Good Example: Morningstar Experiments With Vine

For an example of digital experimentation in our space by a company you know, check out Morningstar’s “Investing is…” campaign.

Two weeks before its annual conference (which wrapped in Chicago Friday), Morningstar started to promote the use of the relatively new mobile app Vine. Conference attendees and others were encouraged to download the app and then use its 6-second looping video format to complete the line “Investing is…” Finished videos were to be tweeted to @MStarAdvisor.

Embedded below is one of my favorite contributed Vines (un-mute using the control in the upper right-hand corner) and then go here to see more. Be sure to click on the Older link at the bottom of the page, I prefer the homemade videos to those shot at the conference. I’ve also subscribed to the RSS feed.

When I first heard about Vine, I don't remember thinking that the format was particularly obvious or even suited to financial advisor communications. Vine is too new for Morningstar to have established an elaborate business case in support of its adoption. This is just Morningstar taking a flyer.

Brevity Inspires Creativity

According to Twitter, which acquired Vine in January, “it’s the brevity of the video that inspires creativity.”

Markets, investment opportunities and products—mostly that’s what the Morningstar conference is about. The conference makes the assumption, almost never stated and rarely explored, is that the advisors have the requisite relationship and communication skills.

But, in a bit of scheduling magic, creativity was the subject of Thursday’s luncheon speaker. Graffiti artist and corporate thought leader (love the title!) Erik Wahl encouraged attendees to break out of whatever structure that constrains them and to allow themselves to create. He delivered this message while painting no fewer than three paintings as he spoke. The audience loved it.

And, that’s where the call to creativity might have dead-ended, if not for the conference sponsor’s promotion of Vine. Vine enables the kind of creative construction that Wahl would approve of. To make a Vine, all of us windbags (present company included) in this space need to strip down to what’s essential.

Short can sometimes be more meaningful, as tweeting has already demonstrated. This is a message with wide resonance, as suggested by the popularity of Vine. Released for iOS in January, Vine Sunday ranked #4 in the Apple app store. It was introduced for Android devices just on June 3 and, by Sunday, shot to #5 in the Google Play Store.      

A Good Fit

Introducing Vine was a social-savvy thing to do, for these reasons: 

• It aligned with what Morningstar does. Morningstar supported conversations about investing well before social networking platforms and in print pre-Web. Demystifying investing is at the core of the company's value proposition.
• It was an open invitation. All were invited to contribute, not just advisors registered for the conference and not just advisors. A few in the broader ecosystem have already made Vines, but I'd expect others (including asset managers) to make more. 
  
  Similar to the Morningstar conference hashtag that’s used in the flurry of tweets commenting when the program content is underway, this extends Morningstar’s reach beyond the conference venue. Vines have a longer life than conference hashtag tweets, though, which extends the reach of the conference over time.
  
  In fact, I’d wager a guess that last week there was more Vine awareness online than onsite among attendees. Morningstar’s post-conference communications can fix that.
• The “Investing Is…” Vines are being aggregated on a Tumblr blog. Even the Morningstar content machine can benefit from a new source of user-generated and user-promoted content.
• Introducing the Vine campaign demonstrates a nimbleness that not all organizations have. Major legacy (Morningstar was celebrating its 25th year) events seek to shorten not lengthen the list of outstanding items in the final weeks leading up to the event. A last-minute brainchild is not a program planner’s friend. Yet, this idea was announced at the end of May.
  
  The Vines that have been produced thus far are a ragtag collection and probably don't represent the full extent of the creativity we are going to see. Until a few days ago, Vines by Morningstar staffers outnumbered others'. The Vines weren’t as integrated into the conference as they might have been with more time. But, sometimes you just have to go with it, and evidently social media whiz Leslie Marshall (official title: Director – Events, Magazine and Social Media) has that license. Credit for the idea itself goes to Jerry Kerns, Morningstar's editor-in-chief.

I mention all of the above not because I think Vine is transformative or even long lasting. I like this as an example of a quick hit. So many digital projects are War and Peace epics—based on extensive vetting, consensus-building and research, featuring a large cast of characters and years in the making. And yet, the very nature of digital lends itself to fast track, quick hit experiments.

Even while understanding and respecting your communications structure/constraints, I’m still going to ask: What has your digital marketing organization experimented with lately?

A Few More Notes 

• More than #MIC25 8,000 tweets were sent during the Morningstar conference. Yet—and while I don’t have the data to back this up—my sense is that fewer asset managers used the hashtag this year than in previous years. An exception: @Vanguard_FA, which also mixed with tweeps at the tweet-up.
  
  Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms were well represented on the conference program and they were out in force as exhibitors and as advertisers. But I think more could have contributed to the online conversation.
• Morningstar’s Social Media Center was hopping again this year, thanks to the RegEd team headed by Blane Warrene. Blane recorded several podcasts from the conference floor, including with ETF strategist Christian Magoon, Carl Richards of The Behavior Gap, Morningstar team members and me. 
  
• On the occasion of Morningstar's 25th anniversary, Vanguard co-founder John Bogle was scheduled as a general session speaker (in conversation with Don Phillips) to provide a historical perspective. But he's far from pleased with how the industry has evolved, including the marketing of investment products. RIAbiz covered the session, including reactions, one of which is from me. 
• My thanks to Morningstar for the invitation to attend the conference.  

Investors’ Go-To Site: Finra's BrokerCheck

I liken browsing on the Internet to going to the stacks in a university library. You pull one book down, it leads you to another and then to another. Before you know it, there’s been a lot of input but (in my case) zero output.

As much as I try not to surrender to Web-based moseying, I will indulge from time to time. Something did give me pause this week and I thought I’d share the results of my digression here.

There was a quote on the New York Times DealBook blog Monday. “People are starting to use BrokerCheck the way they use TripAdvisor,” DealBook quoted Seth E. Lipner. Lipner is a professor of law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College and he also represents investors in cases.

The post itself was about the heightened interest on the part of those regulated by Finra to pursue every possible means to remove negative information from their records. As investors increasingly rely on Finra’s BrokerCheck to vet advisors, the registered people hope to clean their files up before anybody sees anything.

While I have an interest in that, my real curiosity was in the characterization of BrokerCheck as a go-to site. How do investors even find BrokerCheck online? 

Who's Looking For A Broker Today?

Including “Broker” in the name of the database probably made sense when it was established in 1988. And, obviously, there are still brokerage businesses. But, do people really refer to individual financial advisors as “brokers” anymore, I wondered.

No, they don’t, as confirmed by this Google Trends chart, which plots the plummeting use of “stockbrokers” and derivative terms in the last 10 years. (As an aside, the search volume of financial advisor-related terms has remained relatively stable.)

Hmm, in addition to the traffic that heads directly there, BrokerCheck must get its traffic from links on other sites. I immediately hopped on over to the Majestic Site Explorer, a tool that has just been made free, and confirmed that, in fact, more than 9,000 mostly trustworthy sites (including plenty of .govs and .orgs) link to it. That’s a reflection of the benefits of being a 25-year-old entity sponsored by the well connected (online and offline) Finra. 

I then realized that I’d neglected to check Google Trends to see whether “Finra broker check” as a term had any search volume. Wow, as you can see, it does. Having peaked at 100 on Google’s scale in June 2011, search volume on the term in June 2013 was still a healthy 86 on Google’s scale. Drop Finra from the term and “broker check” searches are at about the same level.

At a time when the advisory business has evolved beyond the business practices of brokers, BrokerCheck as a term enjoys healthy brand awareness. It’s interesting to me that investors know to type in “broker check” when they’re researching someone who in all likelihood has branded himself or herself as something far different from a broker. And, a broker is probably not what they're looking for.

I’d make the argument that “broker check” and other search derivations are branded searches—this isn’t a generic search, investors have likely heard about BrokerCheck.

Since July 2010, search volume also has been up for “financial advisor check,” although interest has been spikier. But that’s not likely how an investor with no awareness of BrokerCheck would word the search, it would probably be a much longer search phrase. 

Google Trends also provides a geographic breakdown of where the BrokerCheck searches are originating from. I’m not sure what the insight is here. Are the searches in line with where the financial assets are concentrated? Are these searches an indicator of intent to initiate advisor relationships or to move money?

New York, Of Course, But In Nebraska Too

Most interesting on Google Trends is to view the change in regional search interest in the term over time. Specifically, you can see the map start to light up in 2008 in New York, California, Texas and Florida. Even though the 2013 search volume is off its 2011 peak, the searches are more widespread this year.

Ultimately, the primary takeaway here is that the name of Finra’s database search does not seem to penalize it in terms of traffic, thanks to high awareness which leads to successful searches, and also to its solid online support. A better name, social media presence and securing the BrokerCheck.com domain would help even more investors directly find it.

Financial services continues to be the least trusted industry globally, according to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer. And, financial advisory is the least trusted among financial services sub-categories. Heightened use of the Web to research advisors is another indicator of post-2008 investor determination to take responsibility for who they entrust with decisions regarding their financial assets.

While there isn't a site comparable to BrokerCheck for checking on asset managers, we can assume that an equal amount of scrutiny is being applied to the product manufacturers whose mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) advisors are recommending. 

How To Track The Content That's Shared Via Email

If you had to guess, where do you think most sharing of asset management-created content takes place—on social networks or via email and other non-social means?

My guess (and yours, too, I’ll bet): Our enthusiasm for social media notwithstanding, most of your content is shared via email, instant messages and message boards, etc. Email, in particular, is the most widely used communication channel and one where the sender can control both context and, to some extent, audience. 

The sharing that takes place via non-public (and believed to be un-measureable) exchanges was dubbed “Dark Social” by Atlantic Senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal last fall (an idea so interesting that it was one of my “20 Content Highlights To Remember From 2012.")

It’s especially germane to this business where, like fund company products, the vast majority of mutual fund and ETF content is distributed not directly by fund companies but by intermediaries. Wouldn’t you like to know the percentage of your site traffic that comes from individuals sharing links in emails? Or even the site content that's being called out in emails from financial advisors to their clients and prospects, for example? 

There is a way to get a handle on this, as identified by a few blog posts I’ve been reading lately, the highlights of which I want to share with you.

Direct Traffic Unbundled

When a financial advisor (or somebody else) includes a link to a page on your site in an email and the receiver of the email clicks on the link, that traffic is today being counted by your Web analytics. But in all likelihood, it’s being reported as direct traffic, and that’s what needs to be more closely examined.

For insights into the content that’s being shared—with sharing serving as a measure of the value of the content that you’re creating—you need to dig a little deeper into what's being attributed as direct traffic.

The classic definition of direct traffic is traffic that comes directly to your site. The assumption is that the visitor typed the URL into the browser or used a previously set bookmark. But, take a look at the specific pages for which direct traffic is reported as the referrer to your site.

Is it realistic to expect that someone arrived at your site by typing every character of those long, hairy URLs that many fund companies are unfortunately burdened with?

Example: https://performance.yourdomain.com/web/yourfundcompany/products-performance/mutual-fund-details/details/19765J624/mutual+funds/Intermediate+Municipal+Bond+Fund+A/Class+A

Probably not. The link to this page was either copied and pasted into an email or other communication (more likely) or bookmarked (less likely).

While it will be far from exact, it’s relatively easy to identify Website traffic that is sourced by email and other Dark Social sources. You just need to segregate the traffic that went straight to your home page—that’s probably the true direct traffic—from the traffic that went to pages deep in your site.

This can be done with any Web analytics package.

Segment Using Google Analytics

Here are two options for doing it with Google Analytics.

If you want to assume that all traffic that came directly to pages other than the home page was referred by Dark Social sources, click on this link while signed into Google Analytics.

You’ll see a page with the image below. Choose your profile (if you have access to more than one) and then select Create.

You’ll then be taken into Google Analytics, where you’ll see the image below. Save the segment and you’ll be able to view Dark Social as one of your available custom segments.

For a more narrow approach, click on this link as provided by the Gravity Search Marketing blog. It filters the home page and any subfolder with four characters in it. (This uses regular expressions—if you're not familiar, see the primer ebook I came across in March.) 

As noted in the post, if you promote marketing URLs with subfolders (such as www.yourdomain.com/micrositename), then you’ll want to refine this by excluding those from the Dark Social segment, too. You might also want to further refine by excluding product pages or by including only types of content (e.g., investment commentary or blog posts.)

This analysis is worth doing. Based on what I’m seeing in the analytics profiles I am privy to, your Dark Social traffic could represent anywhere from 10% to 30% of your overall traffic. It’s an overall, if crude, measure of the resonance of your content and will give you some perspective on which specific product and content pages are being shared. 

The Challenge Of Making Remarkable Content

Five, maybe six, years ago, many asset management marketing communications teams were fairly satisfied with their approach to their work.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms had corralled the words and numbers that populated their run-rate communications, mapped the review and approval processes, and implemented systems designed to assure consistency, timely automated output and even cost-efficiencies. Comparisons to donut-making were not far off.

All of the hard work invested to get to that place was by no means wasted, and enables a significant communication effort today. In the years between 2008-ish and now, a content factory-like approach has also been put in place to support the heightened demand for firms' thought leadership content pieces.  

But, our work is never done. In 2013, the marketplace’s expectations of content have advanced. Increasingly, the requirement is to create content that’s “remarkable.”

What’s required to create remarkable content is too new to be scripted, let alone engineered. Unlike the routine production of largely text-heavy communications for physical and virtual literature shelves, it's exception-based. The pursuit of remarkable content typically extends time to market (except when market conditions require accelerating it!), taps random groups and individuals not typically part of the communications creation chain, invariably increases costs and yields inconsistent results. 

If most other communications are donuts, think of remarkable content as souffles. But oh, the rush (and rewards) when a piece of content satisfies!

The Formula

There is no prescribing a formula for what makes content remarkable today. It’s likely to be visual, more likely to be non-text than text, may tell a story and may strive to move the content consumer, whether in laughter, empathy or sympathy. It’s often ambitious and in that ambition runs a very real risk of falling flat.

Sorry, this doesn’t help much, does it? If you’re like most people, you know remarkable content when you see it—whether you find it yourself or receive an endorsement of it from someone you know. In that spirit, here are three examples of non-industry content that I (along with many, many others) have LOVED or otherwise found remarkable lately, along with some comments for you. 

Help Us Experience Something

Horse races can be thrilling, but watching them on television or even in person is not a wholly satisfying experience.

Two days after this year’s Kentucky Derby, the digital sports information company Trackus published this video of the winning horse’s path from an over-the-shoulder perspective behind the jockey. It’s exhilarating to view, especially for those who watched the race and saw the jockey making his move right around the 1:17 mark. More important, it adds to the spectator's understanding of how thoroughbred races are run.

Simulating the experience of an investor is tough stuff, which is partly why this industry for so long defaulted to photos of silver-haired seniors on sailboats. In form and substance they're anachronisms and fall short of the kinds of communicating that's called for today.

Starting with Web-based portfolio tools and calculators, the industry has been trying to help investors visualize. Last year Merrill Lynch produced its Face Retirement Tool, which enables people to age a photo of themselves. And, Vanguard’s My Life Ticker campaign, released this March, aims to help investors focus on why they invest and the key factors in their investment success.

There is still lots of room for your firm to offer its own take.

Share Data That Only You Have

I challenge you to bounce off the YouTube Trends Map—you can’t, you won’t! Google’s sharing of the most popular YouTube videos right now, as filtered by location, gender, age group will keep you riveted well longer than five seconds. And then you might bookmark the URL or email/social share to others. It is remark-able.

We see limited data sharing in this space. Every quarter Fidelity produces an analysis of its 401(k) accounts as sort of a time and temperature report on workers’ readiness for retirement. PowerShares shares its ETF inflow data as well as its most viewed Website pages for the week.

$SPLV was the PowerShares #ETF with highest net inflows in April.View more in the Connection: pwr.sh/con

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 22, 2013

Most viewed funds on powershares.com this week: $QQQ $PKW $BKLN $SPLV $DBC

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 24, 2013

Data can tell a lot of stories in this business. There’s much more firms can do to creatively present the data they can share.  

It Wouldn’t Kill Us All To Enjoy A Good Laugh

Stipulated: Asset management marketing, financial communications in general, is serious business. But surely there are moments for levity.

Check out the yuks on this unsigned Tumblr blog of animated gifs, “Thoughts Of An IRO: If investor relations professionals could act freely.” (Below is just a screenshot, click on it for the full effect.) There would have been no better format to capture the spirit of this. 

I’d be surprised if there’s much LOLing at the asset management content being published today, but smiles and chuckles? It's still slim pickings when trying to find content that’s created to amuse. A few examples include the efforts made in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' Daily Advantage e-newsletter, SEI’s sharing of photos in its annual ugly sweater contest or the occasional asset manager (namely, @AdvisorShares and First Trust’s @Wesbury) tweets. 

Humor is essential to relationship-building. It’s not just other industries that are incorporating humor into their online communications, it’s financial advisors and firms that serve financial advisors, too. Check out this video from Bob Veres, editor/publisher of Inside Information.

For how much longer can we avoid humor, even while striving to produce more natural investment communications? The introduction of levity is a next frontier for asset managers seeking to optimize and humanize the reach of what they have to say. 

As a matter of fact, just in case this post didn't evoke any emotion on your part, I will close now with an amateur video that I am certain will endear itself to you as something remarkable. In your content planning, don't be too quick to rule out turning to animal videos. Just don't dwell on the words in this one.

Bonus update: Compelling content was the focus of a May 30 Webinar I participated in, along with Morningstar’s Leslie Marshall and financial advisor marketing consultant Kristen Luke. The discussion “Social Media Content Beyond 140 Characters,” as moderated by Blane Warrene of RegEd, covered a lot of ground, as you'll hear in the replay embedded below. 

What Happens When The Conversation Hits Too Close To Home

The concept of “joining the conversation” can seem a bit artificial. Few online “conversations” are in progress for any length of time and they’re not that easy to pick up on. Besides, most of the time we hit the Web with our own ideas (conversation-starters, if you will) that we hope someone else will get behind and help distribute.

But on April 23, PBS’ Frontline aired a documentary that has prompted an ongoing online conversation about retirement funding and the expense of retirement plans. As tipped off by the title, The Retirement Gamble, the content was provocative. Its position: That fund fees are eroding retirement savings while fund companies and financial advisors in the 401(k) and retirement planning business profit. In the event that you missed it, here’s the link.

The documentary stimulated lots of debate. Most if not all of the online publications that cover finance or retirement issues took note of it, as did all of the leading advisor publications and a few advisor blogs. I’ve added some links at the bottom of this post for you to read a sampling of reactions.  

For another measure of the response to this one-hour television program, see the amount of commenting and social sharing happening on the sites that reported on the documentary. The 12,000 Facebook Recommends, 1,800 tweets and 448 Google+ shares on the PBS site are just the start.

Search interest in the term “retirement gamble” and the related “frontline retirement gamble” search merited a break-out appearance on Google Trends.

Some commentators thought the coverage was fair, others thought it was biased. I’m not going to weigh in on any of that. My interest was in how fund companies would react. Years ago, there would have been no response. But the industry has developed a contemporaneous communications competency, aided by the availability of digital channels and tools. I thought that firms would chime in, on their own sites and maybe in comments on others’.

The Industry's Response

Mindful that the “crafting,” routing and review of a communication on this topic could take a few weeks at some firms, I waited to do a sweep of who said what. But even though I track mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) content fairly closely, I hadn’t seen word one. So, I did what anybody else might do (indeed, lots of searchers have already done, as the Google Trends graph shows) and went to Google.

I reviewed all the Google search results for “retirement gamble” and “retirement PBS” looking for an asset manager-authored commentary. The closest I came was an endorsement on JohnCBogle.com, whose footer has a standing disclaimer: “The opinions presented do not necessarily represent those of Vanguard's current management.” 

So, then I searched the asset manager blogs. (This is the kind of topic that blogs are made for!) While I found a few posts about proprietary retirement research (representing conversations that firms wanted to start themselves), my on-site “retirement gamble” and “PBS” searches showed up nothing.

As a final check, I turned to Ignites.com, the subscription-only news site for the mutual fund industry and yes, there were a few articles about the industry’s response to the show.

The first bore the headline, “Industry Blasts PBS Documentary on Retirement,” while “Documentary Damaged Industry's Rep: Poll” headlined the second. According to a poll taken of Ignites readership, “although 38% do not perceive The Retirement Gamble as having inflicted reputational damage, most expressing that view do not perceive the industry as being unscathed either.”

It was from the second article that I learned that at least two firms—Vanguard and Buckingham Asset Management—had commented on The Retirement Gamble on their sites. Vanguard was critical while Buckingham called it a must-watch.

The Ignites article left room for the possibility that other firms are also addressing the documentary in their own way. That made sense. It would be almost impossible to believe that public television could have aired an investigative report on a $10 trillion industry and the industry would have barely made a peep. Surely, talking points were created, media availabilities were distributed to the press, customer service people were prepped with scripts.

A Sustainable Strategy?

But, what about online and in public where much of the debate is happening?

Ignites quoted marketing consultant April Rudin as suggesting (but not necessarily agreeing with) that some firms would be choosing not to refer to the documentary by name to keep from giving it any more attention.

Seriously? The industry’s response is symptomatic of thinking that predates a time before today. A time when there was a lopsided relationship between brands and consumers. When brands, which had the resources to control messaging and communication platforms, effectively dictated who gets attention and who doesn’t.            

While asset managers can refuse to dignify the documentary with a public response, they can’t impose silence on others. As shown in their comments and social shares, empowered clients (investors and advisors) are taking to the Web to react, to compare notes with others and to wonder about whether their 401(k) plan providers’ interests are aligned with theirs.

Ignoring a controversy central to the fund industry’s business won’t make it go away. And, it will endear the industry no further to its clients.

Preparing a response without acknowledging PBS or The Retirement Gamble by name advances nothing. It simply raises the likelihood that a firm's statement will be overlooked in the online debate, some of which is driven by keyword-specific searches.  

Vanguard is one of this industry’s communications leaders but it wasn’t one of the firm’s finest moments when they published an April 29 blog post that studiously avoids the documentary’s name. I count more than 30 comments, including comments made to other commenters, on the post. The first comment was to the point: “Thanks for the article. What is the name of the documentary?” It was another commenter on the post who provided the title and a link.

This is the world we live in. Others can be expected to initiate and conduct conversations that are not flattering to us or that we would prefer to avoid. The conversation on retirement funding and affordability, specifically, is one that can benefit from more discourse by more informed entities. There is a lot of confusion out there, revealed not created by The Retirement Gamble.  

From the luxury of my perch outside your four walls, this looks like a communications opportunity for asset managers that are willing to step up, to address issues head-on, to listen and to show themselves to be accountable in public even when on the defense.     

Or, maybe you disagree. If you do or if I have somehow missed something, I hope you’ll say so below.

Also see (included in part for their mix of reader comments):

401(k) Documentary Ruffles Feathers

Advisors Stung By Frontline Attack

The Dull Task of Decoding 401(k) Fees Matters

The Retirement Gamble

Winning The Retirement Gamble: Step 1 Adjust Your Mindset