A Belated Valentine For 10 Sites You Could Learn To Love

Work and some recreation kept me from posting this in time for St. Valentine's Day. Hate when life keeps me from the computer. Without further delay, the sites I love and think you will, too:

1. Quantcast.com
Quantcast is a free service established for marketers, agencies and publishers to serve as a basis for media planning. If you're buying online ads, you may already be familiar with its data about media sites.

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Tracking The Great Financial Advisor Migration—And Implications for Your CRM

Dan Miller, Key Accounts Sales Executive for Discovery, is always good enough to update us on the developments in his world of financial intermediaries databases—which the smartest investment management firms use to augment their “organically grown” customer relationship management (CRM) systems. We checked in with him Tuesday after yet another Investment News article about financial advisor migration.

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Financial Advisors Are Still Out There Swinging—What Are You Pitching?

Even though I didn’t plan it that way, can we think of this as Part 2 to my last post Fresh Ways to Explain the Financial Crisis? In that post I highlighted some innovative props for explaining what the heck has been going on these last several months. But there are other ways to look at how the crisis is being communicated about, and that’s to “listen in” on what financial advisors are saying to their clients.

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Fresh Ways To Explain the Financial Crisis

My first job at a mutual fund company was at Kemper Funds, a few years before the commercial development of the Internet (and my dearly beloved Kemper.com). At that time, competitive intelligence in our shareholder communications group took the form of quarterly meetings scheduled once we’d collected enough shareholder newsletters of our competitors. The purpose: To review what our competitors were doing and to borrow from the best ideas.

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Why Widgets Make Sense For Marketing Investment Products

Like most marketers in 2008, we spent most of the year talking about widgets. When our friends at 50000feet, Inc. proposed one in December we jumped at the invitation to collaborate. SwanDog Strategic Marketing’s DailyDog, the marketing planning widget released today, is the result.

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