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.

Even at that time and even though Kemper was based in downtown Chicago, it felt as if we were an outpost operation relying on the Pony Express to deliver news of the outside world. Given the inherent delay—we were reviewing publications from the previous quarter in the best case—it seemed like a hopelessly stale way to “keep up.”

The Internet has made everything better, of course. Financial services marketers, specifically, have easy real-time access to how their competitors’ are communicating. Now there’s no need to try to read the minds of distributors---either the broker-dealers or the financial advisors themselves. Ditto for the end-investors. Web sites, blogs, message boards, feeds, alerts, tweets—all of it can keep the curious marketer informed. (And we try to help, too, by tracking Best Practices.)

Thanks to the financial markets madness, your business—the marketing of investment advice and products—has been on the mind of lots of governments, organizations and one-stop shops lately. Have you seen how others are communicating about what’s going on? Today's generation of marketers can learn so much and yes, be inspired by the following fresh approaches and smart use of online delivery.

A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis, a "loose flowchart" from WallStats.com, is masterful in its simplicity. Compliance would insist on a whole lot more disclosure. Still…why not take a stab at more story-telling graphs with fewer words?

Two Understanding The Financial Crisis videos have been created by Enspire Learning. Enspire describes itself as “a team of training professionals, creative writers, multimedia artists, and game developers” whose work includes some financially-focused videos. I’m linking to the first Understanding The Financial Crisis YouTube file embedded in a financial planner’s blog, Prudent Investing by Adam Zuercher.

The point: Easy-to-understand explanations are valued by financial advisors—and they often show their appreciation by linking to your content. One of our favorite topics lately is how Marketing can add significant value by creating content with legs.

This Flash video is an example of a financial planner (the Behavior Gap) taking it upon himself to produce an interesting way to present a story every investment management company uses the long form to tell. Again, a similar Marketing/Compliance collaboration would have produced lots more attribution but let’s be honest with ourselves: Would Compliance have flat-out vetoed this approach? I doubt it.

Times are tough, the ranks are thinning, nobody’s happy and you could be worried about your own survivability. Here’s hoping these inspire you to re-focus and find a way to take a fresh crack at telling what may be the most important story of your career.

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.

While Dave Swanson, top dog at SwanDog, has blogged about the content offer, I’ll comment here about widgets and their place in digital marketing in the asset management space.

There’s something appealing about just the word widget. Widgets, portable snippets of code, are cute and compact. Who wouldn’t want one? But don’t underestimate the potential to use them to distribute your content and messaging. Advisors and investors just aren't that into asset managers' Web sites. That's the cold hard reality for asset managers whose function is as manufacturers of mutual funds and other investment products.

Only Fidelity and Vanguard—who draw millions of visits a month (see our special report)--can realistically expect to rely on their site as a primary means of distributing their content. (But also see below about Fidelity and Vanguard-related widgets.)

While continuing to maintain and develop their brand sites, the vast majority of investment product marketers need to be thinking about taking their content on the road. With the DailyDog, SwanDog (and Rock The Boat is contributing content, too) is extending the reach of its message, and that’s what a widget can do for your organization.

In planning the DailyDog, we were faced with some of the same challenges you can expect.

• What to develop the widget in? Choices abound and standardization has yet to take place. 50000feet liked Adobe Air because it's versatile, powerful and works on both the PC and the Mac.
   
• Will our target market adopt it? It’s not that we doubt your intellectual curiosity but we know from experience the limits that IT imposes on desktop downloads. Non-boat-rockers may prefer to avoid confrontation altogether and add "Download the DailyDog” to their ever-expanding list called "Work on This at Home."

But, if your access to our widget or social media applications in general is being blocked, we urge you to appeal this. More than anyone, IT can understand the importance of keeping current. As they do for their work, they can create a secure testing and learning environment for you, and Compliance can find a way to hold you accountable.

Restrictions on where you and your staff go online while at work have the very real potential of limiting your ability to continue to freshen your skills as a digital marketer. They threaten the value of the contribution you can make to your organization going forward, which in turn threatens the firm’s ability to remain competitive.

• Can we maintain it? The only way I survived our first content planning session was to threaten a tell-all blog post as Dave and Bill from SwanDog initially balked at limitations imposed by the structure (No, there’s no negotiating with the character limits and yes, each entry needs a category heading!) and devolved into debating the resume of TV’s Richard Dawson. (Best not to ask.) But a lack of ideas we are not suffering from. We’re confident we’ll be able to send daily marketing nudges to you indefinitely.

We recognize that in your organization a widget represents a new delivery means for IT to support and a new content development demand. Can you justify this added work? How are you going to defend against the rumblings that is just another case of Marketing falling for hype and wanting the next shiny object?

Easy. A widget itself isn’t the strategy—content syndication is the strategy in which a single widget plays a tactical role. Content syndication is what our most thoughtful clients are working on today.

The first widget we’re aware of in this space was introduced by iShares. Whether widgets are in your immediate plans or not, you have to read Chadwick Greenhalgh’s Online Media Daily post in which he explains how iShares’ thinking led to the widget.

"It's not that the results were so earth-shattering that the company canceled all other forms of marketing. However, it was successful enough that our clients started tracking it like a normal part of their media mix. And enough people were using the widget that we were authorized to build a second one," writes Greenhalgh of Euro RSCG Edge.

We highlight the iShares widget on our Best Practices page. In addition, we’re aware of Fidelity Labs' Market Monitor widget (for the PC) and gadget (for the Mac). American Century Investments offers a Google gadget which, as you can see below, can be embedded on a Web page.

And, we know of at least a few others in the works.

To make a long blog post short, we're unleashing the DailyDog for a few reasons. To deliver consulting atoms (see SwanDog's post) and to demonstrate that the dogs in the SwanDog/RTB pound are eating their own dog food. Let us know when you launch your widget—or anything else you’re working on to get the word out. 

One of my favorite Jerry Seinfeld quotes is from when he first became a father. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s along the lines of “Of course, babies are cute. No question. But you know what they’re here for, right? Make no mistake about it. They’re here to replace us. They’re our replacements.”

I thought of that yesterday as I followed a link included in a random email from friend and former colleague Laura Gregg, now with Northern Trust Investments.

Message from Annie Gregg:
Hello Family and Friends, please watch this short video message from Annie. You'll be glad you did!

The purpose of Annie’s two-minute video is to sell Girl Scout cookies (and we get the message!) but it also serves as a crash course of why social media works.

• First, it’s a video. Hard to imagine a different format (not text, not audio, not a presentation) that suits this message better.
• Her delivery evokes an emotional response. Note that she doesn’t dwell on the attributes of her product. She’s selling the benefits.
• Her obvious preparation (script and set) doesn’t stand in the way of her natural enthusiasm for her message--good call, Annie, to deliver your message standing rather than sitting down.
• By the time she asks for the order, you find yourself wishing she had a toll-free number so you could respond right then and there.
• Finally, it’s so good it’s viral—the very reason to do video.

I want to positively reinforce this social media leadership so I’ll be buying cookies from Annie. (If you watch the video and are equally moved, Annie’s parents would like to qualify that the free shipping offer is limited to friends and family.)

But there’s a lesson in here for the rest of us, isn’t there? Annie's mother freely acknowledges that social media doesn't come naturally to her. The average person (and Laura's way above average) working in the asset management space today may be the last generation not to know about Scribd, Lala, TweetDeck.

Take a spin around the Web sites in our industry and where you find video, you’re likely to see a lot of wooden figures delivering deadly boring messages. In all likelihood, you were part of the production and if you were, I know from experience that the sheer act of getting the video out the door was an accomplishment not to be minimized. Still. We can’t stop pushing for better. There’s a reason CNBC’s Fast Money is so well watched by our target audience of financial advisors and investors—it’s entertaining and informative.

Entertaining and informative? Job descriptions in this industry rarely—OK, never—include those words but that doesn’t give our generation of communicators a pass. Even if it takes pushing and pulling the people in organizations who still can get by not being entertaining and informative (and we all know where they sit) we need to get there to continue to be relevant—and to do the marketers’ job, which is to help sell.

Let Annie, your children, nieces and nephews, junior or otherwise social media-inclined colleagues take you to school on how the bar has been raised on effective communicating. (Rock The Boat could give you some ideas, too.)

I turned to Google Trends today just to satisfy a curiosity, but the trends data makes me wonder about the opportunity ahead for IRA marketers.

Based on the data filtered for the U.S. only, searches for the term “IRAs” are well off their historical pattern. As you can see, interest in IRAs in the previous four years began to climb toward the end of the fourth quarter and peaked the next spring, just before April 15.

But at the end of 2008, interest in IRAs as a term was still muted.

Are search trends predictive? A few months ago, Google demonstrated its belief in them when it introduced Google Flu Trends. Google had compared its flu-related search queries with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some searches were popular exactly when flu season is happening. Now Google is using the flu search data to estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

Back to financial services, here’s my logic in calling attention to the IRA trend. We are at a time of year when searches should be on the upswing. Add to that the thousands of people involuntarily leaving their jobs with 401(k)s to be rolled over. I think this sets up for a ferocious level of searches for valuable IRA content in the next few months.

A Google search of IRAs today produced close to 7 million pages of results and 24 pages of 287 sponsored links. (Really? You AdWords buyers think that makes sense?) And yet, look at the natural search results and you’ll see that no single provider dominates the results. If I were searching, I think I’d find these results wholly unsatisfying and revert instead to social search sites like Delicious or Yahoo Answers or even Twitter.

What will the IRA season be like? How much of it will be researched and conducted online? Clearly, competition will be fierce but my bet is that there will be big winners. More important, I believe that there is immense opportunity to win this year not with the traditional advertising messages but with content that creative marketers distribute far and wide.
 

The Firefox browser has climbed to more than 21% market share, according to the December 2008 market share report from Net Applications. It started 2008 with a 17% share.

At the minimum, Website publishers should be assuring that their designs are compatible across the leading browsers. Not every one is confined to the all-Microsoft Office (including Internet Explorer) world that asset management companies live in.

Your Web analytics can tell you how the market share breakdown jibes with your site users. As a check of what the non-Internet Explorer users see, go to Browsershots.org for screenshots of how your site looks using Firefox, Safari, Chrome and any other browsers. Submit your URL and the request will be added to the job queue.

How it works: Distributed computers open your website in their browsers, make screenshots and upload them to Browsershots’ central server. The process can take several minutes to hours so be sure to select only the browsers your analytics suggest you should care about. Browsershots is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl.

We highly recommend that you give Firefox a try as your own browser. It’s faster, more secure and once you’ve sampled a few of the 5,000 Firefox add-ons (here’s a list of the most popular), you’re likely to think of Internet Explorer as soooo 2008.