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.

What role does SEO play in your firm’s Marketing? Many companies we work with don’t invest a lot in search engine optimization. But the companies that do tend to swing over to the other extreme—they tend to have a deeper appreciation for how search drives website traffic and, because of this, they invest many of their hopes and dreams into their SEO efforts.

In many cases, that’s not practical. SEO can’t on its own rescue an online presence, and particularly not if an SEO team is siloed. What an organization knows and understands about SEO can be leveraged many times over once the search professionals are mainstreamed with the rest of Marketing, including writers and producers involved in creating content to be marketed and syndicated.

Whether you’re a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) company that today invests in SEO or not, the presentation I’ve embedded below has relevance for the work you’re doing to market with thought leadership. It may start too far back for some of you or go into too much detail, but be sure to pay attention to the insights starting on slide 51.

The “Death and Rebirth of SEO” by Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, provides concrete examples of how SEO and search awareness can work effectively with content marketing, social media, analytics and public relations. It’s an excellent point-in-time report that I think you’ll get so much out of.

I had been planning a post about the importance of updating your social sharing icons to include Google’s +1 button. You’d do this for two reasons:

1. To enable site visitors to share your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) content on Google+. You’d be joining the ranks of more than 1 million sites that have added +1 since its introduction in June, according to Google.

2. To optimize your Google search engine rankings and traffic. It’s Google’s +1 button, remember, and Google is believed to be paying close attention to content that’s +1ed (I know that’s not really a verb, I’m just hoping that investment writing expert and loyal reader Susan Weiner is taking an extended Labor Day vacation). Only a human can +1 a piece of content and Google is increasingly acknowledging the importance of human signals as a complement to its algorithms.

This isn’t a small consideration as a short-lived Forbes post unambiguously suggested. “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers” was the headline of an article that was supposedly based on a meeting with Google ad representatives, published and later killed. You can read more about the “touchiness” surrounding the issue on this Wired blog post and then see Search Engine Watch’s post from yesterday.

Don’t let this site change flounder on a Compliance review or IT priority list. You’re going to want to get +1 added to your site sooner rather than later.

PDF Tweaks

Of course, I realize that all this social sharing icon intrigue is relevant to a still limited number of asset managers (see our March 10 review of social sharing on mutual fund/ETF sites).
There’s no escaping the fact that many asset managers’ approach to sharing is still limited to making Adobe Acrobat files available. The PDF is a favorite file format on virtually all asset managers’ Websites.

So, when I spotted this Google Webmaster post on preparing PDF files to optimize their rankings, I naturally thought of you all. Be sure to read this thoroughly, including what you’d need to do to get Google to index all those fabulous charts and graphs your PDFs include.

For a while now, I’ve felt that YouTube may be the most under-leveraged social media site for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies. This is a shame considering the opportunity—and the significant internal discussion and review that precedes an asset manager’s establishment of a YouTube channel and the effort invested in producing video content.

When was the last time you checked in on asset managers on YouTube? The following are a few notes from the time I spent over the last week. At the end of this post, you’ll find links to all the channels that I’m aware of. Subscribing to them is an easy way to keep up with the evolving state of the art. (If I’ve missed your company, please let me know and I’ll update the list.)

A Few Fresh, Lively, Natural Presentations

Money management firms are uploading videos that run the gamut from commercials to portfolio manager interviews/updates and recorded Webinars. Much of it follows the sort of stilted style that we’re all familiar with but there are some stand-out video treatments.

The examples I show below reflect a bias—I think that a communication ought to take advantage of its medium. Why go to the trouble to create video if there’s no motion?

That’s not the case in the first example, which is a whiteboard presentation from iShares.

Animation, wildly popular in the last few years, is not common in this space. Below is an example from OppenheimerFunds’ globalize your thinking series.

The third video is an obviously hand-held view of mining operations in Brazil. Sure, we could listen to somebody back home all cleaned up describing what he saw. But in this case, the money manager employs the video camera onsite to show us what he saw. This 2009 video is one of US Funds’ most watched videos despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sound. Maybe narration would have gotten in the way.

Benchmarking Data Available

YouTube is the quintessential big tent, the home of Lady Gaga impersonations, Will It Blend? demonstrations and all manner of cat fancies. So, it’s fair to ask: Um, is anybody finding their way to mutual fund and ETF videos?

By default (you can opt out of sharing), YouTube accounts offer statistics and data that can be viewed to get an idea of how a channel is performing. Across the board, YouTube-reported data on viewership of asset manager videos appears to be much, much lower than it should be for an industry that manages $13 trillion of investors’ assets.

Here’s some data I came across on the channel pages the last week:

• Number of videos and recent postings: Some firms appear to be going for it, based on the number of videos uploaded and the recency of their postings. Putnam has uploaded the most videos (180), more than twice the number uploaded by most of the other firms. Almost half of the firms uploaded videos in the last week. Others, though, seem to have lost interest. A handful of firms haven’t uploaded a video in two months or more which, as we know, is an eternity on a social site.

• Subscribers: Only Vanguard and Fidelity (whose Be The Green Line account was created for a 2010 marketing campaign) have attracted more than 100 subscribers. Vanguard had 353 and Fidelity 109 at this writing. Some channels don’t show their subscriber counts.

• Video views recorded by a single video: Uploaded videos are doing well to attract more than 100 views. Five Russell Investments videos have attracted more than 10,000 views (helped along by followers of the popular film-maker of Russsell’s Conversations series). Some of Vanguard’s videos have been viewed by thousands but more have failed to break the 1,000 mark. Individual Fidelity, Franklin Templeton and JP Morgan Funds videos have drawn more than 3,000 views. In the case of Franklin Templeton, Putnam and T. Rowe Price, the most viewed video was a commercial. Nothing wrong with that.

There’s additional data provided on individual video pages about where traffic comes from, what YouTube calls “significant discovery events.” Clicking on the icon shown in the right-hand corner will expand to show data if it’s available. Here’s a look at the traffic to the top-viewed Russell Investments video.

Give Those Videos A Little Help

YouTube is second only to Google as a search engine, and Google of course owns YouTube. Lots of searchers prefer to click on videos as search results. That’s good because there’s the potential to create awareness and meet more people than you might be attracting on your own Website.

But, the volume of content on YouTube poses a significant challenge for those seeking to be found—and it’s only getting more competitive. Last month, YouTube announced that more than 48 hours (two days worth) of video are uploaded to the site every minute, a 37% increase over the last six months and 100% over last year.

YouTube doesn’t make it easy for asset managers, starting with its video categories. When the closest choices are Education, News & Politics and People & Blogs, it starts to feel as if maybe this isn’t the right place to be after all. One would also expect YouTube’s search filters to be better. Search for “investment” videos or even investment channels and you’ll see that an array of investment-ish videos swamp the results. Mutual fund and ETF provider channels are there (Russell and Putnam ranked highest in my searches) but you have to look to find them.

Asset managers determined to benefit from their presence on YouTube need to take matters into their own hands.

For starters, much more can be done on firm Websites and in other marketing messages to promote and integrate YouTube channels, including announcing the availability of new videos. YouTube offers email updates to channel subscribers but the channel sponsors don’t have access to those email addresses.

On YouTube itself, at the very minimum, the video description fields must be completed. YouTube algorithms can’t watch videos, remember, but they can “read” HTML. Keyword-aware titles, tags and rich descriptions (including the firm name!) all help with discover-ability. Descriptions can include up to 5,000 characters, tags can be 120 characters. Use the space.

Also, Promoted Videos—which operate similarly to Google AdWords—are worth consideration. In the last week, I noticed promotions from Franklin Templeton and JP Morgan Funds.

These are early days for asset managers on social sites, that’s especially apparent on YouTube. What are your thoughts on the opportunity, the level of participation, the content being published and the challenges faced? Your comments are welcome below.

Asset Managers’ YouTube Channels

American Century Investments
Be The Green Line (Fidelity Investments)
Calvert Funds
Franklin Templeton
iShares
Legg Mason
Lord Abbett
MFS
JP Morgan Funds
OppenheimerFunds
Putnam Investments
Russell Investments
TIAA-CREF
T. Rowe Price
US Funds
Vanguard

For as much as we’re all focusing on social media and the potential for it, Search is still the most powerful way for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies to meet new people and for them to discover what you have to say.

And yet, as I’ve lamented on many occasions, most asset manager content is far down in the search engine rankings. At this point, your chances for overtaking keyword-aware search engine-optimized Websites on page 1 of Google’s results are slim (unless, of course, you start being social but don’t get me started, not in this post).

Asset managers’ poor showing for non-branded keyword searches in search engine rankings is tragic to me because I know the depth and quality of the content that you publish on your sites. Such a shame that it’s buried deep within Adobe Acrobat files with nonsensical names stored in content management system databases that generate nonsensical URLs. Your search visibility suffers from Compliance insistence on .pdf delivery and legacy page-making mis-steps, as you are painfully aware.

All of which is a long prelude to my giddiness Saturday morning when I read about Zanran, a search engine exclusively for data. It was Zanran’s focus on data and the specific search results shown on TheReformedBroker.com blog post that got my attention. Blogger Josh Brown used “gold to silver ratio” as a search example and his first result was a .pdf from Claymore Investments in Canada.

By contrast, the same search in Google produces pages of results that go to domains with gold and silver in their names, to heavily-trafficked Websites and to blogs, which are optimized for search. I couldn’t find Claymore or any asset manager on the first 10 pages of results for that search this morning.

Interesting…Could this search engine, still in beta, unlock the value of the data that asset managers diligently publish on their sites, thereby raising awareness of money managers and their communications relevance? I think so. I think it’s possible that the functionality to search “semi-structured data,” as developed by Zanran’s London-based development team, may help your cause.

I’ve done a few tests and the sites and content that I was looking for showed up, and high if not as the #1 result. But you look for your stuff, too. In this screenshot of what appears at Zanran.com, note that the search options can be expanded, you can do site-specific searches.

Zanran is still in beta and a few bloggers are reporting some issues. Overall, I haven’t seen much attention paid to Zanran, though, and something tells me that a marketing blitz is a ways off.

It’s too soon to be giddy. But I wanted you to hear about Zanran when I did. A few suggestions:

• I’d do a double-check of your database files—you don’t want Zanran finding data in out-of-date prospectuses, for example.
• You might want to let your Sales group know about Zanran’s capability so they can cite it as a resource for advisors. A Zanran search is likely to produce better results than the average site search and better than a “keyword site:domain.com” search on Google.
• Keep an eye on your Web analytics to see if and when Zanran starts referring traffic.
• If nothing else, add it to your own search tools.

The following post was my March 3, 2011, contribution to the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) Blend site. The MENG Blend is a blogging initiative featuring bloggers from multiple marketing disciplines and industries. I blog on online marketing and social media.

Non-digital marketers tend to leave search engine optimization (SE0) issues to the digital marketers. If you have been maintaining a 20,000-foot view of how search engines drive Website traffic and attention, you may have missed a few recent developments that could influence your understanding of social media and what it could mean to your work.

The notion of optimizing for search engine results is being broadened beyond Web page code and  keyword-conscious content creation. Increasingly, your appearance in search engine results will also be a function of your social participation.

You and your firm have every right to take your time and set your own pace in terms of your participation in social networks. But if you’re favoring a slow pace or if you’ve concluded that social media is just not for you or your company, you should know that such a position will have consequences.

Social Circle As The Ultimate Clique

Google, in its continuous drive to deliver results that are relevant to searchers, is giving significant weight to social participation. For elaboration, we’ve embedded two videos below. The first is from January 2010. It’s an explanation by Google that the searcher who has established a Google Profile, including links to his accounts on various social networks, can expect his search results when logged into a Google account to include results from people within his network. When we showed the effect of this on our blog last year, the social circle results were displayed at the bottom of the search page.

As the new video below describes, the recent update goes further in three ways:

• Previously Google segregated the social circle results; now they are integrated within the standard search results.
• Search results include notes for links that the searcher’s connections have shared on Twitter and other sites. The appearance of the favicon that the searcher is likely to recognize from his social networking activity along with the link provide a quasi-endorsement for that search result.
• Google offers the searcher more control over how and which social accounts are connected.

How many people—how many of your clients and prospects—use or are likely to use Google Profiles, the linchpin in Social Search? Don’t know. But what is known is that you and your firm are passing on a visibility opportunity with those who do (likely influencers) if you don’t have a social profile of your own.

A Tweet Can Drive Search Results

In fact, a single tweet sent by an influential social account can have a mighty impact, according to a case study documented by the SEOMoz site in mid-February.

We call this to your attention both as an illustration of what you may be missing out on and of what your more social competitors may be benefitting from.

Here are the details: An SEOMoz Twitter account (no slouch itself, by the way) tweeted about the availability of a beginner’s SEO guide. That tweet was re-tweeted (forwarded) by many but notably by the SmashingMagazine Twitter account (@SmashingMag) which stimulated significant re-tweeting. That’s to be expected.

What wasn’t expected was the immediate rise to Google’s page 1 of search results of the SEOMoz beginner’s guide—not the tweet, mind you, the content itself. You’ll want to read the full case study but here are a few of SEOMoz’ conclusions:

• A high quantity of tweets from “real” Twitter users can have a substantial impact on search rankings in the short term, with some residual effect over the long term.
• Authoritative Twitter accounts lend their authority to pages they tweet (both Google and Bing consider the authority of Twitter accounts).
• This was reported and discovered by an SEO site because they pay close attention to what moves search engine rankings. But all effective social accounts are assumed to be benefiting from the search engines’ recognition that social activity can be a signal of relevant, authoritative content.

If your business relies on people finding you and your solutions through search engines, opting out of social media or dragging your heels about exploring it may be to your detriment.

Over on AdvisorTweets.com, financial advisors are expressing a lot of interest in the health of the bond market, municipal bonds in particular. Just this week Wall Street analyst Meredith Whitney warned that as many as 100 U.S. cities and other municipal issuers would default on their debt this year (see her CNBC appearance at the bottom of this post).

It’s led us to wonder about the level of search interest, which we’d think of as a proxy for consumer/investor interest and awareness.

We’re eager to hear what you make of the data below. We think that the advisors are ahead in their focus and that there’s more to come in terms of search interest and, possibly opportunity, for investment companies interested in providing communications leadership.

A look at the 12-month picture provided by Google Trends shows that “municipal bond” searches were up toward the end of 2010. And we always like to note how searches track with the volume of news references—in this case, searches climbed in December following a news coverage peak in November.

But back out and look at Google Trends data since 2004 and we see that the 2010 levels don’t approach 2008 search interest. The municipal bond market was out of whack that year, along with everything else, and setting up for a blockbuster 2009.

“Municipal bond”-related news coverage spiked in early 2008 but notice that searches hit their high September-ish, without the benefit of additional heightened news coverage. Searches declined throughout 2009, even as investors rushed into municipal bond funds.

Who was searching “municipal bonds” in 2008? Should we assume that anxiety was driving the interest? Will those searchers be back at the same levels in 2011? What information will they be looking for and what is your firm prepared to provide beyond the business-as-usual tax-free fund messaging?

We welcome your comments below.

Starting with this post, we’re experimenting with a WordPress plug-in that greets newcomers and encourages RSS subscription. What do you think? We know from our analytics where visitors come from but is it creepy to lay out a “welcome mat” that acknowledges the referrer?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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.

It doesn’t happen often but sometimes the Universe helps with the blog-writing.

All week I’ve vacillated between two disparate topics: the Roth IRA Conversion Centers that are appearing on asset managers’ Web sites and pay-per-click (PPC) content advertising. Thanks to the Universe for showing a way to address both topics in a single (OK, little long) post.

When there’s a change requiring investor education and a deadline to take action—as is the case with the change in the IRA tax law enabling taxpayers to spread the taxes related to a 2010 IRA-to-Roth-IRA conversion over two years—this is an opportunity for asset management marketers to use marketing to raise assets.

According to Google Insights for Search, interest in Roth IRA conversion as a search term (and related derivatives) peaked in January. That was before many firms had published their Roth IRA conversion content but interest remains high. The opportunity is ongoing.

We’ve gone directly to the Web sites of the largest investment management companies to check out the Roth IRA conversion content developed to attract interest and possibly meet new customers (advisors and investors). Note that this isn’t the way newcomers will get to the sites—if they’re new, Search in all likelihood will have to bring them.

What we’re seeing are a few videos (examples: Nuveen and Putnam), limited HTML content and, as usual, lots of Adobe Acrobat files.

The conversion decision lends itself to calculations, and most firms that have created dedicated Roth IRA Conversion Centers offer at least one calculator. It makes sense that some firms have turned to third parties for interactive tools rather than develop their own. T. Rowe Price uses a Morningstar calculator and Standard & Poor’s powers American Century’s Roth Conversion Analyzer, for example.

But while we acknowledge the speed-to-market motivation that may be driving the decision, we’re not crazy about the use of tools or the hosting of content off a domain, as is the case of Dreyfus’s center and, to a lesser degree, Oppenheimer’s calculator which is off the domain and on a page devoid of all Oppenheimer branding.

Content that’s not on your domain won’t lift your domain in search engine rankings and, in these instances, the user experience suffers.

All in all, it’s not a super search engine-optimized showing for the asset managers, and we have our doubts about how the investment manager content is going to rocket to the top of search engine rankings. One notable exception: Fidelity.com, which consistently ranks high on retirement planning search terms.

Which sites are winning the Search competition for Roth IRA conversion-related terms? That’s how the Universe leads us to pay-per-click (PPC) content advertising.

Enter Pay-per-click (PPC) Content Advertising

A handful of sites command the rankings for the top Roth IRA keywords, according to broad and exact match search analytics data from Compete and a few paid SEO tools we use.

But before we get to them, let’s digress by taking a look at an outlier site that’s consistently ranking high in Roth IRA searches: It’s an LPL financial advisor’s blog, Good Financial Cents by Jeff Rose.

Take a moment to contemplate this accomplishment. Asset manager marketing communications staffs are especially lean right now, to be sure, but an individual advisor has managed to produce enough content and establish enough authority to “beat” asset managers at a game they should have an advantage in. Rose is among the savviest content marketer/financial advisors, but a legion of marketing-minded advisors are right behind him. You can read more about Rose’s strategy in this WiredAdvisor interview.

Given the nature of the other high-ranking sites, asset manager content offerings are not likely to be able to “fight” them. But if you or your online advertising resources (if you have them) are willing to explore your options, there might be a way to join them and other retirement planning-focused Web sites.

At this point, I should disclose that several weeks ago I was asked if I’d be willing to review Customers Now, a book on pay-per-click content advertising. As it happened, I regularly listen to the author David Szetela’s PPC Rockstars podcast and I’d been hearing about this book coming together. I accepted the publicist’s offer, received the 84-page soft cover book and have been meaning to get around to writing the review.

I remembered the commitment this week as I saw who was winning the Roth IRA conversion traffic. It’s content aggregation sites, including: www.rothira.com, www.fairmark.com and www.money-zine.com. All of which are supported by Google AdSense ads, a program that involves Google sharing ad revenue with the Web sites.

Cheesy, right? I’ve always thought so, too. But in demystifying how the ad placements work, Szetela makes a convincing case for the practice. It’s germane to this discussion as a viable tactic to consider in driving awareness and attention for your Roth IRA conversion content.

According to Spyfu.com today, 22 advertisers are bidding for “Roth IRA conversion” as a pay-per-click (PPC) keyword phrase displayed on the search engine results pages. A leading proponent of PPC search advertising, Szetela nonetheless says that such a search takes place later in an information-gathering process. In contrast, pay-per-click (PPC) content advertisers attempt to reach readers on content pages (not Search engines) earlier, during their research and discovery phases.

Advertising on content networks enables advertisers to reach many more people online and before the competition takes place on crowded search pages, Szetela says.

The difference between PPC content and PPC search is that PPC content starts by targeting the customer on relevant but typically niche Web sites. This book serves as a practical guide to using the Google Content Network (whose sites include The Wall Street Journal, Seeking Alpha and Barron’s) and ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ Exchange (whose site says it offers inventory of more than 8,000 vetted publishers).

Szetela describes the significant work required to control the content-matching algorithms to “laser-target” ad placements. Through trial and error, advertisers can adjust the ad creative (yep, Szetela makes the case for the dancing-baby-like animations), target demographic groups and overall assure that their ads appear in context of appropriate, “brand-safe” content.

Will your ad appear on the top sites for Roth IRA terms and will that placement materially help your overall initiative? Maybe, maybe not.

What we can say with near-certainty is that publishing just a limited amount of suboptimized content on your site will not draw visitors on its own. Not on such a competitive topic where content aggregation sites got there before you.

This morning, by the way, we saw T. Rowe Price, continually one of the industry’s most aggressive PPC advertisers, on Fairmark.com. T. Rowe is going for it.

More and more, asset managers are going to conclude that publishing content on their own site is just step one of a two-step process. The second step is to promote the content, using an array of tactics.

To learn more about PPC content advertising as a possible tactic, here’s a (free) Adobe Acrobat file of the Szetela book.

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. Vanguard, Northern Trust and Stradley, Ronon Stevens & Young, LLP will be the panelists.

“That wouldn’t apply to us because… [wait for it] we’re in a regulated industry.”

There’s an underlying current in asset management marketing that trends that affect other industries don’t apply here. It’s an illusion that is almost never true online—what’s affecting other Web sites is probably affecting your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) site, too.

We’ve written about how Facebook and other social networking sites are gaining at the expense of asset manager and other destination Web sites.

But there was a report this week about Facebook’s influence in driving Web site traffic that merits attention. Compete.com data cited by the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday suggests that Facebook is now a more important traffic driver than Google.

“Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites,” the Chronicle reported.

Other types of sites even including investment manager sites? Yes, according to Compete.

Here’s what we found when we took a look at the Compete referrer data for the top 30 (based on assets under management) mutual fund and ETF sites for January 2010.

Facebook Ranks Among Top Referrers to 5 Investment Company Sites (January 2010)
Investment company site (Links go to Compete referrer page)	Facebook’s rank as a top 5 source of site traffic	Referrer share (The monthly share of referral traffic generated by the site compared to all of its referral traffic)	The change in Facebook’s share from December 2009	The change in Google’s share from December 2009
AmericanFunds.com	#4	3.5%	+44.6%	+8.2%
DavisFunds.com	#2	18.2%	New	-93.6%
Dfaus.com	#5	Low data	No data	-55.0%
Fidelity.com	#5	2.45%	-12.17%	-7.2%
GMO.com	#4	10.2%	+92.2%	-17.5%
Source: Compete.com

The sites experience very different total traffic levels. Given the Davis Funds’ site relatively low traffic and few (24) sites referring traffic to it, Facebook’s appearance as a top referrer in a given month might be easy to understand.

But Fidelity and American Funds are industry behemoths and, try as we might to produce alternative explanations, there’s no denying Facebook’s breakthrough as a top referrer. Fidelity.com is the 157th largest site, according to Compete. More than 12,000 sites refer traffic to it and yet Facebook catapulted over those to rank as the fifth top referrer in January? Fidelity’s self-directed investors could help explain the popularity and influence of Facebook. But a heavy retail bias doesn’t help explain Facebook traffic to American Funds, sold exclusively through financial advisors.

The implications of Facebook supplanting Google as a top traffic driver is being contemplated across all industries this week. We invite you to provide your own interpretation and comments below. Here are a few of our thoughts:

Your Referrer Data

The San Francisco Chronicle report was based on a single month’s data (December 2009), and this post is based on one month, as well. One month is what Compete makes available at no charge. In fact, if you follow the links included in the table above to the Compete profiles after the January 2010 data rolls off, you may see a different result.

It’s possible that other fund companies are getting more Facebook traffic in absolute numbers but, because their other referrers are more dominant, Facebook is lower on their list of referrers.

Site traffic is reported using multiple measurement methods. Compete reports clickstream data based on a 2 million-member panel of U.S. Internet users. It’s common for Compete, comScore and Experian Hitwise and Quantcast data to be at odds.

Bottomline: The availability of the Compete data makes this comparative analysis possible. If you’re responsible for digital strategy at your firm, you need to dig into your own Web analytics to better understand where your Facebook traffic is coming from, where it’s going and its quality.

Facebook Links To Investment Sites

Of the five firms, Fidelity has a Facebook page with little more than 1,000 fans, and American Funds has a page for members of its Web group only. We couldn’t determine whether advertising links from Facebook count as referred traffic by Compete. Even if it is, our guess is that only Fidelity would be a likely aggressive Facebook advertiser of these five.

In the absence of robust Facebook pages or ads, that must mean that the Facebook traffic is coming from links posted in the Notes areas. Amazing, almost incredible. Congratulations to these companies for producing content that others think enough to link to. To get a sense of it, do a dfaus site:facebook.com search on Google and see the links from Facebook pages of advisory firms. Institutional firms that have thought that social media is just for retail investors might want to think again.

Forget Search To Focus on Facebook Optimization?

Some have interpreted the ascent of Facebook as a traffic driver, often accompanied by a decline in Google-referred traffic, to mean that people are no longer searching and increasingly prefer to discover content socially. Such a shift in Web user behavior would have significant implications for search engine optimization (SEO) and search marketing. That’s true in particular for digital strategy planning in this business, where much SEO remains to be done.

We agree with this post on Search Engine Land that aims to put the Facebook findings in context. The work involved in thinking about how searchers frame their information requests and the measurement and analysis of the effectiveness of various keyword phrases can result in deeper customer and prospect understanding. Please don’t think that you can skip the work now that Facebook users are recommending investment site content—especially if these recommendations are not as a result of a deliberate strategy of yours.

Facebook—and its 400 million users—is awesome. But maintaining a Facebook presence requires a well-considered strategy and ongoing resources. In an October 2009 post, Facebook: Don’t Expect A Lot of Warm And Fuzzy, we noted a certain crankiness toward investment companies by Facebook commenters. (We saw the same early this month in the early reactions to Fidelity’s Be The Green Line YouTube contest.)

But while your Facebook page may be on a backburner pending strategy, policy and resources, we suggest you take this January 2010 referrer data as inspiration to learn more about Facebook. Your firm doesn’t need a fan page in order for you to explore more about how investors are interacting with your content and how they may want to interact with you.