Song selection. One of the maddening things about the American Idol competition is what consistently trips up the final 12. Their raw talent or personality gets them just so far but those who “go home early” fail to read the judges’ minds about the songs they should be singing.

Word selection. That’s the ground on which Web sites compete for search traffic. But unlike with the Idol wanna-bes, there’s no need to guess. There are ways to know which keywords drive traffic. The challenge for the leader of digital strategy at mutual fund, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other asset management companies is in persuading colleagues to use the more commonly used terms when they create content.

Amateur performers on Idol have youth and inexperience as their excuse for ignoring the judges' cues. But professional communications today need to cede to the easy-to-track "wisdom of the crowds.”

Journalists years ago agreed to follow the Associated Press style, and book publishers mostly conformed to the Chicago Manual of Style. But even companies that adopted either the AP or Chicago style tended to produce their own addendums documenting the instances when they wanted to deviate from common practice. Words are invented, hyphens are attached with abandon, spelling reflects individual manager’s preferences and then gets institutionalized. Nobody picks this bit of muscle-flexing as a battle that’s worth fighting.

But there’s a price to be paid for spelling and word idiosyncrasies, and your Web site traffic, your content, pays it. This is inadvertent, of course, and that’s why it’s up to you to point it out. Asset managers are publishers now and need to think of their readers.

We're going to take a look at a few generic examples but it's a safe bet that you have your own sacred cows worth toppling. Granted with the examples below, you can expect your content to be competing for attention in search results with serious heavy-hitters who publish more often than you do. Page 1, position 1 on Google may not be a realistic goal. At the very least, you want to make it possible for the people who are searching for Your Company Name + Generic Term to find the content they expect you to have. Especially since you probably do even if you call it something funky.

We reviewed the following using Google Insights for Search, limiting the search to the last 12 months, from within the U.S. and in the Finance and Insurance categories. You could also refer to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which will show you information about traffic and advertiser competition on your keywords as well as provide data on related keywords.

Example 1: “Unfortunate market anomaly,” "market meltdown," "uncertain markets" all might have been how your investment team preferred to refer to the recent financial crisis but that’s not how the rest of the world thought about it or—more to the point—searched for information about it. Companies that conformed by using “financial crisis” in their work had more takers. Those that shied away from the term were irrelevant.

Example 2: How do you refer to the narratives that present your company’s view of the financial markets? Years ago when I was a journalism school intern working at my first newspaper job, my editor published a column called "Looking Around with Orv." Does your narrative have a similarly precious title? Your Orv may not like it but it’s time for a change.

Here's your decision, though: Not all but most investment management companies seem to be settling on "market commentary." But look what people are searching for—more "outlook" than "commentary." What you call yours should reflect what it offers but if you're leaning toward "outlook," here's some data to start the conversation about expanding the scope of the content.

Example 3:There’s an abundance of high-value content on the Web today, and luckily there are several monitoring tools (e.g., Google alert) that enable people to keep up. When people set alerts, they’re not thinking of your company—they’re made aware of your content only when what you publish matches the terms they’re on the look-out for. That’s the argument for using common terms like "financial advisor" with an "o" and not an "e." "Financial professional" or "investment professional" are umbrella terms that appeal to marketers because they are not distribution channel-specific but they’re non-starters in search.

As I write this on July 1, just a few days from Independence Day, I can anticipate writers feeling that writing for search engines represents a loss in freedom of expression. I get that.

I remember conversations that I’ve had with journalists while recruiting them for marketing communications jobs. The transition to marketing does represent a compromise, not all of the words you first put down “on paper” are likely to survive the routing process. But for what you trade away, you gain in having a role in using your communications ability to advance a business. There’s a rush in that, in knowing that your content—including the words you chose purposefully—is succeeding in attracting information-seekers to your company. That’s what this is about. Findability isn’t every writer’s top priority, but it must be for a business communicator today.

Happy Fourth of July to our U.S.-based readers. Rock The Boat is goin’ fishin.

It’s been fun this week watching the growing social media success of State Street Global Advisors's exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing. A SPDRS commercial introduced in June is getting uploaded to YouTube, as well as to other video-sharing sites, and commenters love, love, LOVE “the video.” (Note how the commercial aspect shrinks when the message is sufficiently appealing.)

Reviewers like the dogs, they like the accompanying song so much they want to buy it…and guess what else? According to their comments, some say they might even give State Street a look.

Watch the commercial for yourself and then let’s bat around some thoughts.

 

What was State Street’s added expense for distribution via You Tube et al?
None, its production costs were unaffected. On the flipside, at fewer than 10,000 combined views as of this writing, it’s hard to claim that their added reach has reduced the expense.

Still…In “letting their content go free” (a social media maxim), the commercial is embedded on a Russian site, a Spanish site and a site that offers basic French lessons, among others. Now, it belongs to the world—and the video views are coming from markets that would be cost-prohibitive to buy into.

What’s different about appearing on television versus YouTube?
The question is too simply posed, maybe, but think of the different context of YouTube. All television viewers are aware that advertisers pay for their time and, on some level even if in some small way, that can discount the impact of a message.

Every uploader of this video is endorsing it for its content—that’s different. The engagement of “users” in uploading, commenting and otherwise interacting with a brand message marks a transition point. Do you remember the Diet Coke and Mento’s stunt? That didn’t belong to the brand, that belonged to the users who took what Diet Coke provided and turned it into something else.

The SDPRs commercial is becoming an homage to dogs. Dogs, animals, lizards all have been the center of commercials previously. But, video-sharing makes it possible to adopt the animals featured.

Below is a screenshot of the Statistics & Data of the highest-viewed copy of the video (not the video we link to above). The video that appears on this page was recorded off a television showing CNBC somewhere in Illinois. It was submitted in the Pets & Animals category (where it's doing very well) and attributed to an entity called State Street SPDR Financial.

Will the added exposure help State Street justify the marketing spend to the number-crunchers, if necessary? (It's easy to imagine CFOs struggling with the soft-sell of this ad, but we seem to remember that State Street is contractually obligated to invest in SPDRs marketing support.)
While State Street no doubt anticipated the popularity of this creative among pet-lovers, we doubt that it was a target customer segment. One of the benefits of being on the Web today is the ability to target, and yet the SPDRs example shows that social media can be messy.

If your professional work gets submitted to a content-sharing (video or otherwise) site, you can expect multiple files—including copies lacking the professional quality that you originally delivered. You can expect people to impose their own organization—e.g., SDPRs might have preferred an investment-related category to pets and animals. There is no dictating or controlling which group or groups may become fans.

Viral distribution is a compliment to the content producer but it also represents more work. When content is safe at home on your site, you know where it is. When it's socializing, you have the added burden to keep track of it and how it's being received.

Still and all, as most CFOs will recognize, added unpaid positive exposure for a television commercial is all upside.

How will State Street evaluate the impact of its new-found attention?
The commercial itself does not include a URL to the site and only one of the video uploads does. Search for “dog commercial” and SPDR or “dog commercial and State Street” and you won’t find the advertiser’s Web site. Now the social Web’s embrace of State Street's content is competing with them!

SPDR Marketing may need to fire up a Google AdWords campaign to secure a place on the first page of search results. We couldn’t find mention of the commercial on either the SDPRs or the State Street site, but adding a search-optimized page with content about the commercial and the file itself would be an idea. Once related content is offered on the brand's domain, the Web analytics team will be able to track how many “dog commercial” searches drove traffic to the site. We’d manage expectations, though—the commercial itself and its afterlife is all about creating awareness. It may be hard to find a cause-effect in the site analytics.

Congratulations to all involved at State Street—there's no doubt that the puppy love will drive video views further. After having endured everything short of famine, drought and pestilence in the last year, investment marketing is showing some life again, isn’t it?

Not so long ago, an overworked Marketing Communications writer would record the CNBC appearances of her portfolio managers, watch them at home that night and write summaries to be routed and eventually published on the Web later that week.

OK, that’s not going to work anymore.

The rest of the world is going real-time, and mutual fund, ETF and other investment communicators are going to have to hustle even more than they already do to catch up.

Exhibit 1 is from the world of entertainment. As the Tony Awards were underway a few Sundays ago, the media was reporting the results as they were happening, and bloggers were at it, too. But even the show content at the end of the show was fluid enough to reflect what happened earlier in the show. This video of host Neil Patrick Harris can say it better than I just did. 

Maybe blame Twitter for revving the real-time revolution.

Twitter reports what people are saying real-time. On the basis of immediacy alone, information exchanged on Twitter qualifies as having more authority.

Take a look at this screenshot of a simple search for mutual funds. Google found almost 30 million results but what’s the top search result? It’s Morningstar.com. No surprise there, given that it’s an extensive Web site chocked full of mutual fund information. Google acknowledges Morningstar’s authority by showing it as the #1 search result.

But no doubt you noticed what’s managed to wedge itself on top of the Google results—it’s results from a Twitter search on mutual funds. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, this page displays the effect of installing a Greasemonkey user script to display the top five related Twitter results while using the Firefox browser. (Not as geeky as it sounds—it’s a two-step process described here.)

But who would quarrel with where such fresh results should go? Of course, what somebody “tweeted” 3 minutes ago might have more relevance to a searcher than a site that’s sufficiently developed and aged to sit on the top of 30 million results. Twitter results belong on top!

Marketers in any industry are challenged to meet the demand for real-time communicating (both talking and listening). But if you’re marketing investment products, you’ve no doubt become accustomed to a multiple day, multiple review, upstairs, downstairs and back to accounting system of producing content.

The delay imposed on getting your work out the door is even more demoralizing when you consider the high-speed real-time market information that your clientele enjoys from most sources. As you know, all your work is for naught if the delay means that no one consumes your content, let alone acts on it.

Think about the time your process takes. Where can you wring out excess days, hours, reviewers? Who do you need to talk to and what can you use to make your case? Some communications do need to be marinaded—exclude them then. Can you start by introducing a process change with one type of communication, to one type of audience, for one business at first? What analytics can you use to measure whether faster speed-to-market makes a difference?

Years ago, Neil Patrick Harris and entourage might have closed the Tonys and gone to Sardi’s to wait for reviews they’d read in the early morning editions of the newspaper. You see how old-fashioned every piece of that is, right? And so it is with market updates that spend overnights with Compliance.
 

This morning, just as we were adding 50 more names to our Social Media directory of financial advisors using Twitter, we read a bylined article on Ignites.com (subscription required but a free trial is available) that concluded: “Unless investment advisors can figure out ways to present compelling yet balanced advertisements in 140 characters or fewer, the prospects for Twitter as a marketing tool appear dim at best.”

The article by Joshua Broaded, CFA, a principal consultant at ACA Compliance Group, points out significant compliance risks posed by Facebook and LinkedIn users who clearly have not been trained in the limits of what they can say. Having been responsible for marketing communications at a few asset management companies, I’ve also winced at quite a few out-of-bounds statements that I see being made online by advisors and asset management employees. These betray a lack of training and supervision. My suspicion is that the offenders are rookies.

This is another side of the transparency that comes with communicating today—if your systems and people aren’t current, the vulnerabilities may be inadvertently revealed by people using the newer communications channels. For example, I’ve seen tweets by job candidates heading toward or leaving job interviews. Vendors, too, are commenting on business strategies.

The social networking sites serve as a means of publishing some of what shouldn’t be said in the first place. Let’s not blame social media for training or policy inadequacies that need to be addressed within a company.

But, what are the guardrails governing asset manager and investment advisor use of social media? They are evolving. Some companies’ compliance counsel is clearly more comfortable with social media than others’, and some commenters are more optimistic than Joshua Broaded about the prospects of using Twitter while remaining in compliance. In fact, we've seen early adopter advisors adjust their online activity as more information is shared. Learning that LinkedIn recommendations could be considered endorsements, many advisors have turned off the capability, for example.

Listed below are links to several discussions that have taken place this year. We’ll do our best to keep this list current—and would welcome your submissions to info@rocktheboatmarketing.com.

A LinkedIn discussion on social media guidelines for brokerage company employees
A discussion started on June 18, 2009, by a Davidson Companies PR staff person seeking examples

Additional Thoughts Re: Compliance Dangers for Investment Advisers Using Social Networking Web Sites
A June 16, 2009, update to Scott Gottlieb's May 26 guest blog on AdvisorBlogger.com.

Compliance Dangers for Investment Advisers Using Social Networking Web Sites
A May 26, 2009, guest blog on AdvisorBlogger.com by Scott Gottlieb, president of U.S. Compliance Consultants, LLC, a full-service consulting firm that specializes in compliance and registration services for investment advisers and hedge funds.

More on RIA Regulation Changing
A May 21, 2009, post on Advisor Products' Andrew Gluck's blog.

Compliance Issues Posed by Blogging and Social Networking
Another one of Advisor Products’ excellent Webinars, this March 4, 2009, presentation features Brian Hamburger and Daniel Bernstein of MarketCounsel, one of the nation’s leading business and regulatory compliance consulting firms.

Web 2.0 Leveraging New Media in a Securities/Compliance Practice
A February 19, 2009, SecuritiesDocket.com Webcast with Doug Cornelius, chief compliance officer of Beacon Capital Partners. Scroll down the list to find the February 19 Webcast, free registration is required.

Compliance Makes Social Networking Rougher for Registered Reps Than for RIAs
A December 31, 2008, guest blog post on Investment Writing by Bill Winterberg, CFP

The following presentation made by Doug Cornelius, Beacon Capital Partners, to the EthicsPoint Regional User Forum is not investment industry-specific but worthwhile.

Web strategist and Forrester Research consultant Jeremiah Owyang this week wrote about the effect of letting a Web property get SNOWED—his acronym for Stakeholder Needs Overwhelm Web Experience Design.

That’s an issue that asset management marketers struggle with in trying to provide equitable support for multiple business lines—mutual funds, unit investment trusts (UITs), retirement plans, annuities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), separate accounts—sometimes in multiple geographies and seemingly always led by warring managers.

You may start by working with a single business in a single market as a beta test for a new, cool design. But what’s produced in the test stage is almost never what’s delivered once all the various stakeholders get their crack at it, is it?

Who knows—maybe the American Airlines case study that Owyang cites can provide a neutral starting point for you to start chipping away at this matrixed approach to Web work. For today let's consider a related but less daunting challenge that calls for you to use logic, reason and expertise to appeal to your colleagues in Marketing.

Here's an older video that brilliantly presents the problem. Thanks to Owyang for calling out to it in his post.

Like Microsoft, financial services marketers need to follow brand standards. Standards are created to control the effect of too many cooks following their own recipes. Standards preserve order, leverage enterprise investments and, not incidentally, they typically originate from Marketing! There’s no undermining the importance of standards.

But when communicating digitally, in small spaces, in quick bursts, there is a tightrope to walk between slavish adherence to rigid or narrow standards and fresh canvas expression devoid of all reference to the brand. When the branding is choking the effectiveness of the digital delivery, those of us responsible for leading digital strategies (and achieving digital success) need to speak up.

Here’s where we see the tensions surfacing:

• Online display advertising: The logo, the tagline, the line drawing of the corporate headquarters—all cannot appear on every frame of the ad. Not if you also have a message to convey. Something must give.
• Brand identity in widgets: In providing valuable information as opposed to marketing messages, widgets are almost the antithesis of online banner ads. Fight the reflex to weigh the widget down with intrusive elements. The available real estate will be even smaller when you're designing for a mobile phone application.
• Branding on Twitter: Your Web site is where you show off your brand plumage. The point on Twitter is to be conversational—you know, less about your firm as an entity and more about its place in the world. If you can do this, starting with your profile, your background, your phrasing of your tweets, you’re likely to attract more followers. (For much more about Twitter, see our Social Media directory.)

• Email subject headings: No doubt your approved editorial style is the result of a hard-working thoughtful committee that produced guidelines, all of which assume that communicators have more than 1 second to attract attention. This is not a safe assumption online. We could point to any number of examples but think of just the email subject heading, the thinnest of all communications and yet one of the most powerful.

  Marketers find comfort in the production efficiencies of re-using templates and subject headings yet lament about low open and click-through rates. It's common practice for asset managers to standardize on subject headings—to wit: "In The News," "Quarterly Commentary" and our favorite: “Another Update from Company XYZ.” Stop the madness! Creativity matters more in digital communicating, not less. Each email sent deserves its own unique heading.

We encourage you to take on the tyranny of the standards. Gather your analytics, collect some examples, including from other industries, and call a meeting to put the question on the table. “What room is there for our communications standards to be more flexible to support the business objectives we intend to achieve using digital tactics?”

Confronted with the facts, right-minded, well-intentioned marketers will find a way to reach a compromise.

Today we're publishing the start of a social media directory for the asset management industry. We've aggregated what we can and now we turn to you for your contributions.

• Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Social Media
• Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Twitter
• Broker-Dealers Using Social Media
• Financial Advisors Using Social Media
• Financial Advisors Using Twitter
• Investment Media Using Twitter
   

As described in our recent eBook "Who Says You Can't? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media," social media is a mixed bag for those involved in the manufacture, packaging and distribution of investment products. It's trendy and seems like fun but for some, it's too new, too transparent, too unstructured. Overall, social media is too much for many highly regulated investment companies to be comfortable with yet.

As you'll see on the Mutual Funds and ETFs Social Media and Twitter directory pages, only a handful of investment product providers have seized the opportunities in communicating on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. (The broadest definition of social media includes blogs and the availability of RSS feeds, and our recent eBook does discuss them. For this directory we've elected to list companies and individuals that are participating off their domains. Let us know if you disagree.)

We hope that we've missed some in this first airing of the list of social media-active asset managers and we hope you'll drop us a note about any omissions at your earliest convenience. The same goes for the even sparser listing of broker-dealers using social media.

Why even bother with a directory at this time? Because in the investment product distribution chain, it's the financial advisor (your product distributor, if you will) who's closest to the investor, your end-user. The advisor does the lion's share of communicating, and lately that's been a make or break part of the job description. Independent financial advisors are showing interest in leveraging social media tools. And, this interest is notwithstanding their significant compliance considerations--our Financial Advisors Social Media directory page cites several excellent articles describing the guardrails.

In social media, advisors see ways to enrich conversations they're already having. Our position is that these tools present asset management marketers with opportunities to have conversations (listen, then talk) that were never before possible.

A listing of Twitter-using advisors can serve as a quick-start to know who to follow as a means of understanding what's important to them and as a step toward enhancing the relevance of your marketing, including communications and customer intelligence. This will be to the mutual benefit of your company and the advisors. We expect the Twitter and social media directory of individual advisors to build quickly, and its organizational structure will evolve, as well.

Finally, there's the media. As our Investment Media Twitter directory pages show, the media are out there on Twitter, listening and interacting. You and your PR support can learn from their 140-character comments and, if you're talking, you'll be part of their input, too.

So, check the directory pages out and let us hear from you on what we can do to enhance this as a resource as you and your company inevitably contemplate social media.
 

Little more than one month after our post about highlights on mutual fund and ETF Web sites (see 5 Random Highlights of Mutual Fund, ETF Sites)  we’re back with another installment, this time all about ETFs.

Exchange-traded funds offer the advantage of lower expenses. That’s a blanket statement that’s made when comparing mutual funds to ETFs. But, how does the cost of using ETFs compare to the cost of using no-load funds? This Rydex Investments trading expenses calculator considers all the variables and gets into the particulars.

Understanding the volatility of an investment is always important, but you might say that it’s critical for an investor considering leveraged index funds. To that end, Direxion Funds offers a volatility tool for 10-, 30-, 90- and 180-day rolling periods. To fully appreciate this, you have to see the graphic reset as the periods change. Note that the user can customize this list by selecting a subset of funds.

When added to an investment portfolio, an ETF typically has a specific job to do. Other sites have correlation calculators but we like PowerShares’, which licenses Smart Money functionality (in fact, it looks as if you’d have to pay for the correlation tracker on SmartMoney.com.)

We know from experience the work that goes into the development and testing of calculators on investment sites. Somebody must think they’re important to have, and we agree, maybe for a different reason. If you’re hosting a special calculator, it has the potential to serve as link bait to draw attention to your company or site.

But too often, Marketing teams err in thinking that the work is done when the site tool is launched. No. The next step is to execute on a promotion plan. A press release at launch, followed by periodic promotions/reminders and enlisting national account and Sales teams to include mentions in every capability presentation. Maybe tack on a Compliance-approved promo in the signature of all outgoing emails.

We urge you to do this for at least three reasons:

• To produce a return on the company’s investment. What opportunities were missed out on because getting the tool out the door was the top priority? Usage will justify the resource call.
• A promotion plan will build in metrics—it will guarantee that Marketing is focused on measuring the reception of this tool. You’ll want to tie promotions to milestones for usage and other analytics. If the promotion is succeeding in driving traffic to the tool and visitors are bouncing, that’s valuable information that may prompt you to pull the promotion and go back in the lab. At least you’ll know. Ultimately, you’ll want to base subsequent development of the tool and other tools on usage and feedback you're collecting and considering.
• If you thought that it was important for your site visitors to have the tool, why risk them using the site without knowing about it? I repeatedly find gems on investment management sites with no apparent Marketing or even on-site support—no press release, no callout on the sitemap, no cross-mentions on other pages. You market the work of other areas in the company, don't be shy about marketing what Marketing had a hand in creating.

Here’s the problem we have with placing a registration process in front of your best content. The value exchange is skewed in favor of you, not the financial advisor, your customer or prospect.

Who has the power in a relationship? The movie “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” is taking this issue on right now in movie theaters across the country. The debate centers on whether the person with the power is the one who cares the most or the one who cares the least. Matthew McConaughey’s character is going to have to figure this out himself for his love life (no spoilers here).

But for the purposes of requiring registration on financial advisor sites, we respectfully ask you to look at your registration trends and password-only site traffic. Who cares more that your content be consumed or that your company builds its brand awareness? You care more, the advisor cares less. It’s the advisor who has the power in this relationship, isn’t it?

Rock The Boat Marketing’s eBook "Who Says You Can't?", published earlier in the month, provides content syndication best practices among mutual fund, ETF and other investment management companies. But in a few months those might be considered baby steps, given how two recent announcements accelerate the trend toward the broad distribution of content.

First, from Morningstar via iTunes comes a free iPhone/iPod Touch application providing access to research, investing ideas, real-time quotes, ratings, company profiles, a customizable watch list, ticker look-up and search and financial news. A Blackberry application is planned for this summer. Premium (paid-for) content is in the works, too.

With its first mobile phone app, Morningstar joins other financial services and financial information providers (e.g., Bloomberg, Bank of America, eTrade, Mint.com, Wesabe) in recognizing that people like to access information and functionality on their phones. We’ve written about this previously (see "3 Questions About Your Digital Strategy") but have to mention again now. Independent financial advisors may well be the target audience for this app on this increasingly popular content delivery platform. What could you deliver—free and without the rigamarole of a registration alongside Morningstar?

The second development comes from Amazon.com, which Wednesday enabled the ability to publish blogs on the Kindle. This is a significant opportunity to introduce your company (or further engage followers) via your content, which you make available via an RSS feed (see our eBook for more on this). As of 9 a.m. CDT Saturday morning, about 500 investing-related blogs had been submitted—none that I could find from an investment management company.

Marketers, please look into this. It’s another way to support the content you create, to meet new people and to generally make sure that your company is within a consideration set (in this case of Kindle users, whose demographics are likely to align with your customers’).

Why would someone pay a nominal monthly fee to subscribe to a blog that’s free on the Internet? I’ve subscribed to a few blogs through Kindle for more than a year now. These are blogs I really care about. I don’t want to miss their posts. I could subscribe via my feed reader but if I don’t get to them in a day or two, they’ll scroll off. On the Kindle, I can read multiple posts at my convenience. I am an engaged consumer of these blogs' content.

Oh, and also Amazon blog subscriptions will generate revenues for you.

What kind of marketer would I be if I didn’t tell you that the Rock The Boat Marketing blog is one of 139 (as of today) marketing blogs available via the Kindle? We're looking forward to Amazon (Amazon!) broadening our reach as well as to the ranking features. While it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to compete on the sort by best-selling, we’ll be focusing on feedback from the customer reviews—that’s assuming, of course, that we survive the 14-day free trial periods. Gulp.

Here are screenshots of the offer of the blog on Amazon.com and what the blog looks like on the Kindle. It looks as if readers of the RTB blog on Kindle will have to go without the wacky over-size images.

This is an exciting time to be marketing what you market—which are the investment insights that power your investment products. There is so much you’ll be able to do when you set your content free.