@AdvisorTweets In Limbo

Update: We're back up and running so stop by and check us out at www.advisortweets.com. For the gory details of what happened, see 5 Insights Following The Return of @AdvisorTweets.

We launched AdvisorTweets.com late Wednesday afternoon and enjoyed so much support for it that we needed to move the site to an XL server Friday. Thank you all for the early interest you’ve shown.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure where we are today.

If you’ve tried to reach @AdvisorTweets, you’ve seen the above message.

But I don’t think the account has been suspended. Twitter’s support page says that suspended accounts see a red box when they log in. When we log in, we get a prompt to restore the account and then this very promising message.

I spent some time manically refreshing my email looking for the instructions. But comments I’ve since found on the Web suggest that the restoration instructions may/may not arrive.

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Introducing AdvisorTweets.com: What Financial Advisors Are Thinking, Via Twitter

It’s a big day here at Rock The Boat Marketing as we launch our first spin-off: AdvisorTweets.com. Honestly, spinning off a second enterprise was not something we expected to do. AdvisorTweets is a Web site born out of the conviction that if financial advisors are communicating, we all might want to tune in.

Since I started my first marketing communications job at Kemper Funds in the mid-1990s, I have marveled at the lengths that marketing colleagues would go to in order to understand financial advisors. Traveling with wholesalers (Cracker Barrel, anyone?), networking at financial advisor events, fielding surveys, hosting focus groups—no stone was unturned to create an artificial setting for the purpose of extrapolating what a handful of advisors would tell us. That was as good as it got back in the day.

What can be done to better understand what financial advisors want and need? Marketers, sales, customer service staffs and executive leadership of asset management companies wanted to know then and, if possible, they care even more today.

We’ve developed AdvisorTweets to serve as a listening and learning post. There’s value in:

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Rydex Infographics Change The Game For Investment Marketing

Hearty congratulations and bubbly all around to the online marketing professionals who produced GetAlts.com, a microsite launched this week by Rydex|SGI to create attention for alternative investments.

I landed on the site with minimal expectations but some curiosity about the name. Compliance officers in my past would have killed “GetAlts” for any number of reasons so the first kudos goes to Rydex for delivering a name with some marketing magic.

More important, though, is the interactivity on the site. I’ve spent a bit of time on it now—long visits that the search engines will duly note and credit the site for—and haven’t read more than 200 words. Instead, I’ve been working with the interactive graphs and charts.

If you’ve been involved in the sales and marketing of mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for any length of time, you’ll recognize all of these—the checkerboard of annual asset class performance, the efficient frontier graph, etc.

Distributing these in print or on the Web as flat communications has sub-optimized the information value of these charts. Rydex is changing the game for investment product marketers by animating our tried-and-true charts and adding audio explanations. They are showing what these data-heavy charts mean.

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Google/FPA Say Search Is The Best Way to Reach Financial Advisors

Are you trying to reach financial advisors? Search and financial news sites are the most frequently used media channels by independent financial advisors, according to a study done by the Financial Planners Association (FPA) and Google.

“This is where you are going to reach not only the widest number of advisors but you’re also going to be able to reach them repetitively and with a frequency of exposure,” says Becca King, Research Manager, in a fascinating 18-minute video Google Business posted on YouTube this week.

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Your Talking Heads Don't Have To Be Dead-heads

Look, videos on some asset management sites are starting to show some life.

One out of five online video viewers say they now watch less TV on a television set due to the time they’re spending watching online videos. That’s according to the Magid Media Futures™ 2009: Opportunities In Online Video study. Pew says online video-watching now surpasses participation in social networks.

But, let’s be honest. It’s a stretch of the imagination to think that mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web sites are reaping the benefits of heightened interest in online video. The state of the art right now in our industry features two guys reading a script on a Teleprompter over one another’s shoulders.

Would you turn off TV to watch those videos at the end of a long day? They are…hmm, how to put this?...not what you would watch before you sleep, maybe for help in getting to sleep.

We’ve recently stumbled upon videos on three sites that dare to be different. They feature talent with a pulse, they’re not framed in teeny-tiny boxes on the site and, well, they’re interesting.

First Trust's Economic Commentary
First up is First Trust Portfolios’ Wesbury 101 - Economic Video Commentary. "This Is Not a 'Sugar High'" featuring Chief Economist Brian Wesbury is the second such video published on FtPortfolios.com this month. Wesbury delivers an animated commentary, and we especially like the inclusion of charts and graphs in the video. If your videos aren't including graphics, why even bother? You could get by with less fuss and expense with a podcast and a headshot.

Oh and who called our attention to this? Financial advisor Adam Zuercher when he tweeted about it to his 360-some followers, illustrating the viral quality of video and the reason you want to offer it on your site. Note that the video can be downloaded.

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