How Many Of Your Visitors Are Browsing With Google Chrome?

How many visitors to your site are using Chrome, the browser Google launched as a beta in early September? It’s a good idea to download and use yourself just to see what your users see. (And you might like it.)

But the data can also serve as a proxy of your site users’ adoption of new “technology.” It could help influence the pace at which you introduce site innovations.

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Asset Managers Offering Market Commentary Display Relevance, Accountability

Now is the moment for financial services communicators whose work has never been more sought after–or more perishable as the progression of events forces a reconsideration almost every day.

We thought we’d give it until today (the Thursday following the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the announced federal bailout of AIG, et cetera) to survey investment management sites and sample the commentary made available for customers and distribution partners.

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‘Mutual Fund’ Google Searches At 4-Year Low

It rained all weekend in the Chicago area. That’s my excuse for why I ran a Google Trends search on “mutual funds.”

I really was just wasting time on Google Trends. It was idle curiosity that drove me to see how “Lehman” searches spiked recently and I also ran a Bear Stearns search, both just to confirm my suspicions that they’d probably enjoyed relative search obscurity until this year.

But then I ran a “mutual funds” search. Early Saturday morning, I’d read a Wall Street Journal article about the “ostrich effect,” which quoted Vanguard as reporting that their mutual fund shareholders checked their account values far less often in June than they did in mid- to late 2007, when the market was up.

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Is Your Site Ready For The Small Screen?

What does your Web site look like on a mobile device? If your target market includes affluent investors, you might want to look into that sooner rather than later.

Consider a datapoint cited in Friday’s issue of MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider e-newsletter, highlighting the recently released 32nd annual Mendelsohn Affluent Survey.

While less than 20% of all cell phone subscribers use their mobile devices to access the Internet, 40% of affluents (the 23 million Americans earning $100,000 or more) do–and 57% of those making $250,000 and above.

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Interactive Graph Simplifies A Complicated Competitive Message

Quarterly performance communications are an ensemble production. And yet for all the quick but careful contributions made by players across an organization, the work is largely unsung. “It’s time to make the donuts”–former colleagues of mine used to invoke the old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial when referring to the tedium of periodically updating the data.

Even less satisfying is the work involved in trying to communicate relative performance-in print, the story is reduced to lots of numbers with not much impact. So, here’s a shoutout to the collaborative effort at Vanguard Voyager Services that has figured out an interactive way to tell the story every quarter.

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