Twitter, the asset management industry’s favorite social network, made some sweeping changes today. While you can count on all of the usual suspect sites (and I say that with gratitude) to provide comprehensive coverage and analysis, I’ll weigh in here with a few comments for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers.

You could watch the video, too, although I got very little out of it beyond a touch of vertigo.

Limited To Users Of Twitter Properties

Twitter is significantly changing—I’d say improving—the experience on Twitter.com. The design will be rolled out to accounts over the next few weeks. One goal was to provide a consistent experience, regardless of the device being used to access Twitter. Changes have already been applied to Twitter’s iPhone, Android apps and to the mobile Twitter.com site. Twitter for iPad and TweetDeck, the desktop app that Twitter owns, also will be updated.

You have to pay attention because you want to be certain that your brand is taking advantage of what it can do now. But, remember that many millions of Twitter account users (it was the majority before Twitter acquired TweetDeck) access Twitter through third-party apps (notably, HootSuite on the desktop). They’re pretty convenient and many people rarely find a reason to go more than once to a profile page on Twitter.

In that respect, I find some of the language Twitter uses to describe these changes as a bit of a stretch. “Visitors to your home page” means one thing when we’re talking about visitors to the home page of your Website, something less when we’re talking about people landing on your Twitter profile page.

By providing additional information on Twitter profile pages, Twitter probably will succeed in driving more eyeballs. Just remember that many more eyeballs will be oblivious to whatever is happening on a Twitter property. Actually, the people who repeatedly consult your profile page may be a new segment for you: lurkers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Brand Pages

Remember when you lost all that real estate on your Twitter profile background? You will be getting it back and more with today’s introduction on Twitter’s advertising blog of “brand pages.”

The brand pages are an enhanced version of the Twitter profile page so you’ll probably have to take another swing through Compliance but the visit should be short and sweet.

Just a couple of dozen advertising partners, charities and individuals were part of the launch today, and @AmericanExpress the only financial company. Here’s what you’ll be able to do when Twitter eventually enables the capability for your page:

• Take advantage of space for a large header image for your logo, tagline and any other visuals.
• Promote the tweet you want to the top of your page’s timeline. It will appear auto-expanded so that visitors can see the photo or video content that you link to.

Twitter’s Re-design

There’s more detail and more to see about what’s been done with the design of Twitter. As suggested by the icons above, the experience has been divided into five states or tabs.

• Home—The home state can be expanded to show more information such as replies, retweets and embedded photos and videos. Great. By the way, for those of you who have blogs, Twitter now makes it possible to easily embed tweets into the blog, especially if you’re using WordPress or Posterous (are any asset managers using Posterous? Would love to hear).

• Connect—Previously, the @ sign referred to Mentions but it’s apparently being referred to now as Connect. With a few of the Connect enhancements, Twitter catches up with what the other apps have been able to do for a few years: To learn more about an account and easily follow it and to see an aggregated list of accounts that mentioned your account or re-tweeted one of your tweets.

This will be interesting. As Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, told Computerworld, “It will kind of put Twitter into a bit of a new space, transforming it from a tool that people use to make quick informative/snarky comments to more of a home for their informative/snarky comments.”

I monitor what’s directed publicly using the @ to asset manager Twitter accounts and some of you can’t like some of what’s tweeted to you. Previously, you may have been comforted by the fact that the reach of the tweet was limited. This changes that because all of those off-the-wall (as well as the on-the-mark) tweets are going to be aggregated right here on the Connect tab.

Twitter seems to be improving the reporting on accounts that favorite a tweet or add your account to a list. Hopefully, this heightened visibility will help drive list usage. I love the ability to create public and private Twitter lists and hope you’re using them, too.

• Discover—This tab is visual and accommodates inline viewing of tweeted images and videos. Even so, it may have limited appeal for Twitter users who already rely on something else (RSS feed reading or mobile apps like Flipboard or Zite) for discovering content.“The more you use it, the better it gets,” Twitter said in a tweet about Discover. Hmm, that sounds a lot like Zite.

Discover also shows what your connections do with the accounts they follow. See who else your connections follow, their lists and what tweets they favorite, retweet or reply to most frequently. For those of you who use Twitter to learn more about your community, having this information at the ready should be very helpful when checked consistently. Lurking? Not when you’re doing it.

• The Me and Tweet tabs look mostly unchanged.

That’s it for now. I plan to keep an eye on the reception that today’s changes get. If something new surfaces or I missed something, I’ll be back to update this post. Naturally, if you have something to say, please do so below.

Inside your company, I know there’s lots of discussion about the rationale for the new social stuff. That’s good because outside, the drumbeat continues—for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers and for all marketers. The old stuff isn’t as impressive as it used to be.

I submit two pieces of content for your consideration today.

First, specific to the investment industry, is I’m Not A Financial Professional, But I Play One On TV, an I Heart Wall Street blog post published yesterday. The blogger is Scott Bell, a financial advisor who runs a California-based RIA but keeps his blogging and wealth managing separate. In aggregating six YouTube videos of celebrity commercials over time, the point of the post is to challenge the SEC’s position prohibiting the use of clients in testimonials.

Just to give you a taste, here’s one involving an introduction by Betty White to life insurance policy settlements.

“…The regulators don’t want actual clients on an Investment Adviser’s Linkedin or Facebook page saying stuff like, ‘He’s honest, OR he always takes my call, OR he took time to explain everything…’ That would constitute way too much of an endorsement. Conversely, hiring Mike Dyczko (Dtika’s real last name) to shill an annuity? Totally kosher,” writes Bell.

Uh-oh, A Dumb Marketing Idea?

When I landed on the post and saw what it was about, the first thing I did was search for “marketing.” Because we all know that a Marketing team was behind each and every one of those videos. Somebody in Marketing made the argument, secured the budget, was the staff point person in the celebrity negotiation, went to the shoot, led the celebration of its first airing, maybe drove the posting to YouTube, etc. Luckily, this post didn’t comment on Marketing’s responsibility (culpability?).

Marketing was implied, however, in this line: “And it must work, or else why would companies keep doing it?”

The success of celebrity endorsements across-the-board is an under-studied topic and I have no contribution to make here. But I will opine that for many companies, the authority and budget to execute a celebrity endorsement has represented a coming of age, almost a vote of confidence in the brand that would no doubt be enhanced.

Do the endorsements “work” against articulated goals? It’s a valid question to ask today. And, does the return on investment (ROI) calculation take into consideration the extent to which they “turn off” important constituents? I Heart Wall Street is not alone in his sentiment. Follow some financial advisors on Twitter and you’ll see plenty of snide remarks about the current crop of endorsers.

Authenticity: An Enterprise-Wide Project

Never mind the SEC (easy for me to say, right?), I believe celebrity endorsements are quickly becoming an anachronism. They reek of fakeness at a time when authenticity is what builds trust. With all due respect, did Betty White embody the vision and commitment of the insurance company she’s vouching for? Or, was she available and at the right price—as she was when she also endorsed Q-Tips and Tyco Toys?

And this is pretty much where I ended this post last night until I watched the following video this morning, which you too might find relevant.

In the almost 5-minute video, Nate Elliott, Forrester Research vice president, principal analyst, says he believes there’s a difference between the development of a “new-fashioned” brand and an “old-fashioned” brand. Listen for the different role that Elliott believes Marketing plays in the collaborative building of the new-fashioned brand—and the timing of the branding messages. Not to be a spoiler but where do you think celebrity endorsements fit into a new-fashioned brand model?

How’s that mobile strategy coming along? Considering the growing mound of data reporting financial advisor and investor reliance on smartphones, there isn’t a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm today that isn’t giving some thought to mobile.

Assuming that’s the case, you and your team really need to spend at least 40 minutes watching this 76-minute video by Avinash Kaushik. Kaushik is the digital marketing evangelist for Google and Web analytics guru that I’ve mentioned a few times previously.

Kaushik’s presentation packs a one-two punch. In the first-half, he offers some insights on the “profound” ways mobile can change marketing. The second half, while extremely valuable, is focused on measurement and likely to appeal to a subset of your team. If you’re a Google Analytics user, hang in there for a link to a custom report he created.

Be on guard as you watch because he starts with three stories about how companies have delighted him (he’s quite a consumer) with their mobile presences. About 24 minutes in, though, Kaushik demonstrates how mostly “sad” many mobile efforts are today.

You’ll feel for the BMW team as he details how they disappoint him by not optimizing for his Samsung Galaxy Tab form factor. When Kaushik says, “BMW owners have tablets and Audi owners have tablets,” guess who I was thinking of? Yep, investors have smartphones and tablets.

Kaushik says, “We have to take the mobile platform seriously and create experiences that are material and accretive to our brand value rather than destructive” and there’s no disagreeing with him. Enjoy.

As you likely know by now, FINRA yesterday published Regulatory Notice 11-39 Guidance on Social Networking Websites and Business Communications. This guidance updates Regulatory Notice 10-06 Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites.

Many agree with The Wall Street Journal’s characterization that the guidance provides finer points on how firms and FINRA-regulated financial advisors use the site. The consensus is that it doesn’t change any of the already articulated rules.

I am the furthest thing from a Compliance expert. But for as long as I was inside a FINRA-regulated firm and definitely now that I’m out and trying to help FINRA-regulated firms communicate, the least I can do is know the rules. In the last 24 hours, I’ve read the guidance and the analysis that’s surfaced so far. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find excerpts I’ve extracted from Bill Winterberg’s FPPad.com, FA-mag.com, HearsaySocial.com and kasina’s blog. Be sure to follow the links to read the full comments.

A Logo On Another Site Represents Adoption/Entanglement

While most of this new guidance expands on the parameters that were first published in January 2010, what I’m hoping to learn more about is new narrative on “co-branding a third-party site.” I can think of scenarios where this would clip the wings of a financial advisory firm seeking to support an online or offline business or local community. But it’s even more relevant for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers.

Here are the relevant questions:

Q10: To what extent is a firm responsible for any third-party website that the firm or its associated person “co-brands”?

A10:  Under NASD Rule 2210, a firm that co-brands any part of a third-party site, such as by placing the firm’s logo prominently on the site, is responsible for the content of the entire site. Under these circumstances, FINRA considers the firm to have adopted the content on that site. A firm is responsible under NASD Rule 2210 for content on a linked third-party site if the firm has adopted or become entangled with its content.

Regulatory Notice 10-06 describes the “adoption” and “entanglement” theories as they apply to third-party posts on a firm’s social media sites. FINRA considers a firm to have adopted content in a third-party post if the firm or its personnel explicitly or implicitly endorse or approve the post.

Q11: When is a firm not responsible for the content on a third-party site to which it links?

A11:  A firm may establish a link to the site of an independent third party without assuming responsibility for the content of that site under NASD Rule 2210 if:

• the firm does not “adopt” or become “entangled” with the content of the third-party site; and
• the firm does not know or have reason to know that the site contains false or misleading information.

In other words, co-branding—which FINRA describes as placing a logo prominently on another site—represents adoption and entanglement and exposes the firm to liability for the content of the site. What am I missing here? Isn’t placing a logo on another site advertising (versus social media)? But more important, does this represent a new limitation?

I searched through all the materials I’ve saved since January 2010 and can’t find a mention about FINRA, co-branding and social media. So, I think I’m safe in saying that this is a new idea being introduced in Regulatory Notice 11-39. But why? Surely, there are allowable limits for co-branding that stop short of holding the marketer responsible for the content of a third-party site.

Investment regulation specialist attorney Larry Stadulis of Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young told me via email this morning that he’s concerned about the scope of this Q & A, too. He’d already asked FINRA for clarification.

A relatively safe guess is that the co-branding statement is more broad than was intended. It’s unfortunate, though, given the time that elapsed between Guidance 1.0 and 2.0 and the confusion/anxiety that already surrounds the industry’s consideration of social media. I’m sure we’ll all feel better when FINRA clarifies.

Google’s new Think Insights, announced last week as a project designed to “help marketers make smarter decisions,” includes two 2010 research presentations that shed light on investors’ search for information online:

• “The Role of Search in Brokerage Account Shopping,” citing Google/Compete 2010 data
• “Inside Look Into The Financially-Minded Digitally-Connected Baby Boomer” with Google/Nielsen Online/Sterling data

Both are embedded below and here are a few notes from my review. By the way, Google doesn’t number its title slides so the slide numbers I refer to below are to enable you to enter the number to go to the slide. It will be one off the number that appears on the slide.

Searchers Likelier To Apply, Bring Larger Account Balances

OK, this post is a bit of a stretch on a blog focused on digital marketing for the investment industry.

• Wells Fargo last week used a flash mob in New York’s Times Square to celebrate a banking event—but hey, Wells has investment management and brokerage units.
• The event was physical not digital, but they did link it to a #HelloNY hashtag on Twitter.
• We might have missed it if the video hadn’t been uploaded to YouTube yesterday.

C’mon, you have to admire the thinking, the energy, the bystanders’ guarded delight…and the restraint shown in not dressing each of the dancers in Wells-branded sweatshirts. Also, note that as of this writing, comments are still enabled on YouTube.

More of this, please.

You work all day every day and many days into the evening. Once in a while you’re asked to summarize what you do, your accomplishments, the ways in which you’ve contributed to the success of your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm. What do you point to?

Five marketers were considered for Fund Action and Fund Directions’ Marketer of the Year, with the award last night going to Marty Willis, chief marketing officer of OppenheimerFunds (who I happened to mention in Monday’s post). Congratulations to Marty and her team.

Congratulations also to the other marketers nominated: Colin Kelton, principal in the retail investor group, Vanguard Group; Wendy Harrington, executive vice president of global marketing services, Franklin Templeton; and Gary MacDonald, managing director, global head of ETF marketing, State Street Global Advisors, and to their teams.

The nomination process provides the rest of us with a peek at how leading asset management marketers link their work and metrics to their firms’ success. The following list of the marketers’ accomplishments is extracted from a January 28 Fund Action page profiling the nominees. I’ve stripped some of the detail and sorted the activity by type. Be sure to visit Fund Action for the complete stories.

Advertising

• Digital advertising drove above industry-average sales growth (Oppenheimer)
• An integrated (online, print and social) advertising campaign that grew ETF assets more than 50%, producing a better than 2% gain in market share in one year (Vanguard)
• Print, digital and broadcast TV ads driving 10%-plus asset growth and, with one ETF, triple the inflows of the previous two years (State Street)
• A robust campaign that resulted in three focus funds more than tripling net inflows from 2009 (Franklin Templeton)
• QR codes added to print ads, an industry first (Oppenheimer)

Positioning

• Overcoming the 2009 leader (Fidelity) to become the largest asset manager in the world (Vanguard)
• Turning Vanguard into a verb (Vanguard)
• Arranging for portfolio managers to be regulars on CNBC’s Closing Bell and Squawk Box (Oppenheimer)

Broadening distribution

• More than 9,000 advisors selling an equity fund, a first in the firm’s history (Franklin Templeton)

Website

• 42% increase in downloads from the firm’s Website (Oppenheimer)
• Making the Website accessible via mobile phones (Oppenheimer)

Social media

• The launch of the industry’s leading (in term of followers totaling 17,000) Facebook and Twitter accounts (Vanguard)
• Partnering with The Wall Street Journal to launch a video series that attracted 96,000 views (State Street)
• Launch of a YouTube channel, with one video drawing 20,000 views (Oppenheimer)

Literature

• 500,000 pieces of campaign literature ordered (Franklin Templeton)

What story do you tell and what metrics do you use to support it?

A recent report includes some long-sought benchmarking data on the effectiveness of online display advertising by brokerage and investment firms, and the good news is that the ads are among the most successful in the financial services vertical.

MediaMind, a provider of digital advertising solutions, is sharing its analysis of more than 28 billion ads created by the industry in “Financial Services: Making Smart Investments in Online Advertising,” a 25-page research report and mini-poster infographic. You can also watch a 1:19 video summarizing the results. I saw the video on the Investius blog, which keeps an eye on video adoption, in advertising and otherwise, within financial services.

Just three highlights from the research:

• MediaMind cites a 2010 Kantar Media study that estimates that the global financial services industry spent $2.7 billion overall on online display ads in 2009. Online display is easily the most invested-in channel, representing almost twice what’s spent on newspaper advertising. Brokerage and investment firms represented about 6% of financial services spending on online display ads. That would have totaled $162 million in 2009.

• Between Q4 2009 to Q3 2010, more than 50% of global financial services impressions served by MediaMind advertised banking services. But the most effective advertising—in terms of producing responses and driving conversions—were ads by credit card companies. And, as you can see in the graph below, brokerage and investment ads were the second most effective.

Now you have benchmarks to use to evaluate the effectiveness of your online advertising. The brokerage/investment average clickthrough rate (CTR) for online display ads: 0.20% and the average conversion rate: 0.063%. Last year, MediaMind reported that the average CTR was about 0.09% and the average conversion rate was .017%.

As good as it is to see the industry do well in a comparison to other financial services providers and industry in general, these numbers are low enough to keep anyone’s heads from swelling.
• The findings point to the importance of serving the most impactful ad with the right offer to users the first time. According to MediaMind, online users are about 30% more likely to convert at the first exposure to a financial services ad. If there’s no interest with the first exposure, the likelihood of users acting after additional exposures is significantly reduced.

Be sure to download the full research, which provides lots of detail and insights about driving online ad success.

One of the most exciting mornings I’ve had as a marketer was the morning I was part of the Claymore team that launched a solar exchange-traded fund (ETF). Day 1 is so important in an ETF launch and of course the firm’s Sales and Marketing was behind it. But, it was a time of heightened interest in solar energy and it felt like the ETF was part of a much bigger discussion.

I was remembering that yesterday afternoon while listening to a Washington Post Webinar presentation on digital media. We supported that 2008 ETF launch with every digital marketing tactic available. But Rochelle Sanchirico, the Post’s Digital Marketing Director, touched on a new tactic that asset manager marketers might want to consider for important theme-based campaigns.

Last November, the Post paid to promote a trend—#election—on Twitter from early in the morning the day before midterms Election Day to early in the morning the day after. It was a safe guess that people tweeting about the elections would use the #election hashtag and the Post assured that it would be in the mix.

The #election “promoted trend” was visible to all users on Twitter.com. Users who clicked on it went to a page of #election Twitter search results with a related “promoted tweet” from the Post parked at the top of the page. The tweet was refreshed throughout the period. You can see a screenshot and read more about it on this page, and below is a grainy but good video explanation of this kind of advertising from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

Sanchirico said the Post set three goals for the tactic:

• To create awareness of the Washington Post brand around the elections
• To drive conversations about the midterm elections
• To refer interest to the Washington Post election coverage, thereby supporting advertisers

The campaign doubled the Post Twitter account average follows and account mentions and it doubled Twitter-referred traffic to the site. A positive outcome, although Sanchirico didn’t go overboard about it.

Other brands have promoted trends, but the Washington Post was the first news organization to give it a go. I don’t know whether any investment firms have tried it yet.

Communicating Within Context

What’s intriguing about this for investment marketing is that so often we communicate without context. In almost all cases, asset manager advertising is oblivious to the content it surrounds or interrupts. That’s also true of product announcement emails or postcards.

But typically there’s a marketplace rationale for the communication, whether it has an institutional focus (retirement readiness, for example) or is product-based. The trick is connecting with the people for whom the communication will resonate.

Claymore’s product was the first solar ETF, with one expected to follow from another provider in just a few weeks. It was important to make sure that solar-focused investors (today, they might be those following a #solar hashtag) knew that there was a solar ETF before there was a second solar ETF.

The challenge was to quickly become part of a conversation already underway. That, I think, is the potential value of the promoted trend.

Your Research

In researching whether promoted trends are something to add to your box of possibilities, you’d want to consider:

• Cost: Consumer brands are interested in these, which drives up the pricing. Early reports said advertisers were paying $70,000 for one day and those estimates have since climbed.
• Conversation fit: Your trend must be related to something that’s already popular on Twitter or expected to be.
• Control: “Tweets on the search results page for promoted trends are unfiltered, open and authentic,” says Twitter. Translation: Your firm might temporarily own the trend but it will have no control over what’s said on the trend’s search results page.
• Content: With your trend secured and your prominent Twitter position assured, compelling but medium-appropriate tweets would need to be written to fully leverage your visibility. Wait a minute, I’ve just described an old advertising model which involves buying the space and then filling it. Consider this only if you have a rich, compelling, contemporary (others have to be talking about it, too, remember) story to tell over a series of promoted tweets.
• Measurement: Yes, metrics had better be in place.

The entire Washington Post presentation, which was sponsored by Covario in conjunction with SES London,  SES New York,  ClickZ.com and SearchEngineWatch.com, is worth listening to, I’ll update this page when information about the on-demand presentation is available.

The week is starting with two app-related news items—Vanguard’s release of an iPhone app for advisors and the news that financial services firms are the enterprises most likely to adopt iPads. We cheer both announcements, as you’ll read below in a post that first appeared on the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) Blend site on September 23. The MENG Blend is a blogging initiative featuring bloggers from multiple marketing disciplines and industries. I blog on online marketing and social media.

If we were friends sitting across the table from one another, I’d test your patience by showing you “just one more” application on my iPad.

If we were digital marketing colleagues, we might talk about mobile platforms and analytics.

But recognizing that the readers of the MENG Blend blog are marketing colleagues of digital and non-digital stripes, I’ll keep this post at a higher level. Really, I just want to marvel at the opportunity before us today to associate our companies and brands with mobile products that engender such affection among users.

In these grim economic times, iPads, iPhones, Droids, Nexus Ones, etc. daily bring delight to their owners. A driver picked me up at an airport last week and spent the entire 45-minute drive showing off what he could do on his Droid. He said his phone and its apps have changed his life, and he meant it.

I’m a dispassionate Blackberry user but my iPad? Don’t get me started.

‘We’re More Than Skin And Bones’

Creativity in iPad applications is driving a renaissance in communicating. Does Brand X have an app, I find myself wondering in the same way I wondered whether Brand X had a Web site in the mid-1990s. Back then, a search for a company site (using Yahoo, of course) might have found the domain and there was some enthusiasm for the new and different information the company was publishing. But the difference between those primitive Web presences and many early-out-of-the-gate brand apps is that apps are visual, interactive and even witty.

To see for yourself, go to www.search.twitter.com and search for the expression “I love this app.” As some who loves lots of apps, I can tell you that many companies are delivering more than aesthetic and functionality. They’re bundling the best of their brand in an app.

Some marketers can’t justify full-scale mobile application development because it’s difficult today to make a case for a financial return on investment. Please don’t let that defer your learning about the capabilities of the iPad and smartphones as well as exploring the bonds that are being developed. (An easy and enjoyable way to peek in on the iPad world is to watch Leo Laporte’s iPad Today podcast, which celebrates the newest and the best in iPad apps.)

“We’re more than skin and bones with credit cards.” That line was written by usability expert Kim Krause Berg on an April 24, 2009, Searchengineland post headlined “How Does Your Web Site Make Visitors Feel?” Berg studies the relationship between computers and people. In the post, she described herself as fascinated by Web sites and how and whether decisions made by Web site designers and bloggers, for example, affect us “emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually.”

It’s the rare corporate Web site that isn’t today conforming to some standard conventions on the Web—logo on the left, search on the right and so on. Consistency for usability, I get it and I support best practices. But in many cases, standardized design and publishing systems have triumphed over communications inspiration, and the result online is just as much a yawner as the brochures that we’ve evolved away from.

Today’s iPad apps are fresh, original expressions, as you can see in the image of the ABC News globe—spin it to see the news—or in the MSNBC app’s navigation via a 360-degree version of its peacock.

Yes, there’s a learning curve for the user of almost every app. Most apps make the learning worth the user’s while. At the same time, think of insights being gained by the brands.

App producers are producing “energy,” to use a word that Berg has associated with Web sites. In her post last year, she cited the work of Gerzema and Lebar, authors of The Brand Bubble. Gerzema and Lebar perform energy audits as a means of getting to know a new client. They believe that a firm’s brand, organizational, operational and cultural energy can factor into a competitive advantage.

These loveable apps are proving the point on the mobile platform. Is there a marketer alive who doesn’t want to be part of such a high-engagement, positive-energy relationship?