a choice. Pay a small amount to deliver by paper, or zero to deliver electronically. Paper would no longer be free,” says the report.

Beacon acknowledges “relationship pressures” that could keep the nuisance charge from ever hitting certain clients. Instead, it would be absorbed by the advisor or broker-dealer. At $13 a piece? Right, that could hurt.

It seems inevitable that one way or another and, probably with increasing urgency, the investment business will be weaned from paper. 

After all, the industry has distinguished itself in all manner of ways as innovators on the product side. 

And, one rarely hears that the electronic delivery alternatives are inferior to paper. (Although the Pershing report says “firms’ disparate user interfaces, processes and forms create challenges for learning and user experience. The outcome is that investors often find e-delivery more trouble than it is worth.”)

It will be an interesting transition—likely to be characterized by both carrot and stick approaches—to watch. Or, if you’re a digital marketer who believes that creative communicators have more to contribute to the team, to play a role in hastening.

Funds Celebrating Birthdays? Cheers To That

It’s silly, isn’t it, to wish a mutual fund, exchange-traded fund (ETF) or some other investment product a happy birthday?

Back in the day, when I was responsible for a fund company shareholder newsletter, I used to hate it when product managers suggested that we celebrate a fund birthday. Can you say “party of one”?

Courtesy of Will Clayton, CC-BY

But I’m not rolling my eyes so much anymore, and for two reasons.

1. Old Funds Can Be Shareholder-Friendly

There's more awareness now of the “survivorship” of funds and, in contrast, the effect that fund closings have on shareholders. 

Of the mutual funds in operation in 1995, less than 40% still existed in 2013. The remaining funds were either closed or merged into other funds. This is according to a study by CFAs Daniel Kern and Gerard Cronin with Tim McCarthy, featured in a December BrightTalk presentation called “Mutual Fund Roulette: Will Your Clients Outlive Their Mutual Funds?” McCarthy’s book, The Safe Investor, was published this week and you may see mention of this study in book reviews.

If you have a venerable old fund coming up on an anniversary—and the study results suggest that it’s a reasonably good fund to still be in existence—it wouldn't hurt to show it a little love. In the best case, you're throwing a spotlight on a fund whose age gives it a certain gravitas. At the very least, a birthday message would remind your clients (advisors and shareholders) that investors in this fund were spared a closing. 

2. The Partying Can Be Purposeful

The communication surrounding a product milestone is able to be much richer today. While all we had space for in the quarterly print newsletter was images of confetti and balloons, there's so much more that can be done online.

Let's take a look at how a few funds have been celebrated.

ETF Providers Get Nostalgic

When you consider that a mutual fund needs a three-year performance record (a Morningstar evaluation threshold) just to be taken seriously, an ETF turning five may not seem like much of an accomplishment.

But many ETFs have legitimate bragging rights when it comes to innovating and opening up access to various markets. In the coming years, you may be drafted into taking part in quite a few ETF birthday celebrations.

In April 2012, iShares wrote a blog post celebrating five years of HYG (the iShares iBoxx High Yield Fund) without overcheering. It was a proportionate remembrance of the environment when the ETF launched.

"...A number of investors were skeptical. The lack of liquidity in the high yield bond space made it an asset class no ETF had dared to enter before. A Seeking Alpha article at the time declared the fund was 'effectively an experiment that can only be judged over time.'”

Today on iShares.com, you’ll still see this quiet image, which is linked to a 2012 whitepaper that recalls the 10-year anniversary and launch of the iBoxx Investment Grade Corporate Bond Fund (LQD), and with it the beginning of fixed-income ETFs. 

Demonstrating Conviction And Consistency

When the ClearBridge Aggressive Growth Fund turned 30 last year, it received a full tribute on a Web page, and related communications materials all bear a Celebrating 30 Years seal.

One of the portfolio managers appeared in a natural-seeming video and made a few points about consistency—"So, I'm the new guy on the team and I've been here 17 years...." Below is a screenshot of the video, you'd have to click on it to go to the site to see it.

Reliving The Old Moves

This year is the 25th for BlackRock Global Allocation Fund, and the firm is showing its pride in a few ways. There’s a video, embedded below.

Also take a look at this interactive chart, which displays explanations of the fund’s positioning along a timeline while at the same time adjusting its risk and return chart. Slick. 

If a "Celebrate Fund XYZ" meeting pops up on your calendar, don't go with a bad attitude. The party planners will be looking to you to bring the digital fireworks.         

How About Streaming Your Podcasts?

Here’s a friendly reminder that content syndication requires continual monitoring. Opportunities that once seemed bright can dim overtime while new directions are constantly emerging.

A case in point: If you’re an investment firm that offers podcasts to be downloaded, consider making them available to also be streamed. Streaming video (e.g., Netflix) and streaming music (e.g., Pandora) get most of the attention, but faster Internet connections and wider bandwidths have also changed the access habits of podcast listeners.

The ability to forego the downloading and syncing process with a media player in favor of streaming a podcast on-demand significantly improves the podcast listening experience. I can tell you from my own experience that not having to plan ahead has resulted in my listening to even more podcasts, from more devices (desktop, iPad and smartphone) and more faithfully. I am crazy for podcasts. (And if it's data you want, see this TopRank blog post from earlier in the week.)

Stitcher!

As long as you’re going to the trouble to create podcast content, making the podcast available on a streaming service could make an incremental contribution to your listenership.

Stitcher is believed to be “the largest platform for listening on Android and second largest on iOS behind only Apple [iTunes]," according to Libysn, the leading podcast hosting platform quoted in a Stitcher press release in October 2013.

In fact, a look at the top show in Stitcher’s Business and Industry category suggests that Stitcher has listeners who may be interested in what you have to say. Note that NPR’s Planet Money podcast is on 101,000 playlists. Something to strive for.

Many of the leading investment-type podcasts on iTunes can be found on Stitcher, but few investment company podcasts are.

An exception I found is Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' "On The Trading Desk" podcast whose screenshot from an Android phone is below.

Like on iTunes, if your podcast isn’t in Stitcher’s top 100, most of the optimization and promotion is up to you. However, see the Discover tab in the screenshot—here’s where a listener to the Wells Fargo podcast might be introduced to yours. As is, the referrals today are to The Dave Ramsey Show, the Suze Orman Show and other media properties.

Next

If I were you, I would: 

• Make sure all internally are OK with the idea. Previously, some podcasters have balked at the thought that advertising would be displayed adjacent to their podcasts (see the ad at the bottom of the Wells Fargo image). There's no question that Stitcher has more of a commercial feel than downloading a file via iTunes. But, is this any different from posting content to Facebook or LinkedIn, which also place ads near your content? 
• Review the application process to be accepted as a Stitcher content provider, it’s not much of a hurdle. 
• Blow the dust off all that “download and add to your MP3 player” language on your Website and update it with the explanation that your content can be streamed and added to playlists, too. That will mean that you or someone on your team will have to experience Stitcher in order to write the copy. My bet is you’ll love it.
• Throw a little promotional support behind your podcast when you get the word that your content has been added to Stitcher. 

In the investment management space, podcasting has a tired vibe. But elsewhere Internet radio has taken off, and with the demographics that investment firms seek. Below is a screenshot from "The New Mainstream 2013," a study of Internet radio usage and adoption conducted by Edison Research, in partnership with Pandora, Spotify and TuneIn. And, even more on-point, Stitcher says the average podcast listener stays connected for an average of 22 minutes. Wouldn't you want in on that?

Wholesalers, CRM Enhancements And The Risk Of Being Invisible

Maybe you know the old movie scene I’m thinking of. Two men are talking to one another. There’s a woman in the scene but for some reason they can’t see her. She’s agitated. She's trying to get their attention, she has information she thinks the men can use. But she isn’t getting through to them. She’s either invisible or dead.

That’s what was I was flashing back to while listening to a recent Wholesaler Masterminds podcast. Rob Shore was interviewing Sam Richter, author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling. The focus was on the intelligence-gathering that Richter recommends wholesalers do prior to calling on an advisor for the first time.

As you’ll hear at the 4:20 mark, Richter makes the point that business-to-business sales have changed since the rise of the Internet. Buyers (advisors) have what Richter calls buyer intelligence—advisors already know about wholesalers’ products and their brands.

“Seventeen years ago, if information is power, who had the power? You the wholesaler had the power because you were the only one who knew about the product. Today, everybody knows about the product,” Richter says.

He goes on to explain how wholesalers can use Google and find other information available on “the impersonal Web” to personalize selling by learning what there is to know about the advisors they’re meeting with. 

"Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care," says Richter, quoting Theodore Roosevelt.

Wholesalers Never Google Advisors?

Who could disagree with Richter’s message? And evidently, it’s needed.

On the Wholesaler Masterminds show notes page, Shore says an advisor once emailed him: “Wholesalers never Google me. Just lazy.”

Wow! Really? I would have thought that the very least a salesperson would do is use Google to search for any mentions of a prospect. Certainly, that’s what advisors themselves are being coached to use social media to do. (For just one example, see this recent SEI post on how advisors should be taking advantage of what they can learn on LinkedIn.)

I tweeted the “Wholesalers never Google me” line and it struck a chord with a few advisors, including this exchange. Financial planning influencer Michael Kitces re-tweeted the tweet, which Jamie Cox commented on. Note that Cox is a Barron’s top advisor whose broker-dealer is LPL. Probably on your wholesalers' top 250 lists. 

RT @RockTheBoatMKTG: “Wholesalers never Google me. Just lazy”--why advisor recon is important http://t.co/wp6mTAur8G via @shorespeak

— MichaelKitces (@MichaelKitces) January 15, 2014

@MichaelKitces @RockTheBoatMKTG @shorespeak they're so dialed into leading w/ product, they overlook the obvious-who we serve, who we are..

— Jamie Cox (@jamesacoxiii) January 15, 2014

Hey! What About The CRM? How About Checking The CRM?

But all of that is just prelude to what prompted this post. While listening to the podcast, I kept waiting for a mention of the mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) wholesaler’s CRM as a font of knowledge about advisors.

Most marketers I talk to are working studiously on building out the intelligence of the CRM. They're equipping wholesalers with information on advisors’ interaction with marketing communications, including email and Website pages, and they're at least piloting lead scoring based on digital language combined with AUM and sales data.

A growing number are integrating social profiles (e.g., LinkedIn and Twitter) for near real-time updates of what advisors are up to. (See this July 2013 post about Putnam's work.) After listening to Richter’s explanation of his YouGotTheNews.com, I’m thinking there should be an integration with Google News to bring in local news. Maybe some firms have that underway.

To listen to the podcast is to get the impression that wholesalers are on their own out there. That there's no awareness of what's being piped into customer databases. It could help. There's data that could warm up a cold call or an attempt to reconnect.

For Sales productivity, for the good of the enterprise and for Marketing (as in, “You spent all that time on that and to what end?”), these enhancements should not go unseen. 

I reached out to Shore, whose Website claims an email list of 10,000 wholesaler names, as a proxy for wholesalers. What was his sense of the CRM as a go-to source for advisor reconnaissance?

Rob ShoreFirst, Shore expressed surprise that Marketing is contributing added insights to the CRMs (and obviously not all are yet, firms are at various stages of delivering various pieces of information).

"No wholesaler has described to me the breadth of capability you just described," he said.

We talked about the potential value of data being reported on individual advisors' interactions with marketing emails or the traffic to Website pages, and he pushed back some.

“I really don’t care, we don’t know what wild hair took somebody to the Website. I don’t think it’s fair to infer that an advisor is hotly interested just because he looked at a few pages on your Website,” he said.

Several product detail pages in a compressed period of time with accelerated frequency? That might be different, Shore allowed. He said that if the CRM aggregated the kind of information heard in the podcast about advisors’ interests and accomplishments (some of this being made available via the social integrations), then that would be compelling and useful information.

We wound our way around to talking about a higher level issue, though, and that’s wholesalers’ use of the CRM, in general. It continues to be what Shore called “spotty.”

“Wholesalers who use SalesForce, as an example, most effectively are committed to robust documentation of a sequence of sales events…My sense and my observation is that there’s not enough of that, there’s not enough of wholesalers committing to diligent CRM input,” he said.

Marketing Is Going To Have To Sell It

It was fun talking to Shore because it was theoretical. It wasn’t the loaded kind of interaction that can characterize Marketing/wholesaler exchanges, when Marketing wants to talk about partnering on a database roadmap and Sales wants to know where an approved presentation is. At the same time, he represented the wholesaler perspective—and the challenge for marketers if all this CRM integration work is going to become visible and yield results.

The work is far from done when a Marketing-led CRM enhancement is complete. It seems clear that Sales management and wholesalers are themselves going to need to be sold on the value of it.

Let’s give Shore the last word:

“How do you prove the value to a sales guy who ‘just wants to sell’? How are you going to show wholesalers how to use the data efficiently in the course of a day when they’re crushed with information, and without them needing to become a propeller head? The data may be there but in the swirl of everything else that the wholesaler is supposed to be proficient at, how can Marketing make them better at using the data?”