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.

Here’s the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) Blend post I foreshadowed/warned you about in July. The post originally appeared on the MENG Blend, a blogging initiative featuring bloggers from multiple marketing disciplines and industries. I blog for MENG on online marketing and social media.

Sometimes, the concept of strangers taking time during their workdays to “share” content with other strangers can seem a bit forced, especially if it’s as part of a deliberate program to get out there and be social.

In my case, the sharing instinct is genetic—I come from a long line of article-clippers whose get-togethers tend to start with an exchange of newspaper articles, cartoons and coupons. My enthusiasm for the state-of-the art today is that the social sites enable sharing with like-minded professionals, most of whom I don’t know. While it’s not uncommon for deeper connections to build, that’s not what’s behind my urge to share.

Online reading today for me has become a three-part act involving 1)the discovering of “awesome” content 2)the pointing of others to it and 3)the learning about cool stuff from others.

When the following five marketing-relevant infographics appeared in the first half of the year, I tweeted about them, I liked them on Facebook and I bookmarked them. I emailed links to them to clients and other contacts. A few appear in presentations I’ve revised to make room for them.

What more can I do to show my love and appreciation for this work? Fortunately, I can share them with you. These five offer both information and presentation value. For close review, just click on the image to enlarge.

1. Planning Purpose-ful Content

When it first appeared in June 2010, Eloqua’s Content Grid provided a visual guide to the connection between content type and distribution channel. But version 2, created by JESS3 and published in June 2011, now anticipates the motivation of a “buyer” (or information-seeker) and the types of content that might be sought in a multi-state purchase funnel.

This is very helpful for content marketers—Eloqua says the grid is a “how-to for marketers looking to operationalize content marketing programs.” And, it’s a deliverable perfectly aligned with what Eloqua sells (a marketing automation platform).

2. Visualizing The Issues

Here’s a way to get people to spend more time with your content than just writing word after word after word.

Graphics produced for the Microsoft/Rapleaf 2011 1st Annual Personalization Summit in May are visualizations more than infographics. If you’re a marketer who cares about the many layers driving the personalization debate or if you’re an event marketer just looking for an innovative way to structure session discussions and what’s reported out of them, you have to check these out. Shown is the chart illustrating Start-up Thinking: Personalization And Innovation.

3. What Happens After The Click

I’m already on the record on MENG Blend as being a follower of Scott Brinker’s work. (See What Do Marketers Think About A Chief Marketing Technologist?)  In this diagram published with Brinker’s guest post on Search Engine Land in January, Brinker simplifies—yes, simplifies—all of the thinking that should underlie the creation, optimization and evaluation of what happens after the click on an online ad, email link, socially shared link, etc.

Marketing executives may not get into the nitty-gritty of all this but wouldn’t you like to know that it’s taking place?

4. First Things First—Match Objectives To Social Sites

I liked the first The CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape when it appeared in February 2010 but the second version, updated and revised in March 2011, is even better.

“Social media” is an umbrella term that encompasses very different social experiences. This one-pager syncs objectives with sites, at a high level. Shown here is just an image—you can download the full .pdf.

August note: This group’s work is never done—surely, a new version is in the works reflecting Google+, launched in late June.

5. SEO: It’s Not A Science But That Doesn’t Deter The Scientific Thinking

“Search engine optimization—SEO—seems like alchemy to the uninitiated,” acknowledged Search Engine Land as it last month introduced this Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors. How content ranks in search engines and why is something that even the experts make just educated guesses at. The Periodic Table is a very smart visual explanation of the relative importance of individual ranking factors to search engines. Awe-some.

Now it’s your turn—what socko marketing infographics would you like to share? Let us know below.

My affection for infographics has reached the point that I’ve put myself on a diet in terms of blogging and tweeting about infographics. And I’m making an effort to check my enthusiasm for the recent burst of sites that are launching in beta (Google+ and Spotify being two of the most hyped examples).

I understand that the arrival of a new site to be explored and mastered in order to understand its place in the universe is not good news to everyone. Fatigue has set in. On the subject of infographics, specifically, some are saying enough with the infographics already. (For a more articulate discussion of how the state of the art of infographics needs to evolve, be sure to see a post last week by Jeremiah Owyang and the excellent comments to it.)

But having said all that (and mindful that I’ll be re-publishing my latest MENG post Five “Awe-some” Marketing Infographics from the First Half of 2011 on the Rock The Boat Marketing blog in a week or so), I just have to put in a word to you now about Visual.ly. Visual.ly is a site that launched yesterday as “the world’s largest community for exploring, sharing, creating and promoting data visualizations.”

I recommend it to you for two reasons.

1. For inspiration

Data can tell a story—especially the stories mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers have to tell—better, as I’ve mentioned before. If you or your design team are struggling, this searchable collection will help.

An increasing number of financial firms are creating infographics (the latest I’ve seen is State Street’s private cloud environment), but more firms want to start and aren’t sure how to.

In addition to the gallery it offers, Visual.ly expects to deliver a “push-button approach to visualization creation” by “instantly applying the graphics genius of the world’s top information designers to your designs.” There’s a placeholder page on the “labs” capability today but it’s in the works, according to online coverage of the site’s launch.

2. To raise the profile of your work and thereby awareness of your firm

The infographics you publish on your site can attract links from other sites, more site visits, more page views and more sharing than if you were to publish the same information in narrative form. All that helps your visibility in the search engine rankings.

Visual.ly is offering to showcase your work by enabling you to upload your infographics and add to their gallery. This is an opportunity I hope that you’ll consider.

The site launched yesterday with slightly more than 2,000 visualizations, about 10% of which were posted in the Economy category. The top economic visualization has attracted more than 10,000 views at this writing and eight comments posted to Facebook (Visual.ly uses Facebook commenting). Wouldn’t you want in on that action?

In 2008 and in the years following the economy’s meltdown, it’s been Mint.com who has innovated the use of data visualization to simplify complex topics. Mint has also found that infographics significantly drove traffic to its site—30 times the traffic attracted by a comparable text-based article. This is according to the bio of Visual.ly CEO Stew Langille, who was previously Mint Director of Marketing.

Mint is well represented in the Economy category on this new site, as are other online financial information providers. But asset management industry communications (example: the Rydex Modern Markets Scorecard) belong in this mix and in this conversation, too.

Of course, you’ll need to consider the risk/reward trade-offs. On your site, you control everything that a much smaller audience see. Participating off-site on Visual.ly will broaden awareness of your graphical work while subjecting it to social commentary. Can you and your firm both accept that conceptually and prepare to monitor, engage and measure? Promise me that you’ll at least think about this opportunity to syndicate your content.

Check out Visual.ly for yourself and see what you think about its potential as an aggregator of financial infographics.

Oh and by the way, I always thought I’d develop my Finfographics.com domain (financial plus infographics, get it?) but if anyone’s interested…

Welcome back to all you asset management digital marketers out on spring break last week! Here’s hoping your re-entry is easy and crisis-free.

To help you catch up, here’s a briefing on five items that you may have missed if you spent last week at a theme park.

#1 Social Media And Financial Advisors’ Immediate Plans

Another week, another survey that touches on financial advisors and social media. Given the attention I paid here and on the AdvisorTweets blog to the American Century survey, I’m honor-bound to call your attention to the Rydex|SGI AdvisorBenchmarking Advisor Confidence Index survey results.

Advisor confidence sank again in March, according to the headline of the research released Tuesday. But tucked in at the end of the press release was Rydex finding that “Most advisors—59%—have no plans to include social media as part of their practices in the next 12 months.” That report based on the sentiments of 150 independent registered investment advisors (RIAs) paints a less imminent adoption rate than has been suggested by the recent American Century or kasina research.

#2 Asset Manager Infographics

I don’t know when these infographics were first published but I learned about the Pensions & Investments chart depicting the growth of employees at U.S. public money managers from an @everydtenacity tweet Friday. After looking around PIonline.com, I spotted the asset manager growth in assets under management (AUM) graph. These screenshots don’t do them justice—you really have to go to the site and interact with the graphs—look at just one firm or select your own to compare.

These charts don’t represent any added transparency on the part of asset management firms. Rather, they visualize data contained in public filings.

Publishers are committing resources to infographic development because infographics engage readers, and their interactivity may extend time spent on a site, which helps online advertisers looking for exposure.

We’re crazy about infographics for this business because of their ability to add meaning to those rows of data tables that mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms routinely publish (see our Visualization-related posts). As we’ve commented a few times, creating content that people value and like to share is increasingly important. Also, see #4 below.

#3 Logo Items Mentioned In The Context of Impropriety?

Asset manager marketing budgets aren’t public, but wouldn’t you love to see an infographic comparing changes in the composition of various asset managers’ marketing budgets? I thought of that while reading Saturday’s Wall Street Journal Intelligent Investor column about insider trading. The Jason Zweig article was inspired by the disclosure that a Berkshire Hathaway executive bought nearly $10 million worth of stock in a company (Lubrizol) about a week before he suggested that Berkshire acquire the company.

Most people, Zweig reported, have what’s called an ethical blind spot. “Faced with a potential conflict of interest, you automatically conclude that it couldn’t possibly offer any temptation to someone of superior character—like you or those closest to you.”

Zweig provided several examples: doctors that accept high-paying consultancies from a pharmaceutical firm and don’t believe it skews their judgments about which medications to prescribe, Wall Street analysts who accept favors from the companies they follow and… “financial advisers accepting trinkets like tote bags and T-shirts from fund companies.”

This is a step beyond digital marketing but your budget rolls up to an overall Marketing budget, right? And is there a line item for promotional logo items that appears hard-coded in the budget worksheet year after year, even despite many firms’ heightened focus on the RIA channel?

Zweig’s inclusion of financial advisor swag in his analysis of improprieties in the investment business is another sign that the winds have shifted away from investment company-branded windbreakers. Increasingly, independent-minded advisors are sensitive to anything that causes them to appear as investment product shills. Maybe this mention can serve as the prompt your team needs to review how much you’re spending on logowear, its alignment with your business strategy and whether your clients value it.

#4 OppenheimerFunds’ Content Syndication Play

BtoB magazine rarely covers this business so it was good to see last Wednesday’s interview with OppenheimerFunds’ CMO Martha “Marty” Willis. Willis described how advertising is being used to drive financial advisors to a microsite offering “’snackable’” pieces of content that advisors can send on to their end-customers.”

“Sharing—syndication of this material—is big; and we’re hoping advisers will put these on their sites. The idea is graphical, how to enable people to more easily digest this material. We think there is long-term opportunity here,” said Willis.

You’ll want to check out the materials available on the GlobalizeYourThinking microsite and Oppenheimer’s YouTube channel. It had looked to me as if the video-sharing capability was limited to enabling advisors to email links to clients but I see that embed code is offered on the YouTube channel.

Looking at both the demand side tracked in part by the social media research and at the supply side, we are still very early in money managers creating content they hope advisors will want to share.

To understand what’s resonating and what isn’t, you’re going to need to spend more time on advisors’ Websites and blogs. Remember that you can use AdvisorTweets.com as a real-time window to the online content that advisors are creating and the content they’re exchanging. If you know what you’re looking for, the AdvisorTweets’ search engine may come in handy.

#5 Wholesaling Illuminated

Mutual fund/ETF wholesaling has been a fairly arcane activity. Do you know about I Carry The Bag, “the first and only magazine dedicated to the Art, Science, and Lifestyle of wholesaling,” WholesalerMasterminds.com and the 1,100-plus member Wholesaler Masterminds LinkedIn Group?

I’ve been watching this effort by Rob Shore, a former wholesaler, sales leader and now coach, because he’s using the Web to shed light on wholesaler practices and stimulate discussions. It’s interesting for marketers who seek to develop a broader understanding of how business gets done.

On Wednesday Shore published this podcast interview with Craig Rollins, a financial advisor who wrote The Wholesaler’s Companion. It’s a book on wholesaling from the client side of the table as inspired by Rollins’ experience with wholesalers. “5 Ways Wholesalers Endear Themselves to Advisors for Life” doesn’t contain any groundbreaking insights but it’s worth your nine minutes.

Earlier this year, I was fortunate to be selected as a blogger on the topic of online marketing and social media for a new blogging initiative sponsored by the Marketing Executives Networking Group. The following post appeared on the MENG Blend site on August 5 and, after an acceptable amount of time, I’ve been given clearance to re-publish it here.

Years ago, when driving my young nieces home, I was struck by the number of kids they spotted playing on their block that I didn’t see (none in the street, fortunately). They had Special Kid Vision, I joked. We still drive around together but nowadays it’s the Cute Boys! on the streets they see that I don’t.

And that’s my starting point for thinking about the concept of reality that has layers of additional information that can be seen by those who are enabled—what’s called augmented reality.

There is a difference, of course. My nieces are naturally hyperaware of the kids and the cute boys, and what they see is in the physical world. The information in augmented reality applications as viewed on a desktop computer or mobile phone is added digitally. (This is a really cool, emergent technology…but “augmented reality”? It’s obvious that no marketer named it.)

Check out what an iPhone user can see using this augmented reality application from Stella Artois introduced last December.

We’re intrigued with what we’re learning about augmented reality not because we see our financial services clients embracing it in the next 12-18 months. We don’t. But we believe that more mainstream awareness and discussion will lead to the steps that precede plans and implementations: the imagining.

Watch the first two minutes of the video below to get an idea of how a tool called Hoppala! Augmentation can be used to add content that can then be linked to a physical location. (After the 2-minute mark, the video gets a tad more detailed than the average MENGer might want to know.) Using Hoppala! anyone, any brand can upload their logo or icon, a message, audio and video files that will then be accessed by users of the Layar augmented reality browser, available for iPhone and Androids.

We love the idea. It’s an easy way for brands to stake their claim on a map. And it hits many of our social media buttons. It democratizes augmented reality—as Hoppala! says, “non-technical creatives” can use it. The Layar browser is enriched by content uploaded by users as co-creators. Brands and individuals are equals in the conversation.

Ah, but you might ask, who could possibly be in this conversation? Well, National Geographic mobile and National Geographic Traveler (the most read traveler magazine in the world) for one, as you’ll hear below. The early adopters are in the process of adopting.

Augmented reality technology is cool. But, as we all know by now, implementation and adoption is rarely about technology. It’s about all the other work required to leverage the technology. How does augmented reality advance a business objective or relate to a social media or marketing strategy? Are appropriate digital assets available? Who will identify, organize and manage them? How will this be evaluated? Are there copyright issues? Privacy concerns?

Of course, it’s early but thinking about augmented reality now can get the wheels in motion. Spend enough time with augmented apps and demos and then look at what the communications we deliver today. Some of it looks rudimentary, first generation and begging for another dimension.

We read about an Adidas campaign in which an augmented reality application showed shoppers what they looked like in multiple T-shirts. By eliminating the hassle of trying clothes on, the app drove trial and ultimately more purchases. Hmm, what other products would benefit if the barrier to trial were lowered or eliminated?

A goofy video about trying different Ray Ban sunglasses on leads us to think of other product fit questions that augmentation could help with. Our financial services clients have the challenge of marketing intangibles (investment products) and yet they too need to help financial advisors and self-directed investors make fit decisions. The decision aids available today—print and Web-based risk tolerance assessments, for example—are serviceable, but how could augmentation communicate more or better? We don’t know, but we think that’s ahead for the industry to figure out.

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.

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.”

Hmm… Given the pace of social media adoption in this industry, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers don’t yet need to focus on making sure that their physical presence supports their online social presence. But a Flickr group could serve a need that Rock The Boat Marketing has been wrestling with lately. In our continuous surveillance of investment companies on the Web, we often see examples we’d like to share with you but don’t have enough to say to devote a blog post to.

Flickr is the perfect site to showcase the examples in a much better way than we could do in a blog post (or on our Best Practices page, which we’ll be sunsetting. Details on that at a later date.) Oh and we use Facebook favorites and YouTube subscriptions to track firms on those two mega social sites.

As you’ll see in the slideshow, the set of photos we’re launching with represents a range that includes: American Century, Deutsche Bank and DWS, Fidelity Labs, Franklin Templeton, iShares, MFS, Navellier, Lord Abbett, Oppenheimer, Prudent Bear, The Principal, Putnam, RidgeWorth, Rydex, T. Rowe Price, Van Eck, Vanguard and Wells Fargo Advantage Funds.

We recommend that you click on the icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the player to view the collection in full-screen mode. Click on Show Info in the upper right-hand corner to read a brief comment and to get the URL. (The construction of many of these URLs shed some light on investment companies’ struggle in ranking in search engines.)

But, there’s no way that the 20-odd images in our first set capture everything that’s going on with mutual fund and ETF companies and social media today. We’ve made them available in a Flickr group (Investment Firms & Social Media) so that you and others can add to the collection and, if your Compliance officer allows, comment. Note that you can subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with any discussions.

These really are the early days, and I’m already thinking about how nostalgic we’ll be when scrolling through this photo album in a year or two. The number of views, downloads, etc. published by the social sites and viewable in these screenshots taken in July 2010 are low in all cases.

But as you review them—maybe as a resource for helping you make the case for your own initiatives—we’d submit that the return in terms of pick-up is not what’s relevant today. Unreported is the experience and insights that these companies are gaining. These are the good, ole days—perfect for experimenting and refining.

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.

If you’ve been involved in the sales and marketing of mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for any length of time, you’ll recognize all of these—the checkerboard of annual asset class performance, the efficient frontier graph, etc.

Distributing these in print or on the Web as flat communications has sub-optimized the information value of these charts. Rydex is changing the game for investment product marketers by animating our tried-and-true charts and adding audio explanations. They are showing what these data-heavy charts mean.

The marquee infographic is the Modern Markets Scorecard, which of course includes alternative investments as well as the standard asset classes. This ought to be powerful linkbait for the site—given that, I’d find a way to offer links to the rest of the good stuff on GetAlts.com.

My second favorite is the Alternative Portfolio Hypotheticals. The Efficient Frontier by Decade works far better than a flat chart but even with the audio explanation, it’s still not for beginners. Beginners can take a look at the The Historical Performance and Trends of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. All are excellent, I’d add a counter to the videos to let the viewer know how much more.

Well done, Rydex, for bringing meaning to what can be dense topics. We’ve been tracking the use of visualizations for a while now and are so pleased to see an investment company add some to the mix.

Will GetAlts produce business? It’s too soon to say but Marketing has done what it can by creating something worthwhile that will generate attention. Of course, the work is far from done. Now comes the rest of what Marketing does: measurement, the correlation of attention to leads and leads to sales, the ongoing site maintenance and refreshing, promotion, etc.

After Opening Night, comes the next performance and the next…there’s no business like show business.

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.

T. Rowe Price U.S. Stock Market Quarterly Market Wrap-up

First Trust Portfolios’ July 20 Monday Morning Outlook

OppenheimerFunds’ Commentary

BlackRock Outlook

Fidelity Investments’ Commentary

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.

Understanding the volatility of an investment is always important, but you might say that it’s critical for an investor considering leveraged index funds. To that end, Direxion Funds offers a volatility tool for 10-, 30-, 90- and 180-day rolling periods. To fully appreciate this, you have to see the graphic reset as the periods change. Note that the user can customize this list by selecting a subset of funds.

When added to an investment portfolio, an ETF typically has a specific job to do. Other sites have correlation calculators but we like PowerShares’, which licenses Smart Money functionality (in fact, it looks as if you’d have to pay for the correlation tracker on SmartMoney.com.)

We know from experience the work that goes into the development and testing of calculators on investment sites. Somebody must think they’re important to have, and we agree, maybe for a different reason. If you’re hosting a special calculator, it has the potential to serve as link bait to draw attention to your company or site.

But too often, Marketing teams err in thinking that the work is done when the site tool is launched. No. The next step is to execute on a promotion plan. A press release at launch, followed by periodic promotions/reminders and enlisting national account and Sales teams to include mentions in every capability presentation. Maybe tack on a Compliance-approved promo in the signature of all outgoing emails.

We urge you to do this for at least three reasons:

• To produce a return on the company’s investment. What opportunities were missed out on because getting the tool out the door was the top priority? Usage will justify the resource call.
• A promotion plan will build in metrics—it will guarantee that Marketing is focused on measuring the reception of this tool. You’ll want to tie promotions to milestones for usage and other analytics. If the promotion is succeeding in driving traffic to the tool and visitors are bouncing, that’s valuable information that may prompt you to pull the promotion and go back in the lab. At least you’ll know. Ultimately, you’ll want to base subsequent development of the tool and other tools on usage and feedback you’re collecting and considering.
• If you thought that it was important for your site visitors to have the tool, why risk them using the site without knowing about it? I repeatedly find gems on investment management sites with no apparent Marketing or even on-site support—no press release, no callout on the sitemap, no cross-mentions on other pages. You market the work of other areas in the company, don’t be shy about marketing what Marketing had a hand in creating.