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Category Archives: Visualizations
A Photo Album To Showcase Mutual Fund/ETF Adoption Of Social Media
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, this post sincerely flatters Kevin Dugan, a digital marketing and public relations professional whose accomplishments include the Bad Pitch blog.
I happened to hear in Monday’s For Immediate Release podcast that Dugan had created a Flickr group to track Signs of Social Media. The group’s purpose, according to the description of Dugan’s Flickr set, is to “show how retail, food and other brands are reaching out to consumers and asking them to follow on Facebook, Twitter and the like.”
Rydex Infographics Change The Game For Investment Marketing
Hearty congratulations and bubbly all around to the online marketing professionals who produced GetAlts.com, a microsite launched this week by Rydex|SGI to create attention for alternative investments.
I landed on the site with minimal expectations but some curiosity about the name. Compliance officers in my past would have killed “GetAlts” for any number of reasons so the first kudos goes to Rydex for delivering a name with some marketing magic.
More important, though, is the interactivity on the site. I’ve spent a bit of time on it now—long visits that the search engines will duly note and credit the site for—and haven’t read more than 200 words. Instead, I’ve been working with the interactive graphs and charts.
A Look At How Asset Managers See The Second-Half
The third week after the close of the quarter? Hey, that means there might be new commentary on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web sites.
(In fact, not all sites have been updated yet, have they? But you know who you are and you know better than me what your “bottlenecks” are.)
As a speed-reading approach to reviewing what appears to be predominantly positive outlooks, I turned to Wordle.net for the visualizations below of what T. Rowe Price, First Trust Portfolios, OppenheimerFunds, BlackRock and Fidelity Investments expect in the second half of the year. Interested in others’? You can create your own in a snap.
These 3 Web Site Tools Advance the Understanding of ETFs
Little more than one month after our post about highlights on mutual fund and ETF Web sites (see 5 Random Highlights of Mutual Fund, ETF Sites) we’re back with another installment, this time all about ETFs.
Exchange-traded funds offer the advantage of lower expenses. That’s a blanket statement that’s made when comparing mutual funds to ETFs. But, how does the cost of using ETFs compare to the cost of using no-load funds? This Rydex Investments trading expenses calculator considers all the variables and gets into the particulars.
5 Random Highlights Of Mutual Fund, ETF Web Sites
Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?
It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That’s why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!
And Now For Your Next Heroic Act: Visualizations
When we talk to clients/prospects about what they’re doing on the Web, the conversations focus on what more they could be doing. Of course, there’s always more to do, especially for those responsible for how mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other investment products are marketed.
But we are always mindful of the range of work—development and strategy—that’s done, day in and day out by eBusiness, Internet Marketing, Interactive Marketing et al teams.
And now, here’s a picture of it.
Fresh Ways To Explain the Financial Crisis
My first job at a mutual fund company was at Kemper Funds, a few years before the commercial development of the Internet (and my dearly beloved Kemper.com). At that time, competitive intelligence in our shareholder communications group took the form of quarterly meetings scheduled once we’d collected enough shareholder newsletters of our competitors. The purpose: To review what our competitors were doing and to borrow from the best ideas.
Even at that time and even though Kemper was based in downtown Chicago, it felt as if we were an outpost operation relying on the Pony Express to deliver news of the outside world. Given the inherent delay—we were reviewing publications from the previous quarter in the best case—it seemed like a hopelessly stale way to “keep up.”
Interactive Graph Simplifies A Complicated Competitive Message
Quarterly performance communications are an ensemble production. And yet for all the quick but careful contributions made by players across an organization, the work is largely unsung. “It’s time to make the donuts”–former colleagues of mine used to invoke the old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial when referring to the tedium of periodically updating the data.
Even less satisfying is the work involved in trying to communicate relative performance-in print, the story is reduced to lots of numbers with not much impact. So, here’s a shoutout to the collaborative effort at Vanguard Voyager Services that has figured out an interactive way to tell the story every quarter.