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.

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.

Google is making it clear that its Google+ project launched in beta last week is not brand-ready. Still, don’t let that be your excuse for learning what you can about it now. Spend some time on the official site to start to get grounded in what Google+ encompasses.

At this early stage, I’m most intrigued by the Hangouts part of the project for asset management firms. Hangouts provides the capability to spontaneously engage in multi-person video sessions with people in your circles.

Because its immediate focus is on consumer use, Google is positioning Hangouts as supporting “fun, fluid and serendipitous” video sessions.

I realize that this video has little relevance to the work that mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers do. But no kidding, the first time I heard about Hangouts, I thought about a conversation I had with a financial advisor a year ago. Of all the marketing communications and materials provided to him, what John Benedict valued most of all was the ability to talk to portfolio managers.

That’s no surprise, right? That’s why you make a point of building in portfolio manager presentations and Q&As at meetings. The difference between your scheduled, scripted physical (and some online, too) meetings is that they’re planned, promoted and fully controlled. They require time to produce and cost hard and soft dollars. One-on-one phone calls such as Benedict likes take time and money, too, and don’t scale.

I’m wondering whether you—large and small firms—could make use of the Hangouts platform to be more in the moment. Communications compliance controls would need to be in place, of course, maybe in the form of a Compliance person sitting in. But can you imagine making your market or money manager experts available to a circle of advisors, either on an ad hoc basis or routinely, via video?

Executing on this would involve process development only, as Google is apparently providing no-cost state-of-the art technology which you can read more about here. This is huge, enabling you to skip months and months of gathering requirements and evaluating alternatives, system testing and implementation. And, that’s assuming you could position this as a priority on your IT roadmap.

For those of you who offer or are planning mobile apps, the word is that Google will make Hangouts available in third-party apps or services. How cool would that be?

In an April post, I celebrated the fund companies that sent tweets after the S&P announced a negative credit outlook for the U.S. The next time something like that happens? (God forbid.) Your pulling together an impromptu Hangout for select advisors to access via their smartphones would trump that and some.

I’ve said this before, but success using social media involves being “conversational, transparent, improvisational and experimental”—qualities that don’t come naturally to investment communications. Google may have just introduced a capability that might help you crack this nut to your firm’s advantage. It’s something to learn more about.

If you’re very interested, you might consider signing up to test a business version of Google+.

One last note: I know from watching the stream on AdvisorTweets.com that a few financial advisors have already gained access to Google+ and are kicking the tires. Check out Wisconsin financial planner Nathan Gehring’s second Google+ blog post about how he might use Hangouts in his practice.

Today’s post draws its inspiration (if you will) from three influences:

• A Prudential study I saw yesterday reporting that 44% of investors are reluctant to ever put more of their money back into the stock market (download The Next Chapter: Meeting Investment and Retirement Challenges report).
• The 289-point market (Dow) drop yesterday. This morning I heard on Twitter that yesterday was the third time this year that the Dow has moved 200-plus points compared to nine times in 2010. There’s nothing like market volatility to shake the confidence of someone whose commitment is tenuous.
• My touch-up painting yesterday afternoon of some trim at a Wisconsin lake house (the spiritual center of Rock The Boat Marketing).

As I painted, I was reflecting on the daunting job of the investment communicator today. How do you “win back” the investors who say they’re not likely to return to equity investing? When they became equity investors, probably, they believed in your marketing communications about the “eroding effect of inflation” on a cash or bond portfolio. They continuously invested, thanks in part to your steady drumbeat to “pay yourself first” and benefit from the value of “time in the market.” Any number of other marketing messages may have made an impression on them at one point.

Your shareholders, your advisors’ clients believed and then they experienced…and now more than four out of 10 investors are thinking that they’ve had enough. Hmm, what can you possibly do about that, I was thinking to myself?

Help In Making An Informed Selection

Then I reached down to dip my paintbrush back into the Benjamin Moore paint can and it was at that point when I remembered an article I’d read about a Benjamin Moore app. What the app does for paint-buying is where I think mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) communications may need to head. Communications you produce may need to move away from the abstract (and definitely away from a product emphasis) to context.

Let me explain. The Benjamin Moore iPhone app can be used to upload photos of a living space.

This screenshot shows a photograph that’s been uploaded to the app. If a paint-buyer wanted to repaint the wall to match the color of the fireplace, for example, he or she could use the app to select colors from a strip representing a color spectrum (which is shown) or harmony, which are complementary colors.

In other words, the user uploads his needs and interacts with the app to see his options. The paint supplier reaches into his inventory and displays the colors that might work for those needs.

Apps Support Relevance

Do you see the difference between this approach and how investment companies communicate today? Just as there are countless colors of paint all of which could work in some setting, there are innumerable investment options. But the communications you provide go only as far as to describe each option.

What if we stopped expecting investors and advisors to 1)come to the paint store and 2)walk down the aisles, looking at swatches and trying to guess the fit between what’s being sold and what they need? What if digital technology could be employed to truly “know your customer” and help elevate the art involved in helping advisors and investors find investments appropriate to the investors’ lives and temperaments?

Portfolio analysis and portfolio-building tools abound online, of course. And some in the broad investment space are experimenting. For example, see this March Wall Street Journal article about how virtual reality can help investors visualize themselves in retirement.

But I think that money manager communications about the “suitability” of their investment products for use by individual advisors and their investors can go much further.

Leading with the user’s context may be an effective way of re-engaging investors and reaching new ones. As suggested by the Benjamin Moore app, mobile especially lends itself to more relevant (e.g., local, personal, even social) communicating and understanding. In fact, personal relevance is becoming an expectation of mobile apps.

We need to think about how much longer we can expect to rely on the same limited stable of communications (the abstract investment messages and product descriptions). We’ve seen them originally offline and they’ve been ported in large part to mutual fund and even ETF Websites. But I encourage you to think different as you approach mobile app development. This is the time and mobile is the opportunity to better communicate with advisors and investors.

What do you think? Have I inhaled the paint fumes or is this something you’re also thinking about?

PIMCO’s release this week of an iPhone/iPad mobile app is among the first (if not the first) non-transactional mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) apps.

Most of the few investment company apps are product and data-based and, as such, may have limited value to non-account-holders. Given the firm’s status as a bona fide investment thought leader, it makes sense that PIMCO would take the lead in developing a content app available to all comers—extending its reach and ostensibly using it as a customer acquisition as well as customer retention tool.

This is all indirect and inexplicit, I should hasten to add. The app includes no conversion devices to capture names or email addresses, let alone sell product.

What follows is not offered as a review, just some isolated comments for those of you planning your own content apps. Congratulations to the PIMCO team for this first iteration, which is listed in Apple’s App Store as Version 1.2.

As fund marketers know, minimal disclosure needs to accompany the distribution of market commentary. And this simple opening screen interrupted by only the Sidebar navigation tab (bottom left corner) is a breath of fresh air.

But…there’s more to answer to than just Compliance and financial regulators, and here I have to say that I think all apps need terms of use agreements. Particularly in the wake of the recent kerfuffle over Apple and Google collecting location information from their mobile operating systems, mobile app downloaders are increasingly attuned to seeing agreements upfront or at least a link upfront. Links are offered at the bottom of individual pieces of PIMCO content that launch a mobile browser and go to the Website privacy policy. Still, users want to know what privacy they surrender when using an app.

Users will value this app as a repository of current and archived content produced by the PIMCO brain tank. As you’d expect, bond guru Bill Gross is well represented, with investment outlooks dating back to February 2009.

Awesome. The app showcases the depth of PIMCO’s content while hinting at the strengths of its content management infrastructure. What would make this app even more awesome is a capability to search on a page and across all content on the app. Oh and also some data, in chart or tabular form.

The app offers limited interactivity. The timeline that appears on a PIMCO Website page has been migrated to the app.

PIMCO enables content sharing via email or via a Twitter or Facebook account. Yay! It’s great to see PIMCO adopting social site authentications (see my related blog post from last year) even in this limited way. But, will PIMCO make use of the authority being hinted at in the authentication screen below? I’d doubt it—but an app-specific policy would say so. The Share capability is the only nod to anything social.

PIMCO’s offer of broadcast replays of Gross’ appearances of CNBC, Bloomberg and NPR will no doubt impress every junior marketer who spends hours of their life (hours they will never get back, as one marketer explained to me once) chasing down re-use rights from the broadcast company and then additional disclosures from Compliance. Even in PIMCO’s case, the videos included are from March, the delay owing no doubt to the processes required.

I have to say that I laughed out loud at this note at the start of a CNBC clip. Really? CNBC is worrying about its inclusion on a PIMCO app as being misinterpreted as endorsement? Really?

Download the PIMCO app for yourself and check out what may be just the beginning of content apps from the investment industry. As always, your thoughts are invited below.

To borrow a phrase from David Letterman, asset managers don’t give digital marketer jobs to chimpanzees. And it’s a good thing, too, because you need to be at your highest-functioning as online content consumption evolves and new utilities surface as a means of providing access to content your firm produces.

Content marketing by asset managers is largely in the form of thought leadership, i.e., long-form content about the markets and market opportunities. The rising popularity of mobile devices (primarily iPads but ostensibly other tablets, too) and browser tools that accommodate saving think pieces for later is driving engagement in longer content. This should be a net positive for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers.

But we see a few issues that you might want to consider. Here’s a quick briefing—of course, we welcome your thoughts below.

Readers Prefer Non-computer Reading

Longer content is getting its lift from bookmarking tools (bookmarklets) that are added to browsers. My favorite Instapaper is believed to be the market share leader, followed by Read It Later and Readability. Once the bookmarklet is in place, an online reader can land on a Web page and decide to save that page to read later on a computer or synchronized mobile device, and even offline, by clicking on the bookmarklet.

This ability to time-shift online content that’s not able to be consumed when it’s discovered is leading to a significant change in reading habits—and preferences for reading device. iPad owners, especially, are saving their online reading, to do the majority of it later on their iPads. That’s the conclusion of Read It Later, based on 100 million articles saved by its users across all major Web and mobile platforms.

“While on a computer, we are more susceptible to discovering additional content throughout the day,” notes Read It Later. But their images above show that as a day wears on, iPad readers abandon the computer in favor of reading on their iPads. You’ll want to read the complete analysis.

And, of course, we recommend that your Web analytics segment your site traffic by device and that you consistently review the differences (including time of day) between those who access your site via computer versus mobile.

The Value (And Risk To You) Of Stripped Content

kasina has reported that more than half of financial advisors use mobile devices to access “work content.” And we know that asset managers are equipping their wholesalers with iPads to do their jobs. To do your job and to truly understand how your saved-for-later content is being consumed, you need access to iPads, too.

What’s more, if IT has limited your browser tool to Internet Explorer, you need to break free to be able to use the bookmarklets that are more commonly available for Firefox and Chrome. IE users won’t be able to use Instapaper at all.

Reading content using these bookmarklets is a better experience for the reader not just because of the device used. It’s also because in saving the content, articles are stripped from their original design and placed into formatted text to produce what this Readability video calls a “clean, comfortable reading view.”

Readability – Enjoy Reading, Support Writing from Arc90 on Vimeo.

Who wouldn’t prefer less “clutter” (a catch-all term for the site design, navigation, widgets, etc. that digital marketers labor over) when reading?

Once you are using Firefox or Chrome and saving content to read later on the iPad, you’ll see for yourself why we expect advisors and investors to increasingly gravitate to these utilities as a way of reading your long-form work. And then you will also immediately see some issues.

No Adobe Acrobat Support

Instapaper doesn’t support Adobe Acrobat files, asset managers’ preferred means of distributing content. While bookmarking appears to save the content contained in a .pdf, it actually can’t be accessed through the Instapaper interface. And, it’s not possible to save a .pdf to read later while on the iPad.

A user who may take the trouble to save your content for later hits a dead-end, as shown in this screenshot of a .pdf-packaged Loomis Sayles commentary on Egypt that never loads.

Not All Required Content Converts

HTML content that’s saved for later converts just fine to the Instapaper interface—but you are going to need to confirm that all required content (disclosures, prospectus offerings and hyperlinks, distributor information, etc.) is included in the text that’s converted. We’re not going to show any screenshots here, but some asset manager content is running pretty naked.

Below is a screenshot of an unadorned (no design, navigation, etc.) excerpt from an AdvisorTweets blog post as seen in Instapaper. Note the link to the original and that the hyperlinks have been retained. But much information was not converted: the second line of the headline, the RSS subscription info, the comments.

Is it sufficient that the bookmarklets always offer a link to the original presentation of the content or is this a Compliance concern? This merits immediate review with your Compliance, IT and content management system (CMS) team. It may require some page-making adjustments. For Instapaper, specifically, see the Instapaper Information for Publishers page.

Some Context May Be Desirable

As you look at your content standing alone as it does, you’ll see that you’ll want to add more to each content piece to give it some context and to extend the “relationship” with the reader who bookmarked your single piece of content. You may want to add a standard line about signing up for an email newsletter or subscribing to an RSS feed. If you have an accompanying audio file, make sure you include a mention within the content.

The Effect On Your Site Traffic

Finally, as you think through the implications of offsite reading of your content, the logical conclusion is that this trend will affect your Website’s total page views, time on site and other engagement metrics. This is to be expected and we encourage you to begin now to set management expectations with the eye on your communications goals, not traffic charts.

Adobe yesterday released survey results that we just have to call your attention to, despite the fact that we commented on mobile phone apps in a post two weeks ago.

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project’s The Rise of Apps Culture had reported on interest in finance apps. But this data from the Adobe Mobile Experience Survey: What Users Want from Media, Finance, Travel & Shopping, October 2010, zeroes in specifically on interest in mutual funds and securities (including ETFs) via both mobile phones’ browsers and applications.

As you review the graphs below (and you can download the full report), remember that these are still early days. Will mobile phone users expect to access investment data on their phones? Some already are, according to this research. This and what’s being learned elsewhere should be enough for asset managers to consider mobile in their communications roadmap.

Don’t Let Your Site Design Be An Adoption Hurdle

The practice is far, far from mainstream. For example, less than 2% of more than 15,000 Americans and Canadians surveyed in the second quarter of 2010 by Empathica Research preferred mobile as a banking channel. More than half of U.S. consumers said they don’t trust the security of the device.

“Internet banking went through the same hurdles with privacy and security concerns,” said Dr. Gary Edwards, who Empathica quoted in its research release.

But now is the time to care how your Web site looks and works on a mobile phone. The Adobe data shows that iPhone users are accessing investment data via Web browsers as opposed to mobile apps. That makes sense given the iPhone’s lead. The lighter use of apps conflicts with what Pew reported about finance apps in general.

If you’re using Flash to deliver content and functionality (as so many mutual fund and ETF sites do), know that you’re offering these early mobile browsers a flawed experience.

Financial services users were less satisfied than consumer products/shopping and media/entertainment users, which Adobe speculated “may be a spillover of how consumers have historically rated their experience” in this category. As an iPad user continually frustrated by what I can’t see on asset manager sites, I’d bet the effect of Flash disabling or diminishing site capabilities has something to do with dissatisfaction, too.

10% Of The Oldest Segment Conduct Securities Transactions

Across the board, Adobe found that mobile’s most active content consumers tend to be male, 30-49 years old and own iPhones. This pattern was true among financial users, too.

Think about how early this is and then look at this data again. The smallest number in the graph above is 10%–10% of 50 to 64-year-olds who perform finance-related activities on their mobile phones are conducting stock and mutual fund transactions.

People want to interact with their investment portfolio on their phones—which Adobe and others have taken to calling “mini-computers.” We stand by what we wrote a few weeks ago. This report notwithstanding, we think mobile Web browsing will eventually give way to user preference for what can be done in much richer, more controllable applications.

What do you think? Do you agree that the tilt will be toward apps over Web sites? What can an asset manager provide via an app that will win its affection as a go-to app? How can you be sure that your firm and products are represented on others’ apps? Which apps? It’s time to get your team thinking about these and other considerations.

The survey found a few differences between the second and third devices used by banking and investment account reviewers and researchers. The order of these is certain to shuffle as all platforms including Windows Mobile are steadily innovating in the hustle to gain market share as mobile adoption skyrockets.
The Adobe research is useful in that it provides the big picture. Your Web analytics can provide insights on how mobile users are accessing your content. We recommend regular reporting, monitoring and learning about the needs of this emerging segment. Not to be a nag but pay special attention to the pages that they bounce from—that’s your clue to what’s not working.

Will your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm eventually produce a mobile application? If your answer to that question is yes, data released in the last few weeks may help move your plans to the front-burner (yep, right alongside everything else).

A global smartphone study by Zokem points to shrinking reliance on Web browsing as mobile users show a striking preference for native applications.

“There is still a lot of usage inside the Web browser,” said Zokem founder Hannu Verkasalo. “However, as mobile consumption patterns get richer, and people learn to require more and more functionalities, the native applications in most cases provide the best user experience.”

Native apps already represent 50% of all mobile data traffic volume, according to Zokem.

What kinds of apps? Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project released a The Rise of Apps Culture report with data that floored us. Check out this graph that shows:

• A high percentage of apps users get financial information and “do their banking.”
• And it’s a significantly higher percentage than all Internet users.

The report also included December 2009 data from the Nielsen App Playbook that showed that banking/finance apps were more popular than sports and shopping apps! This research predates the release of the iPad and much of the popularity of the Droid.

It’s logical that apps users are more likely than other adults to engage in almost every online activity “due in part to the Web accessibility and increased engagement many apps provide,” according to Pew.

What’s another term for what researchers describe as “increased engagement”? Love! I waxed on about the affection that mobile apps are engendering among their users on a MENG Blend blog post last week (Looking For Love? Bundle the Best of Your Brand in an App).

We “love” our apps. Credit the early app producers for delivering such positive experiences that users are more than open to experimental navigation, continual update cycles and even incomplete information libraries.

We’re willing to overlook inconveniences and hang-ups because using most apps is such a delightful and better experience than having to slug it out on the open Web. This delight, I’m convinced, enhances the user’s brand impression.

Of course, asset management firms, too, would want to find a way to take part—and sooner rather than later.

The eagerly anticipated Apple iPad just may force a rethinking of asset managers’ reliance on Adobe Flash Player as a means of delivering some much-needed life and vitality to their Web sites.

In an industry not known for its innovation online, Flash-based presentations on a home page or on a financial advisor home page have been the go-to site enhancement on mutual fund sites. Given their young age, almost all exchange-traded fund (ETF) sites employ Flash in some way.

If your site uses Flash, you’re not going to be happy with how your pages display through Apple’s Safari browser on the iPad.

Apple’s lack of support for Flash and other Web plug-ins on the iPad is consistent with its lack of support for Flash on the iPhone. According to Apple’s guidelines for preparing content for the iPad, only HTML5 tags can be used to deliver audio and video content in Safari. The stated purpose of HTML5, the next generation markup language for the Web and not Apple-specific, is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-ins like the Flash player from Adobe.

Below we show examples from DWS Investments and WisdomTree, but the problems prevail across industry sites viewed on the iPad.

DWS Investments’ Home Page With Flash…

DWS Investments’ gorgeous Flash-heavy site includes the Financial Weather Report that we include among the Rock The Boat Marketing best practices. The first shot below is of its home page as viewed on a PC; the second is the stripped down version (and note the Adobe Flash Player link above) as seen on the iPad.

…And The Same Home Page On The iPad

WisdomTree Home Page With Flash…

WisdomTree’s outstanding videos are front and center on its home page. On the iPad, the prime real estate is just empty.

…And The Same Home Page On The iPad

We find this predicament especially unfortunate because we’re familiar with the work involved in the storyboarding and production iterations required for Compliance review. But, we think you’re going to want to produce an alternative to Flash presentations just as soon as possible.

The iPad is first-generation and in the hands of just a few hundred thousand users today–as your corporate IT team (few of whom are likely to be Apple “fanboys”) may point out to you.

Your comeback? Prior to the launch, Apple was predicting 10 million unit sales in 2010 and there are already 75 million iPhone/iPod Touch users. The largest media sites including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CBS have been driven to redesign, either eliminating their use of Flash or offering a non-Flash alternative.

This is an appropriate concern and we recommend that you and your Web developers collaborate on a plan that considers users of Apple mobile devices.

If you’d like to see how your own site or others’ look on the iPad, iPadPeek is a Web site that provides a preview. Be sure to disable your Web browser’s Flash plug-in (follow the directions from this Mashable post).

The screenshots in this post, by the way, were created on my iPad. It was a dark and rainy Saturday morning when the UPS driver brought color and layout and photos back into my life via the delivery of the iPad.

The Amazon Kindle is intended primarily for reading books, I know. But I’ve been using it for my daily newspaper delivery. Since 2007, I’ve been reading The Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune in the (original) Kindle’s color-less and mostly closed environment.

I missed a lot that I used to love about the morning paper ritual, but the Kindle was convenient and environment-friendly and I was willing to suffer for that.

But the arrival of the iPad means the end of compromise for me. So far, the iPad has lived up to my every expectation in meeting my indulgence of wanting to read the news (the WSJ application and the Tribune Web site) on a colorful tabloid-size screen even while multiple computers are elsewhere in the house.

I brought my iPad to my family’s Easter celebration (what a great way to collect the whole family’s fingerprints!). “What do you mean it can’t print?” my sister asked. “But, is it that much better than your iPod Touch?” my brother-in-law wanted to know.

I love the iPad. Beyond that, I’ll leave the reviews to the reviewers. And I’ll leave this post by encouraging you to get your hands on the iPad. Once you do, you’ll see how (and maybe why) the iPad has already motivated some companies to elevate their game, to provide richer experiences. They want to be ready for whatever this new form factor sends their way–and that’s where you and your site need to be.

On Friday, May 7, Pat will be moderating a “Connecting Today: How Asset Managers Are Using Social Media and Why” session at ICI’s 2010 Operations and Technology Conference.

We sat in on a Forrester Research Top 10 Financial Services Web Site Best Practices of 2009 Webinar this afternoon and thought we’d pass on a few highlights.

App Turns Phone Into An ATM

USAA’s mobile phone app (released first for the iPhone and in January for the Droid) enables registered accountholders to deposit checks simply by photographing the check and submitting the image via the phone.

We covered remote deposit capture (RDC) seven years ago when the payments industry introduced it as a solution for commercial customers that met volume requirements. It’s exciting to see the capability downstreamed to consumers for one-off use.

Brad Strothkamp, Forrester principal analyst, singled the app out for two reasons.

First, it’s a best practice of offering content differentiated from what Internet banking applications offer. If you’re working on a mobile strategy for an asset management company, be sure to consider the medum—offering just a miniature version of your mutual fund or ETF site won’t cut it.

But more important, this app is an innovation that makes doing business with USAA easier.

According to USAA’s January press release announcing the Droid app, in the five months since Deposit@Mobile was introduced in August 2009, customers deposited more than $300 million using their iPhones.

USAA provides financial services (including mutual funds) to military members and their family—a very mobile group. More than 1.2 million members use USAA’s mobile platforms to manage daily transactions.

Mint.com Bases Cross-Selling On Potential Savings

Mint.com, the online personal finance site we’ve been encouraging you to keep an eye on for the audience it’s building and the tools it’s delivering, is now doing “smart” cross-selling based on transactional information. According to its site today, more than 1 million people have uploaded their checking, savings and investment account information to Mint and 3,000 are signing on each day. Mint is tracking $175 billion in transactions, $47 billion in assets and has identified more than $300 million in potential savings for its users.

In the cross-selling example that Strothkamp cites, when Mint “sees” discount brokerage commissions, it can cross-sell a lower-cost provider. Let’s set aside the other discussion we could have—i.e., How long until Mint begins to cross-sell based on mutual fund expense ratios?—this is smart Web site functionality.

Social Media Stimulates Trading

The TradeKing community is a Forrester favorite and you can read more about it on the Groundswell page. The community allows for traders to share trade and balance information at the aggregated level. Most intriguing in Strothkamp’s comments was that TradeKing finds the more active a trader is in the social community, the more they trade—four times more!

Across financial services businesses, “there’s a lot of interest in figuring out social tools,” Strothkamp said.