“People are talking online about you and the business you’re in. You want to take part in that conversation, you want to be in the mix.”

When mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms are early in their exploration of communicating off their own domains, that kind of exhortation by me or somebody like me is usually met with a blank stare. That’s the best case. The worst case is when they pretend they’re listening but they’re really just planning their broadcast schedule for the social sites.

So yesterday T. Rowe Price took to both Twitter and Facebook (if you have a subscription, you can read more about it on Ignites.com today). Cheers all around. In my unscientific monitoring of asset manager mentions on Twitter, my impression is that T. Rowe is the firm that’s talked about most. This may be a reflection of its client base and/or the stakes that the firm has taken in social media investments. As someone who hasn’t had to do any of the work involved, it’s about time for @TRowePrice.

What Took So Long?

I had a chance to talk to T. Rowe’s social media ringleader Dan Phelps yesterday and he outlined the thoughtful, painstaking two-year process that led to the February 1 launch.

But who could have known that would be the same date that Facebook filed its IPO? T. Rowe Price’s high profile as the mutual fund company with the largest investment in Facebook guaranteed that there would be lots of social mentions of “T Rowe” yesterday and no doubt continuing this week.

OK, I don’t know, this wasn’t discussed but my suspicion is that’s not the conversation that the T. Rowe corporate marketing communications people necessarily seek to have. But they’re listening and they’re ready to respond where appropriate. That’s the benefit of all that planning.

I call your attention to one tweet in particular from @bradledwith, a certified financial planner and wealth manager.

Here’s a financial advisor showing interest in a T. Rowe Price mutual fund on Day 1. Excellent. Except…the question being asked is tricky, isn’t it? Fund companies don’t promote their holdings and there’s no way a Twitter editorial calendar anticipated tweeting about the funds that have Facebook exposure.

In The Conversation But Not To Drive It

This is an unplanned conversation opportunity and it marks the beginning of a new way of communicating in public for @TRowePrice. Again, the conversations initiated by others are like offline conversations—unpredictable and rarely about what the brand wants to talk about.

Twitter is about content publishing, sure, but it’s also about customer service and public relations. The same question was no doubt asked on the phones yesterday and customer service handled it.

Most people on Twitter know to direct questions to companies, but this advisor probably assumed that T. Rowe had no Twitter account. Most asset managers don’t (here’s a list I keep of investment managers on Twitter).

What I like about a new account on Twitter is that T. Rowe has the opportunity to surprise this planner by showing that they were listening. They may do it directly in a way that we can all see or they may find a way to engage offline. That they’re engaging is the point. Oh and all those strategy meetings and technology testing and workflow analysis, that’s the point, too.

There’s no underestimating the importance of being fully prepared to be conversational.

I was so eager to get at the recent Advisor Perspectives/Inside Information research that I read the complete 65-page report on my 4-inch phone while sitting out in a cold car waiting for a Realtor to show my house over the weekend.

The conditions notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. “Investment Trends in the Financial Advisory Profession: Key Implications for the Investment Management Industry” lives up to its promotional email.

Authors Bob Veres (Inside Information) and Robert Huebscher (CEO of Advisor Perspectives) wrote a page-turner filled with some provocative ideas for mutual fund and ETF marketers focusing on the elusive RIA channel. The study is based on more than 1,000 responses from independent and dually-registered financial advisors to a September 2011 survey of readers of both publications.

My thanks to Huebscher for providing a review copy of the report. My intent with this post isn’t to skim the cream of what was learned. I want to respect the fact that the report is being sold. (Contact Sales [at] AdvisorPerspectives [dot] com for an executive summary and more information.)

Rather, I call your attention to a theme underlying the report. The research points to a reversal underway in how the industry had been evolving prior to 2008. Since the financial crisis, independent advisors have begun to work differently and the information that advisors need and value from asset managers has changed.

Most Advisors Are Tactically Active

At the highest level, “one of the study’s most significant results” was the high percentage—83%—of advisors who planned to make a tactical shift in the allocations of their clients’ portfolios to asset classes or investment vehicles in the next three months. As an example, the graph below from the executive summary illustrates the change envisioned for large cap equity allocations.What had been disparaged by “mainstream advisors” as market timing prior to 2008 is now common practice, the study notes.

A strength of this study for asset management marketers is that it consistently points out the implications of serving the information needs of “tactically active” advisors. Its insights should help marketing communications align their output with the information that independent advisors seek. (Also see an August 2010 Rock The Boat Marketing post “What One Advisor Wants From Asset Managers.”)

What’s more, the report says that its findings may suggest how other distribution channels will be selecting and managing investments in the near future.

Investment Screening Based On Data

In the decade or so leading up to 2008, firms’ research analysts increasingly relied upon models to build recommended fund lists and as advisors heightened their reliance on that due diligence, quantitative values—funds with at least four or five stars from Morningstar, Morningstar style boxes, assets under management, expense ratios, etc.—were used to screen the contenders from the also-rans.

While few RIAs have home office support in the form of analysts and approved lists, they earned a reputation for being even more quant-based and for doing their own mad number-crunching to evaluate funds.

One result, noted by the research: 95% of all mutual fund inflows can be attributed to a Morningstar star rating of 4 or 5.

As a digital marketer, I’ve cheered the use of data-driven screeners, often delivered via the Web. They are an objective way of surfacing funds that might otherwise not be considered. Definitely an improvement over a focus fund list that was the result of a non-transparent business agreement between a national account and an asset manager.

However, in that screen-reliant New World, many of us wondered about the future value of brand and other communications, whether in introducing a new or different (translation: doesn’t fit in a style box) mutual fund or trying to build institutional awareness.

A Shift Toward The Qualitative

But the market meltdown of 2008 has prompted a change that’s underway, according to what this research is reporting. The data suggest that independent advisors are emphasizing more qualitative factors. “Raw performance” continues to be important, the report says, but in the context of investment diversification and correlation. And, advisors are doing their own evaluations of a manager’s investment process and those evaluations are ongoing.

What is the most important investment characteristic when choosing investments for a client’s portfolio? A manager’s investment process tops the list of advisor survey respondents, as shown in the pie chart I created below. The Morningstar rating is dead last.

“Fewer than 10% included the Morningstar star rating among their top three fund selection criteria, and 33% ranked it last. Only 18% indicated that a fund’s track record was their most important criteria; 44% included it in their top three. Just 39% counted a manager’s track record among their top three criteria.”

The finding “that fewer than 50% of advisors in the 2011 sample ranked a fund’s investment performance, or the manager’s performance, as one of the most important criteria for selecting a mutual fund for client portfolios” would have “astonished” an observer just four years ago, notes the report.

Time To Rethink The Fact Sheet Template?

Consider this report and then consider the most basic of your product communications: the fact card or fact sheet.

One of the appeals of digital communicating is that routine updates can be templated and the data refreshed in an automated way. Mutual fund and ETF product communications especially lend themselves to a systematic approach. It’s not exactly set it and forget it, of course, because of fund events and disclosures that evolve over time.

But the elements of a fund sheet are fairly static, aren’t they? The Growth of $10,000 mountain chart (requiring a lot of space!), the Morningstar style box and star rating, lots of performance data and a paragraph or two about the objective or strategy. It may be time for a new template.

Note: According to the research, Morningstar may be ahead of asset managers in anticipating evolving needs. While it notes the diminishing relevance of Morningstar stars and style boxes, it says Morningstar’s new Global Fund Reports, introduced in November 2011 as forward-looking analyst ratings, are likely to be relied upon by advisors for due diligence.

Focus On Reducing Downside Risk

Across their answers to multiple questions about investment vehicle and asset classes employed, frequency of portfolio changes, etc., the advisors make it known that their focus is on reducing downside volatility in client portfolios—and on staying on top of what’s happening that could threaten their clients’ exposure.

“Investing is fundamentally about risk management,” the survey quotes one respondent as saying. This “seems to reflect the difference in mindset today from five years ago, when the response would likely have been: ‘investing is fundamentally about returns.’”

There are quite a few takeaways from the research (including some new ideas on RIA segmentation) but none is more crystal clear than this one. If your product communications are more about returns than risk management, they may need a post-2008 reboot.

Content marketing and social media weren’t mentioned once in the report (and yet I’m recommending the research anyway!) but they are implied. Advisors care vitally about your money managers’ process, especially in the “go anywhere” funds they are more likely now to embrace, according to the research.

To satisfy advisors’ continuous need for information, today’s asset managers need more than run-rate product communications and well orchestrated presentations. They need to be visible and in the mix with real-time interpretations and analyses.

Finally, this report provides reason to be optimistic if you’re marketing a small or new asset manager. Take pains to explain your value proposition and your process, make sure others are aware of it and your prospects may be good.

I escorted a loved one onto the World Wide Web over the holidays. It truly was my pleasure and honor, after years of his enduring my stories about Websites, RSS feed-reading, analytics, apps and podcasts. He—a brilliant guy and voracious newsreader who haunts the libraries but was able to spend only limited time on their desktops—finally could be online at home via his own 3G iPad and I was eager to help him.

Well, I had romanticized the Training Day. When the time for instruction came, followed by telephone calls and follow-up tutorials, I realized how much I’ve taken for granted about how different online content consumption is and how customization transforms the experience. Not to mention how frustrating the information exchange can be, for both parties involved.

It’s taken me a while to recover (yes, I think I’ll blame the trauma for the delay in publishing a Rock The Boat Marketing blog post in 2012) but I want to share with you some thinking that emerged from it.

The online content consumer has so many awesome options. That’s what I wanted to demonstrate to my newbie. The biggest difference? The ability to arrange for content he cares about to come to him, as opposed to him scouring paper publications looking for something interesting.

The flipside—what these content gathering and filtering options imply for the content producer—is what I take a stab at in the table that follows.

Reality Check

Before the mainstream use of social media and apps and RSS feed readers, etc., brands could focus on their own messages and their own delivery and promotion devices, control it all and do just fine. But given how content is discovered, followed and subscribed to today, a reality check is in order.

Brands, including mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies, need to consider how waves of online content consumers are being exposed to pieces of their work first and to the brand second, if at all. Realizing that content is found more often by topic, keyword or via endorsers necessarily forces a brand to be more gregarious and less set in its own ways. (On a related topic, see my July 1, 2009 post “Mind The Keywords—’Unfortunate Market Anomaly’ Won’t Help Search Traffic Find You.”)

I understand that my unregulated, unrestricted use of the social media and the Web is different from your experience as a corporate marketer blocked from accessing many, many sites. But I see too few of your firms’ content in the mix, where I go online and in the tools and services I use to extract industry-relevant content.

In this still new year, I urge you to consider the multiple ways people will encounter your content. I think there’s more for you to do to leverage your content, available content insights and your relationships with those who value your content.

What firm doesn’t crave content loyalists (the first row in the table)? But think of the others—those who wind their way around to you via a piece of your content (the subsequent rows in the table)—as prospective content converts. They represent your business’ potential for growth. Their path to you via your content deserves your close attention.

There’s nothing profound about this table and it’s not meant to be comprehensive. It’s just a simplified approach to thinking through some ways in which content is discovered and consumed and to what effect. I submit it for your review and comment, those of you who can. As always, if you’re not authorized to comment online, send me an email if you have a thought.

How Content Is Consumed And What It Means For Producers

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

I submit two pieces of content for your consideration today.

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

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

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

Uh-oh, A Dumb Marketing Idea?

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

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

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

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

Authenticity: An Enterprise-Wide Project

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

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

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

Six months ago, I wrote a post about companies that are sharing their business data via APIs, and the insights that result when others work with those APIs. In the last few weeks, Ameriprise Financial has unveiled a reverse of that—their financial advisor search engine now uses the LinkedIn API to enable prospective clients to tap their social networks as a means of surfacing an Ameriprise financial advisor.

Ah, here’s where this social data stuff gets interesting.

How do investors typically look for financial advisors? Offline, they ask their family and friends for referrals. Online, they have probably used search engines or advisor-finder services. By introducing a search via LinkedIn, Ameriprise is acknowledging what lots of consumer research is pointing to—the increasing influence of and trust in social networks and recommendations. This may be a next-gen way of vetting an advisor.

“Find an advisor who is right for you” is the heading on the search page that offers three kinds of search: by location, advisor or team name and via LinkedIn connections.

“The advisor who is right for you is based on the consumer’s comfort and trust, the advisor’s headshot, the proximity of the advisor, whatever credentials are on the Website,” says Joe Rueckert, director of online marketing. The premise of the LinkedIn search is that the consumer whose LinkedIn connections surface an Ameriprise advisor’s name might be further along in the vetting process of finding an advisor who’s “right.”

“This is a referral business,” Rueckert says, “that’s how advisors get clients. And we’ve been saying for a while now that the Web is moving in their favor. Connections don’t just exist in the ether. They’re articulated, especially on LinkedIn.”

I think the Ameriprise site enhancement is worthy of attention for a few reasons.

First, LinkedIn Profiles

This integration is possible only as a result of some smart planning and data architecting. Rueckert and team have been encouraging Ameriprise advisors to create LinkedIn profiles (with Compliance approval and archiving in place) since 2008. Today, more than half of the firm’s 10,000 advisors are on LinkedIn.

The final mile—necessary to be included in the LinkedIn searches—is the inclusion on the LinkedIn profile of a link to the advisor’s personalized (Ameriprise branded and served) Website. Only 20% have taken that step, suggesting that behavior change tends to be more challenging than technology.

“Some advisors don’t see the value, some think that it’s going to take more time, some say their clients aren’t there,” explains Scott Allen, director of interactive marketing.

When I authorized the connection between Ameriprise search and LinkedIn, my results reflected what most mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers might see—dozens of advisors! In Ameriprise usability testing, consumers typically got five or fewer results. As you can see in the screenshot above, the results (you’re seeing just the first) are presented in an attractive display, including a modern-day headshot, a list of areas of focus, links to the LinkedIn profile and to the advisor Website. The default is by alphabetical order of the last name, although searches can be sorted by first name.

The screenshot is of the list view of the search results. In the map view, you’ll see that my first alphabetical result lives in San Francisco, which probably wouldn’t be my first choice as a Chicagoan.

ZIP code advisor searches aren’t available using the LinkedIn search. But performing a ZIP code advisor search from the Ameriprise home page provides a better look at how Ameriprise structures the data describing its advisors—note that the results can be filtered by the amount of assets to be invested and by specializations. That’s smart and truly raises the bar for broker-dealers still offering “office locators” online.

While Rueckert and Allen say they’ve been interested in LinkedIn for a few years, it was only recently that LinkedIn became sufficiently “flexible” with its API. Even then, the coding was more complex and time and cost-consuming than expected.

What About The ROI?

But the time and expense invested aren’t the only competitive barrier Ameriprise enjoys.

“We have good leadership who understands that things are moving so quickly in this space that we have to be considering how the consumers going to change,” Allen says. Lucky for them because there was no way that the Ameriprise team could build an airtight case for what this investment will do for the company or for its advisors.

Based on this example (and I have no business relationship with Ameriprise), I suspect its digital marketers have an advantage that many of you unfortunately lack. For them, an ROI wasn’t a prerequisite to the development and execution of this “experiment” (my word, not theirs).

Let’s break it down. In order to make use of the LinkedIn tie-in, a prospect needs to land on Ameriprise’s site. The likelihood of that happening? It’s probably a function of the strength of the brand. No marketing has been launched in explicit support of this yet.

Of that group, not everyone has a LinkedIn account. Of the group that does, not everyone will want to see what advisors their LinkedIn connections use.

Early Measures

Ameriprise ability’s to measure the search activity is limited. In addition to relying on Web analytics that track traffic to the search page, Rueckert says they’re studying how frequently the LinkedIn search is being used as a percentage of all searches. The percentage of searches that produce zero results should improve over time as more advisors get on board. But no data is collected.

What’s not known is whether this referral interaction will happen. Will one business connection ask another for a perspective on a financial advisor he or she is connected to?

And, the acid test—did this capability produce a lead who materialized and turned into business for an Ameriprise advisor—can’t be proven online. Advisors will have to report that to the Ameriprise team themselves.

Time will tell whether this “works” for Ameriprise. In these early days and based on what Ameriprise has been shared, I’ll offer these observations:

• This is differentiating—and only broker-dealer firms of a certain size could do it.
• Ameriprise has no doubt gained in what they know and understand about LinkedIn, possibly the most important business network for advisors.
• This innovative support for business-building is likely an effective recruiting point for prospective advisors.
• This and their stated interest in communicating via social media ranks Ameriprise as among the social media leaders in the broad investment industry space.

Check it out for yourself. What do you think?

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.

Three reports surfaced in the last week that may help your “evangelizing” about social media and even the impact of digital communicating in general.

Changes In Advisor Content Consumption

kasina shared some high-level findings of its annual “What Advisors Do Online” research and facilitated a conversation with two marketers—Liesl Leach, JP Morgan head of digital marketing and advertising, and Catherine Heron Carroll, Allianz Global Investors’ senior vice president and director of digital marketing, during an audio Webcast Thursday. Fortunately for us all, the Webcast was made available on demand and I’ve embedded it below.

You’ll want to watch/listen to all of it. Here are just a few of the random notes that I took from what was presented and said:

• The surge in advisor reliance on mobile was the top finding this year, according to Steven Miyao, kasina CEO and co-founder. While less than 10% of advisors accessed advisor sites from mobile devices in 2010, nearly 40% of advisors in 2011 say they use smartphones or tablets to access advisor sites. Close to one-quarter use apps developed by asset managers.
• There’s updated data on the argument for content syndication—less than 20% of advisors surveyed said they did their online research on asset manager advisor sites. In other words, they’re researching on sites that mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms need to be present if not active on.
• Apps offer a superior user experience, according to Carroll at about the 20:55 mark. Contrast the experience required of an advisor using a password-restricted advisor Website with an app. “If you go in there and download an app and answer just a couple of questions, you’re going to have such a better experience than you’d have on the Website,” Carroll said. The app can be tailored to the user’s interests and the content can be accessed when the user is offline.
• An audience question triggered a good discussion about the ROI of social media. It starts with Miyao’s response at 37:30. But at 39:30 you’ll hear Leach discuss the importance of reaching influencers and the media. “If one just focuses on advisors and home offices you may be missing the point.”

Documenting The Movement

You’ll see some similar themes—tablet use, digital content development and structural changes needed to leverage digital strengths—in “Social Media and Financial Communications Mid-Year 2011 Report,” a 12-page report prepared by Rebecca Neufeld, senior account executive, Financial Communications at Edelman in Chicago. And, she blogs about it here.

Neufeld’s work is an excellent resource, especially if you need to draw on recent examples of experience and survey data including asset managers in the United States as well as other financial services companies and in other countries. Believing as I do that social media and financial services are an unstoppable combination, I think Neufeld’s premise and subtitle (“The Train Has Left The Station”) is especially apt.

Even the New York Fed Has Decided To Listen

The third report I want to mention is not like the others. And, it’s only tangential to asset management work. Still, this request for proposal (RFP) from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is a public sign of the building acknowledgement that a)online conversations are taking place that large financial institutions may need to at least “listen” in on and b)their tedious and bureaucratic processes and procedures notwithstanding, many institutions are finally mobilizing to do something about it.

It’s quite possible that other Federal Reserve Banks already have monitoring systems in place, I just happened to see this thanks to a tweet by @JesseFelder.

Here’s an excerpt from B. Background and Scope (page 9): “Social media platforms are changing the way organizations are communicating to the public. Conversations are happening all the time and everywhere. There is need for the Communications Group to be timely and proactively aware of the reactions and opinions expressed by the general public as it relates to the Federal Reserve and its actions on a variety of subjects.”
Frbny Social Media Rfp

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.

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

Asked to provide just one reason asset managers should invest in social media, my answer would be “to better understand your clients and prospects.”

Two years ago my enthusiasm for what could be learned by listening to advisors who were increasingly visible online led me to develop and maintain AdvisorTweets.com. As a result of that work, I believe that I better understand advisors and what’s important to them, and hope other users of AdvisorTweets do, as well.

In an AdvisorTweets blog post today I’m announcing an impending change for AdvisorTweets. I plan to offer the site, related domains (AdviserTweets.com and CFPTweets.com) and all assets for sale by auction starting next Tuesday, June 14. The notice this week is to give you a heads-up in case the opportunity appeals. You’ll find the whole story in the post.