At one point, the RedDot content management system (CMS) product must have had a pretty good sales team in the financial services vertical. I’ve worked for three companies that used RedDot and seen additional implementations since I’ve been consulting.

So naturally, my interest was piqued by an email I received last week offering a whitepaper: “Four Reasons To Migrate From RedDot CMS.” I found this especially curious since the whitepaper was authored by non-linear creations, a firm that I became tangentially acquainted with when they were on a job as a RedDot integrator!
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We’ve published some changes to the Web site today that we’d like you to know about.
The Best Practices Page RIP
Not every Web site can win awards or rank on a top Web site list. The Best Practices page, part of RockTheBoatMarketing.com since its launch, was our way of acknowledging our readers’ flashes of brilliance or functionality on the investment Web sites they direct. We imagined we’d build out the page as we continued to spot best practices. Well, we did a sorry job of refreshing the content and for the last year we’ve considered the Best Practices page the shame of the site.
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A social network for financial services professionals? With today’s launch of a membership community called SocialTurns, such an idea goes from preposterous to promising.
SocialTurns’ target members are financial services marketing, compliance, technology and sales professionals who don’t get out much. As you know, employees of regulated companies are discouraged or banned from the kinds of social interaction that most other industries are experiencing and experimenting with today.
Enter Socialware, the Austin, Texas-based social middleware technology provider that has been doing an awesome job in providing whitepapers, Webinars and other information designed to educate the industry on social media. CEO Chad Bockius takes the effort up a notch with his formation of a SocialTurns community made up of what have been social media wallflowers.
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What do financial advisors want? Marketing staffs (and others) spend their days developing products and creating communications they hope will resonate with the advisor community. Despite all best efforts, some fall short.
In the 11 months since the launch of AdvisorTweets, we’ve learned a lot by “listening” to financial advisors’ tweets. In this post, we’re publishing excerpts from an interview we had with John Benedict, a 12-year financial advisor who recently broke from the FINRA-regulated broker-dealer world to establish his own registered investment advisor (RIA) J2Capital Management of Troy, MI. On Twitter, Benedict is @GeckoJB.
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We keep the focus pretty narrow here on the Rock The Boat Marketing blog. If you’re interested in digital marketing (including social media) at mutual fund and exchange-traded (ETF) firms, you’ve come to the right place. We assume that you’re going elsewhere online to follow broader marketing topics.
Here’s a new site to add to your list of general marketing resources: the MENG Blend, a co-operative blog organized by the Marketing Executives Networking Group. MENG is a nearly 2,000 member, not-for-profit organization of senior-level marketing professionals that I’ve mentioned before.
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Putnam Investments and TIAA-CREF, two of the asset management industry’s leaders in social media adoption, will be showcased at a social media session I’ll be moderating on Tuesday, Nov. 2 at Fund Forum USA 2010 in Boston.
The conference bills itself as the “only event to bring together the U.S. & the global asset management community.” Fund Forum USA 2010 runs from Nov. 2-3, preceded by a Global Distribution Summit whose theme is “restructuring the [investment product] distribution/manufacturer relationship.” It sounds fascinating.
Our social media session is scheduled from 5 to 6 on Nov. 2, immediately before the “Drinks Reception.” Also interesting.
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You may have left work Friday thinking that you knew what this workweek would bring. But our guess is that a Saturday report by The Wall Street Journal will reset priorities for Web marketing teams at many companies, including some mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms.
“Marketers are spying on Internet users,” said the Journal in an extensive report on its investigation of Internet tracking technology used by the 50 most popular U.S. Web sites plus WSJ.com.
Two financial sites—Chase.com and BankofAmerica.com—were included among the 50 reviewed. According to the Journal’s “exposure index,” users of Chase’s Web site have medium exposure and Bank of America low exposure to tracking technologies such as cookies, beacons and other trackers.
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I am doing my darnedest to do what expert bloggers do and that is to write ahead, to have some blog posts in the queue and ready to publish. But every time I try to do that, something more interesting comes along and I can’t not comment on it—which is at least consistent with the point of this blog post.
The post that I intended to publish today started with a gentle reminiscence about fly fishing on the Snake River. That was how I was planning to introduce the skill of reading one’s immediate environment and reacting appropriately. Pure gold, you’ll just have to trust me on this.
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How many opportunities do mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers have to meet financial advisors? Years ago, marketers and advisors mixed at top producer events or due diligence meetings, both today largely gone by the wayside. Traveling with the wholesaler, to the extent that it continues, may be the closest you get to a few advisors.
Online, of course, there have never been more opportunities to see advisors in action. That’s the value proposition of our sister site AdvisorTweets.com, where we’re aggregating financial advisors’ tweets 24/7. But nothing beats listening to advisors talk in complete, connected sentences minus hashtags and shortened URLs.
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