At Last: The Largest Mutual Fund Company Is Blogging

Congratulations to Vanguard Investments which launched a real-live blog in mid-March, continuing a tradition of online leadership that dates way back to its early work with America Online.

Never mind that more than 100 million blogs have preceded Vanguard, and more than 300,000 blogs are about investing alone, according to Technorati. Check out this widget that tracks the use of investing terms on all blogs—with its blog, Vanguard joins lots of others talking about the business it is so dominant in.

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Financial Services Companies: It's Time To Start Talking Again

Financial services companies, everyone is talking about you. You know that. But lately, the drumbeats are getting louder for you to starting talking for yourself.

We know that you’ve had any number of preoccupations—serious and steep revenue declines cascading into budget cutbacks, lay-offs and business reorganizations. But it’s been a year since Bear Stearns and six months since Lehman Brothers, plenty of time for surveyed investors and pundits to reach a consensus: Financial services companies need to be heard from.

Consider the commentary from the last few weeks alone.

"Out of sight can mean out of business," according to Nielsen IAG, which tracked a 13%-plus decline in year-over-year ad spending on financial services and insurance from 2008 to 2007. Spending dropped 23%-plus in the fourth quarter alone.

Citing the data shown in the chart below, a March 19 report from Nielsen links reduced spending to reduced confidence in an organization.

Eight percent of Americans today have full confidence in banks and financial services companies compared to the 31% confidence level expressed as recently as 2006. That’s according to a consumer poll sponsored by Waggener Edstrom Worldwide (WE)/RT Strategies and reported on March 20. Other findings:

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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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And Now For Your Next Heroic Act: Visualizations

When we talk to clients/prospects about what they’re doing on the Web, the conversations focus on what more they could be doing. Of course, there’s always more to do, especially for those responsible for how mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other investment products are marketed.

But we are always mindful of the range of work—development and strategy—that’s done, day in and day out by eBusiness, Internet Marketing, Interactive Marketing et al teams.

And now, here’s a picture of it.

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A Stimulus For Your Search Engine Rankings: One Low-Cost ‘Tweak’ That Could Make A Difference

Across the country, businesses and individuals are focused on making their dollars go further. It’s an exercise that includes a forced examination of wasteful habits. Forgo that second coffee mid-morning, for example, and you’ll be saving a few dollars a day.

In that spirit, we have a suggestion for managements of mutual fund, ETF, broker-dealer and other investment-related marketing teams: stop using “Click here” as your anchor text.

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