There are some people who are theatre people. There are some people who are music people. And—getting closer to the point of this post—there are the book-lovers. Me, I’m an online content junkie.

With this post, 12 months in the making, I delight in that special piece of content found swimming out there in a sea of perfectly average content. This is my list of what I found to be the best marketing, digital marketing and/or investment-related content—with a few wildcards—of 2011. It’s an updated edition of a similar list published last year at this time.

Uh, slight correction. Who found these? Not me, more often than not. I need to send a shout-out to the tribe of people whose content recommendations I follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, SlideShare and a little bit of Facebook. By riding along with them, I benefit from the content my connections discover and they have excellent taste.

1. Just Be Sure You’re Consulting

Six days into the new year, I read Paul Ford’s The Web Is A Customer Medium and it hasn’t been far from my mind since. You can just scan most of the content recommendations that follow, breeze through them and get the gist of what they’re about. This post may ask more of you but please keep with it.

The overarching premise is that people who use the Web expect to be consulted by brands and other entities that use the Web. If you have an online agenda that doesn’t consider the online community, there is going to be blowback. People will want to know, Ford says, “Why wasn’t I consulted?” And that’s not going to go well.

We are in an industry where I fear that many firms still think they can control what happens online. There’s a reason this is first on my list of endorsements.

2. Why Marketers Said Aha This Year

This kind of thing doesn’t always work but Daniel Burstein, director of editorial content for MECLABS, got some terrific perspectives when he interviewed attendees and speakers at Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Summit 2011 in November.

The question: What was your aha moment of 2011?

3. How Mobile’s Different

One advantage of blogging is that the blogger can take the space he or she needs to do the job right. That’s definitely the case in this thoughtful, timely explanation 10 Ways Mobile Sites Are Different from Desktop Web Sites by Shanshan Ma on the UX Matters Website.

4. A Powerful Way To Convey The Reach Of A Disaster

We loved them in 2009 and in 2010 but in 2011, some people turned on infographics and data visualizations. While it’s true that many were little more than illustrated data sheets, some data-based interactives took the art to a higher level.

The Japan Quake Map animation of more than 1,600 earthquakes in March is a superb example of how visualized data conveys information in ways that words can’t. This couldn’t have been a planned project, of course. Notice how function trumps design. Amazing. (Click on the image to go to the site to play.)

5. Why Signals Are At A Premium

One focus this year was on understanding social signals and the role of social networks in influencing people. Google’s need to capture those social signals as a means of continuing to produce relevant search results was believed to be the motivation behind Google+.

A lot happened, including the launch of Google+, after the February publication of this The Next Generation of Ranking Signals post. Nonetheless, it provides excellent background on how relatively new metrics will influence search engine ranking signals.

6. A Gallery Of Steve Jobs, The Marketer

What was so great about Apple CEO Steve Jobs? You know that some whippersnapper will ask that someday soon. Refer him or her to this awesome collection of the brand’s history from the first Macintosh computer to the iPad 2.

7. Done With 2012? File This Away For Next Year

I liked the thinking and the step-by-step breakdown of this presentation by Jamie Steven, vice president, marketing at SEOMoz on building a 2012 marketing budget. It all comes together on Slide #38.

8. When You Care, Really Care About Usability

Have you hugged a designer today? Every honest marketer recognizes the significant if sometimes nuanced contributions that design makes to communications effectiveness.

This post from the UK Website UserFocus.com expands on how four visual design principles—contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity—improve usability. The examples in the image shown here illustrate ways in which contrast can be used to distinguish primary action from a secondary action.

9. Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Unless you’re willing to subscribe on the spot, you’ll have to register for limited access to this article from the UK’s Marketing magazine site. It’s worth it for the insights on what four financial directors (CFOs) have to say about marketing and marketers. Evidently, some think that spending an afternoon “strategizing” with an advertising agency is on par with taking a lunch break.

10. There’s Listening And Then There’s Predictive Analytics

Online asset management communicators compete for investor and advisor attention with an array of wily content providers, including those who are getting very sophisticated about the content they’re serving, to whom and during what part of the day.

Watch the full Gigaom interview with Bloomberg Digital head Kevin Krim. Here’s just a taste: “The company now collects over 100 data points for every page a reader loads, based on what they interact with, what time of day it is, etc.—more than a terabyte of data every day in aggregate—and the team has 15 different algorithms running in parallel to make recommendations for what that reader might want to see next.”

11. Blogging Is This Advisor’s Job

When I tweeted this blog post How Do You Have So Much Time to Blog?, I went a little further than I usually do. I admitted to a wee crush on investment advisor Josh Brown.

Yes, I follow Brown (@reformedbroker) on Twitter because he has a way with 140 characters. But this post sent me over the edge because I think he nails the argument for why a financial advisor should blog, and in his inimitable style. No one should have any questions after reading this.

12. The Photo That Launched A Thousand Remixes

Online mischief-makers took every opportunity they could this year to remind us that you take your chances when you upload an image to the Web.

When the White House shared this photo of the national security team awaiting news of the Osama bin Laden raid, Photoshoppers got to work adding their own touches to the famous Situation Room photo. No one at the grave meeting actually wore Princess Beatrice’s hat, for instance.

You can see some of the alterations to this lone piece of content and additional background on the meme on this Know Your Meme page.

13. The Need For Speed

One might argue that working on a Formula One racing pit crew and working for an asset management firm are at two ends of a spectrum. Granted, the need for speed isn’t quite the same for the mutual fund/ETF marketer.

But a pit crew’s rules for creating a speed culture, as outlined in this Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) post by Stephen Denny, are as relevant to your work as they are motivational. My favorite line: “Obstruct a view or take one unneeded step and crucial time is lost.”

14. Struggling With Conversions? What If You Could…

I couldn’t sleep the night I read this Keyword-Level Demographics post because of the possibilities it suggests. Even if you’re not into analytics, please give it a look. It’s about combining Facebook data and search referrers in Web analytics to get to demographics at the keyword level. With that information and analysis, you should be able to understand the keywords that lead to conversions for certain personas. OMG.

15. Neighborhood Crime? Home Buyers Want To Know

Home sellers don’t need any more piled on them. But this crime data mashup provided by Trulia is too good not to include.

As the FastCoDesign post explains, Trulia took available data and made something valuable to and at the same time relevant to their core business. This is a great example of content marketing.

16. But 7 Is Good, We Can Work With 7

Anticipation, risk-taking, pairing. These are three of the seven things that algorithms cannot yet do, justifying the continuing existence of human editors. This is according to Eli Pariser writing on the Harvard Business Review blog network. Why seven? Why not a nice round number like 10 or 100? Try not to think about it.

17. The Communications Evolution Of Portfolio Managers

You’ll recognize the Type One and Type Two portfolio managers described in this Interloping blog’s perspective. I mean, does this sound like anyone you work with? “They are pissed when the marketing department drags them out of their cave before they’ve finished investigating a fishy footnote in the last quarterly statement.”

That’s Type Two, the gruff non-communicative portfolio manager lovable for his commitment to his work.

I understand the point the blogger is making about the correlation between bad public speaking and strong investment performance. Still, I have to think that public communicating—whether in person or via social network participation—is going to have to be a core competency in the future. This is a period piece. The days are ending for money managers to be all about the analysis and not about the communicating.

18. Logos 2011-style

Have you ever wasted hours on the Web trying to get some sense of what’s new in logo design? Not this year, thanks to Stock Logos’ comprehensive discussion of logo trends, including color, gradients and some applied terms I never heard of. Juvi? Dandruff?

19. Taking 24/7 Seriously

Years ago when my mother couldn’t find my father she’d call the fire station and asked the firefighters to send my Dad home. Fast forward to today. If you’re ever looking for my Dad’s third daughter, you’ll probably find me here, monitoring the Internet nerve system using the Online Schools’ State of the Internet Now! data extravaganza.

It’s an ever-updating page of data counting what’s going on right now on the Web, on Google, on YouTube, on Amazon, on Twitter…you get the idea. Clicking on the image below will take you there.

Created by: Online Schools

20. Think of #Occupy As An API

Even if you didn’t experience it on the streets yourself, no doubt you read plenty about the Occupy Wall Street movement. This Atlantic article is one of the smartest pieces I saw. The writer explores the concept of #OWS not just as a physical movement but as a hypothetical API.

As an API, the components of the movement, which writer Alexis Madrigal breaks down, can be taken and applied by others in other settings. Long but excellent.

21. Tell Us How You Really Feel

And now for something completely contrary: The Social Graph Is Neither. Maciej, the author of this post, takes issue with the characterization of the connections being made and exposed today by “primitive” social networks as a social graph. And, he substantiates his views.

I Laughed Out Loud when I read these two sentences: “Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers–that’s the social graph. Social networks exist to sell you crap.”

22. This Guy Could Sell Anything

What seemed like just hours after Facebook announced its timeline capability (yet to be fully rolled out), enterprising technology strategist Eric Leist created a video that mashed up an actual scene from Mad Men and a fake Don Draper Facebook timeline. Brilliant—and a case study of creating content so good, so smart and so quickly that it deserves to go viral.

Click on the image below to watch the video on YouTube. I wish you could stay here and watch it but embedding has been disabled.

23. Drilling Down Into Reader Behavior

Who Are The Most Read Authors? is a fascinating analysis by bookmarking service Read It Later using anonymized data from May through October. Author popularity (as measured by the number of articles saved using Read It Later and returned to), content length (longform versus blog) and loyalty are examined as measures of content effectiveness.

Sorry, no investment companies or financial bloggers have broken into the all-top list. However, the post also looked at a more narrow set of writers–those just from the New York Times–and economist Paul Krugman towers over all other Times’ writers as the most-saved. Financial content readers are out there and they’re bookmarking.

24. Apple’s Purposeful Email

What, specifically, can marketers learn from Apple? I know it’s the second mention of Apple, but I just have to include this Flowtown infographic tracking the “trademark characteristics” of an Apple email.

25. How It All Began

Ah, Internet history. Check out this list of screenshots showing what Amazon, the New York Times and six other major Websites looked like when they launched. Note that for your far superior experience, I’m linking to the one-page view versus the slide show gallery. Nice of Mashable to give us the option.

26. …And Yours?

And, per what I learned from #1, this is where I consult you. What online content made a lasting impression on you this year? Please, please chime in below.

Digital marketers at financial services companies, including mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies, spend a healthy chunk of their time working on outbound emails. So, how are you doing?

Above-average on three out of four counts, according to the Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index™ released yesterday. More financial services emails are successfully delivered and opened than emails sent by other industries. This is based on Harte-Hanks’s analysis of about 3 billion email messages sent across nearly 100 companies in nine industries in 2009 and 2010. (The company also studied unsubscribe rates and on this dimension financial services scores a thin advantage. Over all industries, the unsubscribe rate was 0.16% versus 0.08% for financial services.)

But it’s the email click-through rate (CTR), arguably the critical measure, where financial services trails. What’s worse, the reported number is a blend. In a follow-up email from Harte-Hanks, I learned that financial services CTRs tumbled from 3.3% in 2009 to 1.7% in 2010. Although, “to date, we are seeing an upturn,” the PR contact tagged on to her note.

So much energy is involved in the writing, designing, reviewing, coding and tracking of emails—and at best just two out of 100 recipients are opening them? On the bright side, if your emails are drawing better than 2% click-throughs, you’re doing better than the industry standard. Better than 3% and you’re above average.

I’m always skeptical when I hear about “email programs” because I worry about the disproportionate effort invested in them and the implication that the communicating is done once the emails are sent.

There is a sense of satisfaction when a “blast email” finally makes it out the door. But let’s be realistic about exactly what that mass communication is going to accomplish. A 2%-3% response in the form of a click-through is not sufficient to sustain interest let alone grow interest in your business.

What other forms of communicating are you planning and testing for greater impact?

Google made some news in the last few weeks that we hope you’re paying attention to. We briefly comment on Google Instant and Priority Inbox below but if you’re short on time, go directly to the embedded video on data visualization. (The player shows 21 minutes but the last three minutes are a commercial.)

With summer 2010 ending this week, we expect to be back at it posting more frequent, shorter posts. That’s the plan.

Google Instant Likely To Influence Search Traffic To Your Site

Wednesday brought the launch of Google Instant, which is a change to Google desktop search (browser and mobile search are expected to follow) that produces search results instantly in real-time as you type your query. It’s likely to have an impact on user behavior, traffic reliant on long tail search phrases and online ad-buying. What kind of an impact? It’s too early to say. We recommend that you keep an eye on your search traffic analytics.

In addition, we found the analysis in these articles especially helpful:

• Google Unveils Tool To Speed Up Searches
• How Google Instant Could Reinvent Channel Flipping
• Google Instant: Potential Implications for the Advertiser

Priority Inbox Helps Advisors Ignore Your Irrelevant Emails

At the end of the month, Google announced Priority Inbox for Gmail users. Priority Inbox picks up on Gmail user signals such as who they email most and whose emails they open versus senders of emails that go unread or are deleted without having been read.

This is worth your attention to the extent that your customer database includes financial advisors with Gmail addresses. Previously, you still had a shot at reaching Gmail-using advisors no matter how many emails you sent that they didn’t read. With this change and based on advisors’ apathy toward your emails, Gmail may immediately route your communications to an advisor’s “Not Important” section of the Inbox. Ouch—and yet another reason to sharpen your email appeal.

You can read plenty about Google Instant and Priority Inbox elsewhere. They are two examples of the twists and turns and new developments that digital marketers are bombarded with and need to keep current on.

Inspiration For Using Data To Tell Stories

Next up is a TEDGlobal 2010 video. It was released on August 23, we watched it this week and we truly hope that you can find 18 minutes to take it in.

We’ve commented previously about the power and efficiency of communicating data-intensive messages graphically. And we’re continually bookmarking examples of how online publishers have created infographics of financial topics. Graphics aid investor and even advisor understanding.

Think of the possibilities as you watch this TED video of David McCandless, designer and author of Information Is Beautiful, a collection of data visualizations. Self-described “data detective” McCandless designed the Billion Dollar-o-gram, which he elaborates on in the video plus much more.

Join us when we put on our hat as curator of AdvisorTweets.com and moderate an Advisor Perspectives Webinar, “Engage The Media Using Social Media” at 4 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Central Wednesday, September 15. For more information including our national and local media and advisor panelists, see our AdvisorTweets blog post and register here.

What are your options once you’ve come to the realization that not everyone who visits your Web site today will be back for more tomorrow or…(sorry) ever? It’s a heartbreak because you no doubt have so much more to say and a business reason to want to keep in touch. That’s the rationale for asset managers to offer email newsletters and, increasingly, RSS feeds.

But there’s a difference between making content subscriptions available and promoting them. Promotion is what marketers do—right? Please try not to wince as we reprise a recommendation we made almost two years ago. (The review work required in the recent migration of our Drupal blog posts to WordPress prompted some reminiscing and we’ll be revisiting a few topics in the next several weeks.)

It’s common practice nowadays to visit a Web site and, after a few seconds, be interrupted with a floating offer—”Would you like to subscribe to our content?” These are called popovers. They hover over the content on a Web page, appearing after a predetermined amount of time. In our November 18, 2008, post, we recommended using them for email newsletter offers.

Today—given increased financial advisor and others’ reliance on RSS feeds—we think you should consider an RSS popover like what I encountered this morning on InternetEvolution.com.

The reason you’d do this is to make your site visitors aware that they can continue to consume your content without needing to make a point of returning to your site. Tucking an RSS icon into a side column of a Web site is a passive move. What we’re recommending is an aggressive tactic that many sites report having great success with—they’re making offers that site users are accepting. To us, that’s a win-win.

We understand that mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms may have reservations about employing this interruptive technique. We encourage you to research and vet it fully, including running some A/B testing to understand its effectiveness. An August 11, 2010, post The Case For And Against Popup Opt-in Forms provides an exhaustive discussion, if not completely on-point because it’s written more for bloggers.

In your review, answer these questions: Are you creating content that you believe is valuable and helpful? Are you dissatisfied with the number of people you’re reaching with your content, whether via Web site visits, email or RSS? Is there a real reason that your site needs to stand on a different principle than the sites that your visitors use prior to coming to your site and after they leave your site? C’mon, what would it take to run an experiment?

Because we’d like to see you again—either at your place or ours—this is a good time to mention that the Rock The Boat Marketing blog now offers email subscriptions. To subscribe, click on the gray envelope icon in the top right-hand side of the page.

Hi there!

New year, new decade. Here’s hoping it rings in a whole new burst of creativity for marketing at asset management companies.

First, I confess I got a chuckle over a chart that appeared on The Reformed Broker blog right before the holidays. Here’s a snippet of it but be sure to go to the post for the rest—plus comments.

Assuming you’re in the right mind, we hope you’ll laugh, too. Oh, those Aughties. By the end of them, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing communications had gotten pretty predictable, not very informative let alone inspiring. (And the Reformed Broker is making some larger points about the products themselves.)

The asset management industry is getting out of the 2000s just in time. That was then and this is 2010. What and how are you going to communicate in this brand-new year?

In our last post, we reviewed some of our “must-read” and “great” financial services tweets. We’ve mined our tweet stream for the “cool” stuff, augmented with a few additions, to compile the list that follows. You may have your own virtual notebook of the cool and creative—naturally, we’d welcome your Comments below.

We gave you Monday to re-enter, Tuesday to re-engage but today let’s think about revolutionizing the way you communicate online. Do the following spark any of your creative juices?

Shake Up Your Unsubscribes

Of course, you offer your email list an unsubscribe option. Check out this screencast to see how one company acknowledges unsubscribes. While you’re not likely to “punish” an employee, could you add any flavor to those vanilla Unsubscribe confirmations?

Interactive Goal Planning

Investors use your products to achieve their financial goals. Lots of words on your site are dedicated to coaching them or helping support financial advisors’ coaching. This planning roadmap toward financial goals is far more visual—and maybe more effective? Powered by Boulevard R, we spotted it on financial advisor Russ Thornton’s site so that’s what we’ve linked to.

Depicting Characteristics of Companies

Here’s a screenshot from Tableau Software’s interactive visualization of a group of companies—Inc 500 in this case. Don’t you regularly communicate about sets of equities your products invest in? Hmmm.

In the same vein but a little further out there, here’s an interactive data visualization that maps parameters of stocks in the S&P500 to animated visual outputs. It’s called a STOC (Stock Ticker Orbital Comparison).

Commenting In Context

While we know that the vast majority of you are not accepting comments on your sites just yet, take a look at the state of the art—the addition of dimension to commenting. Poynter.org provides a great explanation of it below and you can see it in action toward the bottom of this WashingtonPost.com page.

Media Mashup

Is there a business reason for your Web site visitors to mix their message with a more venerable one? In this creative example, users can add their message to Bob Dylan’s signs.

OK, have at it. While we’d love to work with you, we understand that some of you are going to head off on your own. That’s cool, too. All we ask is that you keep us in the loop. We’ll be updating the Rock The Boat Marketing Best Practices page in the coming weeks and it will have plenty for room for your work.

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.

This is such an imaginative time to be a marketer and especially a digital marketer. As busy as we know the next few weeks will be for most, here’s hoping that you can find some time to follow the links below to some outstanding content that collectively aims to describe what marketers will be working on in 2010.

We’re counting on your liking predictions as much as we do because our next post is devoted to them, too. We’ll be publishing Rock The Boat Marketing’s 2010 predictions for digital marketing at asset management companies early next week—subscribe to our RSS feed now or please remember to check back then.

Broad Marketing Trends

11 Smart Marketers Shared Their 2010 Predictions is a MarketingProfs round-up from a motley group of marketers representing agencies, consulting firms and a municipality’s Zoning Board of Appeals.

Examples: One of the ad hoc panelists says that tailored campaign microsites with unique URLs will be abandoned, and social media networks will become destination sites/pages for product launches. Another expects 2010 to be the year when the practice of allowing Sales and Marketing to operate as separate, conflicting silos ends once and for all, due to an urgency to get online and social marketing right. In a statement that a few commenters push back on, a third predicts "2010 will be the year that ‘true’ mobile marketing takes off."

Social media silliness will give way to private social networks. Video will become increasingly important for selling higher ticket items that require repeated exposure and graduated commitment to complete the sale. As video becomes commonplace it will make sense to develop content creation processes that simultaneously lay down all three types of media (video, audio and text). Those are among the 5 Bold Marketing Predictions from direct marketing consultant Clayton Makepeace’s The Total Package Web site.

Email And Contact Strategy

In keeping with the season, there’s an evergreen quality to a few of the email predictions on EmailInsider (e.g., opt-in processes will become friendlier and landing pages will convert better). But writer Chad White’s comments on how ISPs evaluate engagement metrics when making deliverability decisions and the expected heightened use of email preference centers are worth your attention.

Let’s include a few forecasts in this post on predictions. Almost half (48%) of businesses are increasing overall marketing budgets next year, according to a StrongMail survey reported on this Research Brief on Mediapost.com. Email and social media are two channels that offer high ROI, StrongMail notes.

Source: 2010 Marketing Trends Survey, StrongMail

Marketing Automation and B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 were written by Eloqua‘s Steven Woods, whose book Digital Body Language we’ve recently read and highly recommend. Now that companies can learn so much from customer and prospect behavior online, expectations of physical meetings are being reset, Woods says.

"In 2010, in sales organizations we will see a rapid recognition of the new reality that buyers are less willing to take an initial call from a vendor salesperson with an assumption of only exchanging basic information,” says Woods. A more productive first meeting should be the benefit of getting to know a prospect’s online profile.

Brand

“A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement,” writes Brand Keys’ Robert Passikoff in his top 10 brand and marketing trends for 2010 on PizzaMarketplace.com.

Oh and also, according to Passikoff, “Consumers are on to brands trying to play their emotions for profit."

Online Creative

8 Experts’ Predictions for 2010 gathered by iMedia Connection provide creative agencies’ views of what will work next year. Experts from Razorfish, Mediasmith and others say that “Want better marketing? Create a better product” will be a relevant theme, and better products will determine the brands likely to succeed. As for agency work, effective execution of ideas won’t cut it—“agencies need to help clients build brands that do something” as opposed to just helping them formulate effective messages.

Social Media

If 10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010 is your first exposure to Mashable.com, the exceptional social media blog, make it a two-fer. Read founder Pete Cashmore’s survey of what’s going on and what’s coming and then find time to browse Mashable. The demand for real-time information, location-sharing and the “voluntary erosion of privacy” are among the trends Cashmore names.

The Church of the Customer offers a too-short Out/In list. Blogger Jackie Huba’s thesis is that social media will get boring in 2010 as businesses seek to integrate social media into business functions. That means policy-writing, and business goal and team alignment.

When you think about it, why do we have to go to a separate site just to search? One of the 5 Social Media Predictions for 2010 on this Social Media Today list expects Search to be phased out as a separate function next year—“users will receive meaningful, personally relevant search results within the context of whatever they are currently doing.”

See you back here next week for Rock The Boat Marketing’s 2010 marketing predictions for asset manager digital marketers.

Web strategist and Forrester Research consultant Jeremiah Owyang this week wrote about the effect of letting a Web property get SNOWED—his acronym for Stakeholder Needs Overwhelm Web Experience Design.

That’s an issue that asset management marketers struggle with in trying to provide equitable support for multiple business lines—mutual funds, unit investment trusts (UITs), retirement plans, annuities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), separate accounts—sometimes in multiple geographies and seemingly always led by warring managers.

You may start by working with a single business in a single market as a beta test for a new, cool design. But what’s produced in the test stage is almost never what’s delivered once all the various stakeholders get their crack at it, is it?

Who knows—maybe the American Airlines case study that Owyang cites can provide a neutral starting point for you to start chipping away at this matrixed approach to Web work. For today let’s consider a related but less daunting challenge that calls for you to use logic, reason and expertise to appeal to your colleagues in Marketing.

Here’s an older video that brilliantly presents the problem. Thanks to Owyang for calling out to it in his post.

Like Microsoft, financial services marketers need to follow brand standards. Standards are created to control the effect of too many cooks following their own recipes. Standards preserve order, leverage enterprise investments and, not incidentally, they typically originate from Marketing! There’s no undermining the importance of standards.

But when communicating digitally, in small spaces, in quick bursts, there is a tightrope to walk between slavish adherence to rigid or narrow standards and fresh canvas expression devoid of all reference to the brand. When the branding is choking the effectiveness of the digital delivery, those of us responsible for leading digital strategies (and achieving digital success) need to speak up.

Here’s where we see the tensions surfacing:

• Online display advertising: The logo, the tagline, the line drawing of the corporate headquarters—all cannot appear on every frame of the ad. Not if you also have a message to convey. Something must give.
• Brand identity in widgets: In providing valuable information as opposed to marketing messages, widgets are almost the antithesis of online banner ads. Fight the reflex to weigh the widget down with intrusive elements. The available real estate will be even smaller when you’re designing for a mobile phone application.
• Branding on Twitter: Your Web site is where you show off your brand plumage. The point on Twitter is to be conversational—you know, less about your firm as an entity and more about its place in the world. If you can do this, starting with your profile, your background, your phrasing of your tweets, you’re likely to attract more followers. (For much more about Twitter, see our Social Media directory.)

• Email subject headings: No doubt your approved editorial style is the result of a hard-working thoughtful committee that produced guidelines, all of which assume that communicators have more than 1 second to attract attention. This is not a safe assumption online. We could point to any number of examples but think of just the email subject heading, the thinnest of all communications and yet one of the most powerful.

  Marketers find comfort in the production efficiencies of re-using templates and subject headings yet lament about low open and click-through rates. It’s common practice for asset managers to standardize on subject headings—to wit: "In The News," "Quarterly Commentary" and our favorite: “Another Update from Company XYZ.” Stop the madness! Creativity matters more in digital communicating, not less. Each email sent deserves its own unique heading.

We encourage you to take on the tyranny of the standards. Gather your analytics, collect some examples, including from other industries, and call a meeting to put the question on the table. “What room is there for our communications standards to be more flexible to support the business objectives we intend to achieve using digital tactics?”

Confronted with the facts, right-minded, well-intentioned marketers will find a way to reach a compromise.

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.