As inspired by our dear departed Yahoo Internet Life’s Old Way/Net Way feature years ago, we last month teed up the idea of contrasting some Old Way/Social Way examples. This is the second in an occasional series.

Old Way: Advisor Log-ins

Nearly every mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web site has a financial advisor area that requires registration. The old old way (still practiced on some sites today) is to present all unregistered or un-logged-in advisors with a roadblock—a page with nothing on it but a form to use to register or to log in. More progressive sites (see Wells Fargo Advantage Funds and Lord Abbett) start communicating even as they’re asking advisors to register for more.

Our perspective on site registration has evolved. Registration is not necessary to surface new names for asset managers. There is a finite universe of professionals licensed to sell investment products and it’s available from Discovery. The typical asset manager has access to this database and works with a CRM that includes records of advisors’ augmented by Sales’ notes.

An argument might be made that “leads” come in the form of advisor registrations to the site. But Sales tends not to value these. With some notable exceptions, asset managers have yet to fully integrate registered advisor Web activity and CRMs. If there is a link, it tends to be weak (i.e., registrations may be noted but subsequent site use not noted, not reported and not consulted by Sales or Marketing).

Finally and most germane to this discussion, the majority of content behind a password is Compliance-approved for client use. By and large, it is not content that only advisors can see. We expand on that below.

In other words, the practical value of site registration has fallen far short of the theoretical argument for it. Oh—and this is what we’ve grown increasingly sensitive to—registration on a site satisfies asset manager requirements. Customization and personalization is offered on some sites today, but user experience was never the primary motivation for registration.

Site functionality that favors the site sponsor and not the user? That’s the old way.

Social Way: Web Authentication

Elsewhere with Web-delivered communications and increasingly on mobile phones and televisions, people are connecting. While the majority of people are still spectators (see Forrester’s Social Technographics ladder), they’re showing a strong interest in content that’s shared and endorsed by their community. The integration of content and community adds relevance and heightens the value of the experience of consuming content. Hence, the hundreds of comments on blog posts, live chats during podcasts, the Twitter crawl on CNN.

Developers are hustling to accommodate the growing preference for what’s called “social browsing.” Here are just a few examples.

On the desktop: RockMelt is a browser launching in beta this week that frames the browsing experience with the social activity of the browser’s Facebook and Twitter connections. The first six minutes of this video with Robert Scoble and the developers will give you an idea of the interaction that’s being delivered.

Using applications: Flipboard is an iPad app that attracted a lot of attention when it launched a few months ago. I can give personal testimony to my ride on the bandwagon. Flipboard is an awesome way to keep up with the content that’s being recommended by the people I follow on Twitter and my skimpy collection of Facebook friends.

Over the weekend I read a Fast Company blog post that reported that 21-29 year-old females spend as much as five hours per day on Facebook. The finding: Social browsing including reading status updates and clicking on content links had “largely replaced all other forms of Web browsing.”

There were lots of skeptics and critics among the commenters to this post. But I realized that it’s true of me (not the five hours on Facebook part) and I am neither 21-29 nor an enthusiastic Facebook user.

Because of the experience Flipboard provides and the integration, I spend most of my recreational (versus purpose-driven) browsing time with the content endorsed by my social circle. (We’ve commented on the power of social circle search results before. This is a step further.)

Take a look at this screenshot from my Flipboard app. It shows an article from Mashable. Yep, I’m connecting with my favorite site publishers on Facebook. I like this better than reading the same article on the open Web, and see how easy it is for me to weigh in and see what others have to say. Flipboard may push me to do a better job of connecting on Facebook just to include others as content curators.

Bottomline for content publishers: Want to get my attention or the attention of other social browsers? Get somebody to endorse it on the social sites.

On the television: Among its innovations, the Google TV platform enables the watching of a Twitter feed on the same screen as a televised event—think of watching the World Cup or the Dancing With The Stars finals and related tweets on the same screen. To see that specific feature, go to 1:25 on the video below.

Authentication For A Different Purpose

So by now, are you thinking what I’m thinking? The maintaining of advisor-only Web sites that require proprietary registration schemes is at odds with the social sharing that’s sweeping the Web today.

At the highest level, your firm produces content for advisors to use and, ideally, share. What are the obstacles? It’s not that advisors don’t share—of course, they do, as can be seen daily on AdvisorTweets.com, in their LinkedIn and Facebook activity and on their blogs. It’s not that your content isn’t high value, it is and you’re steadily working on improving it. The obstacle is what years ago was meant to serve as an obstacle.

What if asset managers flipped this whole authentication procedure on end? First, how about offering a second option for signing in? Options include Web authentication standards Facebook Connect (the most controversial and yet most ubiquitous), OAuth (used by Twitter) and OpenID. (See this article for a great current discussion of the differences between the three.)

The screenshot below shows the log-in menu on WashingtonPost.com, one of more than 80,000 sites that had integrated Facebook Connect which had been used by 60 million people as of December 2009. See how it accommodates two sign-in procedures that would yield more information to the publisher and yet it also offers the Facebook Connect sign-in.

In the Facebook scenario on a mutual fund or ETF site, the advisor who wants to maintain his social identity would sign in using a fast and easy process that links his Facebook account to the site. In doing so, he authorizes the site to publish his interaction on the site to his Facebook news feed. A Facebook activity feed plug-in could be added to your site showing what other Facebook users’ have recommended and shared from your site.

No doubt, there is a continuing reason to insist on site-specific password registration for sensitive information (account access, for example) or for true advisor-only messages. But we’d push for the password requirement to be invoked less broadly than it is today. It needs to be limited, to keep from turning away advisors seeking information.

Imagine a freeing of your content to be integrated with other content in an advisor’s newsfeed or shared across an advisor’s connections. You’d be able to track reactions, good and bad, from advisors, other advisors in their networks and non-licensed others who see your freed content. You want people talking about your firm, after all.

Some of the commentary would likely fail a Compliance review. But remember that the discussion would be taking place off your domain, as it has for years out of Compliance’s reach on Yahoo! Finance Message Boards, Morningstar and elsewhere online and offline. The difference is that you’ve enabled it and that the content you produce would finally be part of the “conversation.”

We know there’s huge untapped value behind the log-in on advisor sites. At a time when it’s getting easier and easier to navigate and interact with most other Web site content, the password-restricted advisor site will be left behind by all but loyalists. It’s the old way.

We encourage you to start thinking about the social way and its potential to drive advisor interest in what your firm has to communicate. What would you give up? What would you gain? What size mountains would need to be moved?

There are zillions of technology, practical, policy and people issues and we don’t minimize them. Try not to let them intimidate you. Asset management firms can’t afford to wear blinders to changes in the way advisors and investors are gathering their information today.

If thinking about the possibilities intrigues you, we have two articles for you to read next, both from Jeremiah Owyang, Web strategist and Altimeter Group industry analyst:

• Social CRM: When Registration Pages Go Extinct
• Research Note: Integrate Social Networks with your Corporate Website with ‘Social Sign On’

In addition to tracking marketing predictions (see our 2010 Marketing Predictions, Part 1 post for a round-up and see this article for 100 more), we’ve been keeping an eye on business predictions for 2010. And, the short version is that asset-gathering isn’t going to be any easier.

If you’re a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer, you can expect competition to heat up as your marketing counterparts do what they can to encourage investors to return to equity funds, evaluate their Roth IRA conversion prospects and use new, improved tools and expert advice for investment portfolio-building and re-building.

Digital marketing strategy and tactics will be at the center of all of these, that’s a safe guess. Below are five Rock The Boat Marketing’s predictions for asset manager digital marketing strategy in 2010, sprinkled with a smattering of wishful thinking.

1. It’s catch-up time for asset managers and how they interact on the Web.

We liken the modus operandi of most asset managers on the Internet today to the neighbor who moves into a bustling subdivision, pulls the shades, keeps the kids from playing outside and refuses to take part in the block party. In 2010, we expect some asset managers to more fully participate as citizens of the World Wide Web.

Of necessity, we expect to see some companies introduce or step up practices that others have been following for years. Linking to other Web sites (which is done minimally or on an exception basis by most money management firms today), developing content designed to draw links from other sites, introducing multiple email newsletter offers, adding RSS feeds. We expect to see more marketing communications writers being tasked with writing search engine-optimized copy. “Unfriendly” URLs that are so prevalent on asset management sites are going to be rewritten.

The current M.O. dates back to a different time, when the assumption was that someone would come to your site and take the time to browse it. Oh no, they won’t. An earlier Rock The Boat Marketing post commented on the decline of traffic to destination sites across all industries, including asset management. The asset manager that stands still next year and makes no change to its current approach to Web publishing will suffer a loss of visibility it can ill-afford.

A few money managers are developing new plans, ones that acknowledge the value of using content to pull information-seekers to them (and what’s required to do so) while simultaneously recognizing that most content will be accessed on sites other than their own domains. Also a part of the plan: how to support mobile phone users.

2. Some asset managers will rethink financial advisor sites.

Having worked on asset management Web sites since the beginning, we recall the original objective of advisor-only areas of asset manager Web sites. The intent was to drive engagement—registered advisors would be more than just users of mutual fund products, they would be advocates, or so the argument went.

It’s time for a reality check on exactly what advisor-only sites are accomplishing today. Multiple surveys (including kasina’s What Advisors Do Online and the SwanDog/Morningstar Marketing To Today’s RIA) suggest that these sites are lightly used by advisors.

American Funds and other managers that command significant market share or have thoroughly and completely committed to the channel may be pleased with advisor reliance on and use of their sites. But the majority of firms that pop the Web analytics hood and look around will see a gaping discrepancy between advisor registrations and log-in activity. Just about everywhere else on the Web is livelier and more engaging than a dusty advisor site that is mostly a document repository and makes no pretense of offering community. Junior advisors who could be expected to most benefit from the resources of an advisor-only site are especially likely to recoil in disappointment after an initial visit.

In 2010, practical asset managers will resolve to objectively look at the site usage data and feedback. We think a few will pursue alternatives and deploy resources in other ways to provide more meaningful value to advisors as a means of engaging them.

3. Relationship-building will become a group exercise, with the digital marketer one of the exercise leaders.

As a digital marketer, you may have a reputation within the company as being a “techie.” In 2010, we predict that you’ll play a pivotal role in Marketing’s responsibility for relationship-building. Relationships will be even more important in 2010 as countless firms set their sights on independent advisors and specifically registered investment advisers (RIAs), whose online reliance is well documented.

We see many changes coming (and needed) in how asset managers manage their online relationships. One example: Having communicated so long via print, many asset managers continue the mindset online. The economics of paper and ink dictated the development of a mass message, but many-to-one communicating isn’t the only nor is it the best way online.

Cogent Research’s Advisor Touchpoints 2009, released in November, quantified the volume of communications that advisors are being bombarded with today. According to Cogent, the average advisor has 14 asset manager relationships that produce more than 100 e-mails, phone calls and mailings per month. The most active communicators among mutual fund firms average 16 client contacts per month; ETF providers average five per month.

Next year will be no different than this year—advisors will open and read the emails that are the most engaging and relevant. The difference in 2010, we predict, is that many firms will be tuning their communications with the help of enhancements to their customer relationship management (CRM)s and based on intelligence from their email and Web analytics systems. With your perspective, you’re in a position to add lots of value to what should be a cross-functional mandate.

Look for progressive asset managers to segment their email communications and sequence their messages based on individuals’ response. For those managers, conversation about (and Sales’ pushback on) the number of emails sent will have evolved. How effective are online communications in initiating and nurturing relationships? That’s the question for the new year.

4. The benefits of social media will drive its evaluation.

At least a few companies in 2010 the focus of the discussion on social media will switch from the risks to the benefits.

As the differences between the relationships that asset managers have with their clients (advisors and shareholders) stand in stark contrast to the transforming dynamic between other companies in other industries, some asset managers will want in. Barriers and sticky issues—and there are plenty—will be ordered and addressed.

Adoption will be incremental. We’ve watched Vanguard pursue this path as it offered content ratings on its site, launched a YouTube page, a Facebook page and later enabled comments on it, and introduced a blog on Vanguard.com. The same is true of TIAA-CREF who just today used its Twitter account to announce its iPhone application.

The Rock The Boat Marketing Twitter list of investment managers now includes 17 companies including Fidelity, The Hartford, Nuveen Investments, MFS, Lord Abbett and Putnam. Throughout most of the year, we’ve commented on the marketing uses of Twitter. But it’s a bona fide customer service channel in some industries, and we regularly see tweets that suggest that investors expect fund companies to be listening, too.

Why don’t you have a social media strategy in development? Is the answer “Compliance won’t let us”? While wariness of social media might have been considered an appropriate, measured stance in 2009, we predict thinning patience for this in 2010. At some point, clients and executive management are going to interpret it as an excuse for inaction.

5. Ambivalent, tepid marketing will give way to aggressive, spirited content marketing.

Our work requires us to spend lots of time on asset manager sites. There is a sameness to them. It’s no wonder advisors and investors forget where they saw what. But it’s in the content offerings where we see companies differentiating themselves today.

You and your colleagues in 2009 have delivered phenomenal market analyses, for example. It’s clear that you made them a priority this year and we know from experience how you needed to work your relationships with Investments and Compliance personnel to get Sales what they needed and were no doubt clamoring for. …And then you “posted them on the Web,” right? Or maybe a day or a week later sent out an email to your entire database with the tantalizing subject heading: Whitepaper Updated. (We kid because we love, always remember that.)

Next year some companies will realize that Sales isn’t the only audience for the thought leadership they provide and that they’ve been hiding their light under a bushel (or buried within an Adobe Acrobat file, as the case may be).

Some companies will take a look at the budget they invest in new product hoopla, for example, and re-allocate a portion of it and FTEs to public relations, advertising, email and even social media tactics designed to leverage the marketing potential of the content. Each whitepaper, interview transcript, portfolio update will be announced externally with the same zeal it’s announced to Sales.

We’re looking forward to the promise of next year. 2009 and 2008 were not for the faint of heart, to be sure. But they required largely defensive marketing. We think the environment will be conducive to a little more rockin’ the boat in 2010.

What do you see in the new year? Do you agree with our predictions? Do you disagree? We welcome your comments below.

Happy Holidays to all! We won’t post next week but will be back the week of December 28. Throughout of course, follow us on Twitter—@RockTheBoatMKTG and our alter ego @AdvisorTweets.

Today, in 2009, there continue to be some asset management companies that are surprised when Marketing expresses more than a passing interest in the customer relationship management (CRM) database. Marketing wasn’t there when the CRM was planned and Marketing isn’t a sitting member of the CRM enhancement prioritization committee.

All of which explains why leads related to marketing activities can’t be tracked to the same extent as sales activities, among other database deficiencies from a marketer’s perspective.

A former colleague from an investment management company sent me an email Wednesday. His background is in IT; I knew him back in the day before he achieved his current High Muckety Muck status, with all due respect.

In a fairly short email, Lonnie (not his real name) revealed his training and the difference in how he thinks of social media versus, shall we say, a stereotypical right-brain marketer. Marketers may look at social media interactions and see the randomness of the conversations. But Lonnie, in his comment about our AdvisorTweets.com, sees the value of organizing tweets as an added input to a customer and prospect database.

A few CRMs support social media. Watch this video of how Batchbook, the small business CRM that Rock The Boat uses, integrates social media participation. The video describes how a database manager can build out a customer profile with added information about the customer’s Twitter account, blog feed, Flickr account, etc.

Your company may soon invest in online monitoring capabilities as a way of keeping track of what’s being said. The CRM should be where those entries are stored, too. Web analytics that can identify individual site traffic—browsing from within a site that requires registration, for example—already have been added to individual database records at some asset management firms.

Just think how all this intelligence can warm up what would otherwise be a cold sales call and how it can enhance the relevance of follow-up one-on-one communications. Sales will want this social media integration, IT will prioritize it and deliver it, and Sales Support will come to rely on it.

When the time comes, Marketing will be asked to create the design for the Twitter background, you can count on that. But Marketing has much more to contribute and represents a perspective that’s missing when just Sales and IT meet. In fact, Marketing should be leading the charge in the consideration of social media.

C’mon, call the meeting, don’t hope to be invited to it.

Dan Miller, Key Accounts Sales Executive for Discovery, is always good enough to update us on the developments in his world of financial intermediaries databases—which the smartest investment management firms use to augment their “organically grown” customer relationship management (CRM) systems. We checked in with him Tuesday after yet another Investment News article about financial advisor migration.

All marketers, not just those responsible for digital work, need to focus on this industry phenomenon. (See our related post How Aggressive Are You Willing to Be to Help with Customer Data?)

Losing touch with part of your database is like mis-placing a building, an employee or any other corporate asset. It’s a risk all investment managers are dealing with now as financial advisors change firms at what Discovery expects to be an unprecedented pace.

The risk is minimized for Discovery clients because every firm and every advisor record in the Discovery database has a unique identifier, enabling records to be updated when an advisor moves from one firm to another.

“We’re seeing much more interest in the last six months to get CRMs cleaned up, and my sense is because Marketing is getting involved. In fact, we’ve been increasing our data stewardship services, looking at our clients’ data, matching up what they have, doing de-dupes. We’re seeing much more interest in that,” said Miller.

Still, there is a potential for delay in updating the records. “If a rep moves today and we picked up the data from that part of the country yesterday it may take us a while to get all the way back around the circle,” acknowledged Miller. “But my team works hard—consider that we have 535,000 reps in the registered representative product—to make sure the information is accurate.”

Advisors in motion have consequences firmwide, as they can impact an investment manager’s channel support, territory assignments, wholesaler compensation.

All of this movement couldn’t come at a worse time for marketers. At many firms, Marketing is finally being given the ball and asked to demonstrate what can be done to engage and nurture advisor relationships online. Stale contact information will diminish the efficacy of these efforts and could threaten email reputations at organizations where bounce management is lacking.

(And don’t overlook the implications for all who trade in contact information. Are you purchasing email lists or buying print advertising to reach advisors? It stands to reason that you’ll be buying fewer good addresses.)

For a picture of the industry in motion, look at two reports Discovery publishes.

As shown, more than 3,100 reps changed broker-dealers in January 2009, with more than 40% of the movement from wirehouses.

According to Discovery, almost seven out of 10 advisors moved to other wirehouse firms.

Miller couldn’t hazard a guess on what part of these moves were the result of individual decisions and what part the result of business consolidations. “The dust is still settling,” he said, “we just don’t have a clear picture on that yet.”

The January data is generally in line with last year’s pace. “January is when bonuses are paid out so we wouldn’t expect a hike in the activity then,” said Miller. But he expects advisor moves in the first quarter of this year to “spike,” exceeding the number of reps who moved in the first quarter of last year (17,000).

Since noting increased activity last year, Discovery has been publishing a Break Away Broker Report, which reports on the numbers of reps who have moved from a broker/dealer firm to a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) in the last month.

Marketers will want to take particular interest in the growing RIA database. RIAs are typically the least well known channel and the most difficult for a wholesaling force to service.

And yet, last week, TD Ameritrade Institutional reported that 60% of surveyed (RIAs) reported an increase in clients, many of whom are coming from broker/dealers and wirehouses.

Your CRM, of course, is the best place to keep track of what your enterprise–not just Sales–knows and continues to learn about your customers and prospects. If you haven’t focused on it lately, now would be the right time to call a meeting.

Many experts (including this report from Marketing Sherpa) expect email to get a workout in light of shrinking marketing budgets. But email marketing is something that requires a lot of attention to get right. It hasn’t been a strength at many investment management companies previously, and we’d caution against a kneejerk decision to just stoke up the email machinery as you’re cooling off on your direct mail and other print communicating. There’s a high probability you run the risk of burning through some of your high quality contacts.

We’d argue that CRM/database growth—as opposed to depletion—should be the objective of just about any marketing effort. (And see our thoughts on Marketing’s role in helping maintain the database.)

A recent study from Silverpop provides some benchmark data about business-to-business lead management practices (using email). Financial services companies were represented among the 250 BtoB clients whose data were analyzed.

Most relevant to our space, perhaps, are the insights on the extent to which others are tracking database changes. (If you listen closely, somewhere in your distant past a professor is still pounding the desk and insisting, “You cannot MANAGE what you do not MEASURE.”)

The full Silverpop Benchmark Study of Lead Management Practices can be downloaded but here are two highlights:

• The typical BtoB database is growing at a monthly equivalent rate of about 5% to 10%. “An average size database that isn’t growing at least 5% per month is probably underperforming,” the study says.
• The study provides detailed data on open, click-through and click-to-open rates by quarter and by type of campaign. You’ll know best whether these work as benchmarks for your organization but one high-level survey finding seems plausible. According to Silverpop, drip campaign response rates outperform single-message campaigns by 2:1 and 3:1 in some cases.

Marketing wants to send even more emails even more often? This is something that the reactionaries in your midst could have a problem with. If you think your campaigns could benefit from two and three times your current results, you might want to call a meeting and enlist Sales, Compliance and other interested parties in collaboratively drafting a drip plan.

The report also includes some data and commentary on form completion rates. One additional thought we’ll add relates to the inability to set communications preferences on most money manager sites. A Kitchen Sink approach to communicating with investors and financial advisors is bound to drive more unsubscribes than if you enabled your site visitors to sign up for only what they’re interested in.

Although it’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison because none of the offers relates to a step in a lead generation process, here’s a good example of preference-collecting from Thornburg’s site.