A Compromise For All You Social Media Skeptics

“You can’t possibly believe that all advisors are going to be tweeting and friending people?”

Such was one response to the eBook we published last week (Who Says You Can’t? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media) [The eBook has been removed from the site, pending an update]. We present it as a snapshot of social media adoption by financial advisors and of the current best practices and possibilities for mutual fund and ETF marketing.

We believe that there’s a communications channel opened up here being used by many of the very people (independent financial advisors, largely) that money managers want to get to know better. Some people liked the eBook.

Here’s how I answered my provocateur. No, we don’t think it’s a matter of time before all financial advisors have active Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. accounts. For the foreseeable future, we know that the majority of investment management communications will continue to be through wholesalers. Marketers will continue to fly the flag at a few conferences every year, and printing and mailing will continue. We don’t believe that the “blast emails” will stop anytime soon.

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3 Questions About Your Digital Strategy

If you’re responsible for the digital strategy of a mutual fund company, exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider or other investment manager, you’ll want to know about some important work that’s been released in the last week or so. Below I’ve extracted just a few germane findings to stimulate thinking about your digital priorities. Naturally, you’re encouraged to follow the links to the complete reports.

Video, Social Networks Drive Engagement
Online engagement by Internet users is deepening, according to The Global Online Media Landscape released by Nielsen Online. The increased engagement, according to the report, “is in part a result of a shift toward video content and social networking as popular online subcategories.”

Specifically, according to Nielsen:

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Strike Up The Barry Manilow: We’re Talking About Feelings And Your Web Site

While checking my RSS feeds this morning I came across an article that I reacted to with mixed emotions.

That right there should have been a tip-off: I approach the morning feed-reading like a transfusion—gotta catch up, gotta find out what’s been going on since the last time I checked in. No time for emotional responses to HTML.

But this article—How Does Your Web Site Make Visitors Feel?—slowed me down. I was intrigued and really wanted to spend some time thinking about it.

These lines, for example, took me to a place I don’t ordinarily go at 6-ish on a Friday morning:
“You have before you a computer of some type or perhaps a cell phone. It’s equipment that contains the energy forces that made it (with all their fancy scientific names). Some scientists are exploring whether objects contain the consciousness of those who built it. This is similar to organ “memory” where an organ transplant patient has the memories and physical habits of their donor.”

The author of the article (which I recommend to you) is Kim Krause Berg, a highly regarded Usability Consultant with UsabilityEffect.com. She explains that she’s been “exploring and researching the relationship between computers and people.” She describes herself as fascinated by Web sites and how and whether decisions made by Web site designers and bloggers, for example, affect us “emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually.”

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5 Random Highlights Of Mutual Fund, ETF Websites

Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?

It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That's why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!

A question to the managers of these sites: Are you leveraging them as the link bait you should in order to draw visitors to your site, first to that page and maybe to explore the rest of your value proposition?

1. Fidelity Investments’ Historical Yield Curve
Of all the gorgeous, exciting visualizations of data to be found on the Web today, this isn’t one of them. But it’s a true gem, very, very cool. A site visitor could spend minutes on this page learning. Marketing managers, when it’s time to hire again and you have a green marketing communications staffer, park them in front this.

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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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