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.

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?

Standard & Poor’s Monday announcement of a negative credit outlook for the United States based on the budget deficit produced another drill for those responsible for timely and relevant investment thought leadership at mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms.

Investment strategists’ appearances on financial television shows notwithstanding, rapid public response and interpretation has not been part of asset managers’ culture. And, it doesn’t come naturally to the way that many of you like to work—few of you have training or experience in or the disposition for breaking news. So, bravo to you for reshuffling priorities to hustle from the investment strategists or economists to Compliance to layout to the Web team to…

The following listing is incomplete, of course, because it doesn’t acknowledge the efforts of all firms who readied commentaries. The tweets sent by companies followed by the Rock The Boat Marketing Investment Managers Twitter list provide a ready window into the firms that produced insights and used Twitter as a channel to announce the availability of the insights. Shown below are tweets from @PIMCO, @BlackRockUSInvs, @USAA, @sentinelinvest, @OppFunds, @VirtusUpdates, @Federatednews, @iSharesETFs and @Fidelity.

The tweets are in chronological order, meaning that the top tweeters were quickest to say something. @iSharesETFs early and consistently re-tweeted content on others’ sites, a practice that many accounts are not allowed to follow. Repeat tweets related to the subject aren’t shown, and note that if your tweet didn’t explicitly refer to the S&P or deficit rating we (and the rest of your followers) wouldn’t know it was relevant.

You work all day every day and many days into the evening. Once in a while you’re asked to summarize what you do, your accomplishments, the ways in which you’ve contributed to the success of your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm. What do you point to?

Five marketers were considered for Fund Action and Fund Directions’ Marketer of the Year, with the award last night going to Marty Willis, chief marketing officer of OppenheimerFunds (who I happened to mention in Monday’s post). Congratulations to Marty and her team.

Congratulations also to the other marketers nominated: Colin Kelton, principal in the retail investor group, Vanguard Group; Wendy Harrington, executive vice president of global marketing services, Franklin Templeton; and Gary MacDonald, managing director, global head of ETF marketing, State Street Global Advisors, and to their teams.

The nomination process provides the rest of us with a peek at how leading asset management marketers link their work and metrics to their firms’ success. The following list of the marketers’ accomplishments is extracted from a January 28 Fund Action page profiling the nominees. I’ve stripped some of the detail and sorted the activity by type. Be sure to visit Fund Action for the complete stories.

Advertising

• Digital advertising drove above industry-average sales growth (Oppenheimer)
• An integrated (online, print and social) advertising campaign that grew ETF assets more than 50%, producing a better than 2% gain in market share in one year (Vanguard)
• Print, digital and broadcast TV ads driving 10%-plus asset growth and, with one ETF, triple the inflows of the previous two years (State Street)
• A robust campaign that resulted in three focus funds more than tripling net inflows from 2009 (Franklin Templeton)
• QR codes added to print ads, an industry first (Oppenheimer)

Positioning

• Overcoming the 2009 leader (Fidelity) to become the largest asset manager in the world (Vanguard)
• Turning Vanguard into a verb (Vanguard)
• Arranging for portfolio managers to be regulars on CNBC’s Closing Bell and Squawk Box (Oppenheimer)

Broadening distribution

• More than 9,000 advisors selling an equity fund, a first in the firm’s history (Franklin Templeton)

Website

• 42% increase in downloads from the firm’s Website (Oppenheimer)
• Making the Website accessible via mobile phones (Oppenheimer)

Social media

• The launch of the industry’s leading (in term of followers totaling 17,000) Facebook and Twitter accounts (Vanguard)
• Partnering with The Wall Street Journal to launch a video series that attracted 96,000 views (State Street)
• Launch of a YouTube channel, with one video drawing 20,000 views (Oppenheimer)

Literature

• 500,000 pieces of campaign literature ordered (Franklin Templeton)

What story do you tell and what metrics do you use to support it?

Ambiguity surrounding FINRA guidance on social media (see this report from a February SEC event) forces some mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers to resort to a familiar argument when appealing to their firms’ compliance officers. “But Fund Company XYZ does it, why can’t we?” The argument meets with limited success.

Investment company Websites provide ample signs of the divergence between compliance departments’ interpretation of the FINRA guidance (influenced probably by executive management’s appetite for stepping out socially). But today let’s look at just one narrow slice of social media the extent to which sites offer social sharing icons.

Content sharing (syndication) is important in a world that acknowledges that more people are going to others’ sites than are coming to yours. This has been a favorite subject here on the Rock The Marketing blog (see Evolving Away From Site Tours And Toward ‘Likeable Objects’ and Asset Manager Site Traffic Also On The Decline—What’s Your Content Syndication Plan?).

We are increasingly seeing social sharing icons on asset manager Websites, such as the above best practice approach from USAA.com. That’s a positive development for site users who expect to continue their sharing ways no matter what site they’re on. It’s a positive for the firms interested in extending the reach of their content. And in most cases, it adds to marketers’ analytics, which should lead to added intelligence about what’s valued and what isn’t.

At the same time, we know there are marketers whose efforts to add social bookmarking have been shut down. They and their firms are operating at a disadvantage.

What Can Be Learned From The Facebook Like Button

Two announcements this week prompt this post.

There was news on Tuesday that Warner Brothers Entertainment would begin offering movies via a Facebook app. This decision to stream a single piece of content (one movie) could be a game-changer as it represents a major studio’s intention to use Facebook to supplement sagging DVD sales while at the same time avoiding Netflix, Amazon and iTunes as online distributors.

Imagine you’re in the meeting discussing this and the conversation comes around to, “Well, which movie should we test this with?” The online audience is different from the movie-going audience (for a peek at the difference, see Mashable’s report on who “the online world” predicted would win the Oscars). And a Facebook audience is different than an online audience.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, Warner Brothers chose the 2008 “The Dark Knight” as its launch title largely because it had already been “liked” by 3.9 million Facebook users.

Wouldn’t you like to know which of your content is shared and couldn’t you use such data in the decisions you make?

In a related news story, Facebook launched a new version of its Insights for Websites. Insights now provides much more information regarding the use of the Like button, the top popular pages that people are liking and sharing and demographics of the likers and sharers.

These are analytics about consumption of your content off your site that you are going to want and need.

An Asset Manager Status Update

FINRA-regulated businesses that offer social sharing include Eaton Vance, Putnam, Russell Investments, USAA and Vanguard. They employ a mix of approaches. We’ve seen sharing buttons on what look to be all pages of a Website and on just some sections. It’s more common to see them on market commentary or investing education pages than on product pages. Standard third-party disclosure tends to accompany the sharing features on Websites but not on the sites’ blogs.

According to our spot-check, AddThis and ShareThis are the most common third-party services offering a suite of sharing buttons including email, Twitter and “share this on Facebook.” In addition to supporting sharing, both services offer analytics enabling site publishers to understand how site users are valuing their content. Marketers, content creators and investment strategists, too, can get a lot of value out of the analytics each service provides—see AddThis analytics and ShareThis analytics.

But the Facebook Like button is the motherlode when it comes to creating awareness and driving traffic. In November 2010, Hitwise reported that Facebook.com generates nearly one in four page views. So…if you’re a marketer interested in getting in on that, you may want to lobby for a Facebook Like button.

Unfortunately, social sharing seems to stop just short of the Like button on asset manager sites. Based on a few offline discussions we’ve been part of and on a discussion you can see on SocialTurns.com, the ambiguity about what “liking” means seems to be impeding implementation.

Can a FINRA-regulated individual click the Like button himself? Some say no, because the act would represent adopting the content and thereby assuming liability for it. But what registered persons can/can’t do seems to be a separate issue. FINRA has said that it will issue additional guidance later this year. Let’s hope that it clarifies the question of whether asset managers are within bounds offering the Like button.

Today, the Like buttons are few and far between in the wild. I looked around for a while until I spotted the one on iSharesblog which is a different entity from iShares.com. (Clicking on the blog link from ishares.com launches an interstitial warning page that you’re leaving the site.)

There it is in its awesomeness, supported on a BlackRock Institutional Trust Company Terms & Conditions page that goes to great lengths to disclaim content use and linking. That BlackRock found a way to address this is a good sign, for its blog users and for its marketers.

Will this example help sway your compliance head? Hope so. Are you aware of others? Please let us all know below.

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

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

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

Readers Prefer Non-computer Reading

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

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

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

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

The Value (And Risk To You) Of Stripped Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Adobe Acrobat Support

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

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

Not All Required Content Converts

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

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

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

Some Context May Be Desirable

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

The Effect On Your Site Traffic

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

A colossal amount of content flies by in the course of a year. And yet over the last 12 months, I came across some content that made a (so far) lasting impression. My favorite content from the year broke new ground, introduced new ideas, deepened my understanding or changed my mind. I found myself returning to it, emailing links to it and finding a way to work it into presentations.

The following is a list in no particular order of 25 2010 content highlights that I think deserve an encore. What one reader considers memorable is highly objective, I can’t argue with you on that. But each was selected with you, the asset management marketer, in mind. And forgive me for squeezing in one or two that wander slightly off-point.

It’s been a great year—enjoy!

1. What Part of Social Media Don’t You Understand?

The CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape is a single downloadable easy-to-understand guide to 10 social networks. Well done. This screenshot shows just a slice of it.

2. It’s New And You’re Going To Need It

April came and with it the Flash-less iPad, prompting many of us to scramble to understand HTML5. Here’s a wonderful explanation by way of illustration of why we should all care about HTML5.

3. Let’s Let Marketing Do The Hiring Just This Once

In addition to being a great read, “The 13 Characteristics of a Great Chief Compliance Officer” is also a ready-made job description if you’re hiring—Human Resources Directors…anybody?

4. Nobody Ever Enjoyed #4 More

First American Funds made this video to celebrate its listing, as fourth, in Barron’s annual “Best Mutual Fund Families” report. Celebrating awards can be tricky, but this does a great job of humanizing a fund company.

5. Know Your Customer

Bob Veres’ The Future of the Financial Advisory Business is a free 112-page whitepaper that’s a must-read for anyone whose job includes marketing to financial advisors. And, for more on tweeting advisors in 2010, check out our AdvisorTweets blog post later this week.

6. Even Though Using “Dead” In Headlines Was Overkill

Once you’re on an iPad using apps, of course, you’re going to compare the experience of the “app Internet” with the open Web. This was a favorite topic of content creators in 2010. We repeatedly referred to Wired magazine’s The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet and the New York Times’ The Death of the Open Web.

7. They Just Keep Giving It Away

We commented on the open research work being done by Altimeter Group, Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang throughout the year and were struggling with which piece to highlight in this list. An Owyang tweet Monday morning settled it for us: His latest post on a framework for social media ROI.

8. Don’t Underestimate The Power Of Twitter (Part 1)

So cool: this is a map of all the data underlying a tweet.

9. Confirmation That Investors Are Not From A Different Planet

In May we welcomed the Spectrem Group’s release of investor research confirming that investors were much like others in the United States in 2010—many use social media and expect to communicate with others including investment professionals using social media.

10. Why Don’t We Just Ask Them?

In a year of high interest in tracking financial advisor adoption of social media, a few asset management firms took the lead early in providing insights—and thereby assuring that they were part of the conversation. American Century produced the often quoted survey. Rydex and Russell Investments published research insights, as well.

11. Time To Rethink Fund Launch Frenzy?

“Marketing must aim higher” was what I tweeted about this Financial Times interview with Philip Kotler, the so-called father of “modern marketing.”

I appreciated Kotler’s question: “Is marketing the enemy of sustainability?” and the interviewer’s elaboration: “For years the task for marketers was to persuade customers that the latest upgrade, the newer model, was a must-buy. But it is time to challenge that orthodoxy.”

12. Some Cubicle-Expanding Analytics Help

Why are so many Web analysts sitting in cubicles? We don’t get it. The Web in 2010 abounded with blog posts designed to help elevate the contribution that analysts make. These two articles, the first by Avinash Kaushik for beginners and the second for Google Analytics users specifically, should help an analyst demonstrate his or her value to an organization and move you all into offices with a view.

13. Lights, Color, Action

Honest to goodness, when I landed on TNS’ “study of the digital life” for the first time, I felt my heart beating faster. A neon design dripping in data, it’s all enough to make one dizzy.

14. A First-Person Description Of Engagement

Author Margaret Atwood, not the first person you’d look for on Twitter, provides an endearing first-person account of her experience on Twitter with her followers. I wish I could send you right over to the New York Review of books but there’s no content to be found on what used to be the page. You can read most of it on the Huffington Post site.

15. How Would You Like This Spill In Your Backyard?

The whole visualization/infographic business—which we believe has to be the future for much of investment communicating—blossomed online this year. Off-topic but here’s my favorite because it enables the user to relate to the data by making the BP spill real. The screenshot below shows how much area the spill would cover if it were in Chicago. We wouldn’t like it.

When emailing the link to the BP spill site, I tended to include a link to the video below which makes its own point (if a bit of a guilty pleasure here).

16. An Equities Extravaganza

Extraordinary investor aversion to the stock market called for extraordinary measures. It’s obvious that lots of time and effort was invested in Franklin Templeton’s 2020 Vision: The Case for Equities in the Decade Ahead.

17. When You’d Like Your Audience to Stay Awake

PowerPoint isn’t everyone’s genre and yet it’s the tool most of us rely on to communicate at least some of the time. Steal the concepts in this presentation.

18. The Social Butterflies That Are Financial Services Employees

Financial services users love to socialize, according to Palo Alto Networks’ March 2010 semi-annual report showing that 94% of companies in financial services had connected to as many as 28 different social networks from within the enterprise. The latest report was issued in October although with no additional financial industry updates.

19. We Bullish Internet Analysts

We’re guessing that a link to analyst Mary Meeker’s presentation Ten Questions Internet Execs Should Ask & Answer was circulated in your firm via email a day or two after she presented it. It got lots of play on Twitter, too, especially among the mobile-minded who are likely to be kept very busy in the next few years, according to Meeker.

Internet Trends Presentation

20. Welcome To The Publishing Business

Every company is a media company, according to this Brian Solis two-part post whose premise is that The Future of Marketing Starts with Publishing. Here’s a sample: “In social media, content and context are packaged as social objects and they serve as the catalysts for conversation, intelligence, and sharing, and hopefully, word of mouth.”

21. A Blog That Acts Likes A Blog

A few blogs have appeared on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web sites this year, but only Vanguard bloggers have shown a willingness to stir a little something up in true blogger style. Case in point: A controversial Vanguard post that prompted this RIABiz headline: “Blog battle: Vanguard 401(k) principal and 401(k) tracker have it out over the Internet.”

22. What You Want Matters Less

I must have read this a half-dozen times. It’s an analysis by Wesabe founder Marc Hedlund of why Wesabe lost to Mint.com.

An excerpt: “Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all… Instead, I prioritized trying to build tools that would eventually help people change their financial behavior for the better… Their approach completely kicked our approach’s ass…it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly.”

My takeaway: Go with what the user will want, not with what you want the user to want to do.

23. Its Simplicity Is Just An Illusion

Awesome and awe-inspiring is this illustration of how Google works.

24. Don’t Underestimate The Power of Twitter (Part 2)

The Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s “Why Twitter matters for media organisations” is one of the best, most comprehensive explanations of Twitter that I’ve read.

25. Respect The Web

A former journalism professor (Rockchalk, Jayhawk KU!) used to chide students for believing that history began the day they were born. In the case of the Web, it has a history with egalitarian principles that we business users may take for granted.

If you’re working on the Web and using the Web today, you really have to read this piece by Tim Berners-Lee. He comments about the app Internet, net neutrality, privacy and other issues with a unique authority given that, as he writes to start the Scientific American piece, “The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990.”

Thanks for hanging in here to the end of my list—what 2010 content made an impression on you?

The following post presents a bit of a dilemma and shows the conflicts that can arise in posting on two sites. I wrote the post to be published on the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) Blend site on November 11. As happy as I am for you to be able to find the post here—and think it’s germane to the work you do—there are some good comments, including from Scott Brinker, on the MENG blog that I recommend you check out, too. One idea, two sites to go to—sorry about that.

The MENG Blend is a blogging initiative featuring bloggers from multiple marketing disciplines and industries. I blog on online marketing and social media topics.

You’re a marketing executive in 2010. How satisfied are you with Marketing’s performance in leading and managing initiatives that are technology-based? Could your organization benefit from a Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT)?

The role of Chief Marketing Technologist has been suggested by Scott Brinker, president and CTO of ion interactive, developer of a landing page software platform. Brinker argues that Marketing’s collaboration with IT would be enhanced by the establishment of a CMT.

“This is a senior management position, reporting to the CMO, with three key responsibilities,” wrote Brinker in “The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist” on AdAge.com.

“First: Choreograph all the disparate technologies under marketing’s umbrella. Second: Nurture a growing technology subculture within marketing, raising the department’s overall technical proficiency. And third: Collaborate with the CMO on strategy, translating the CMO’s vision into technology with high fidelity—while also inspiring the shape of that vision by advocating for what new technology can enable.”

There’s even more about the proposal on Brinker’s ChiefMartec.com site and the idea has gotten lots of attention in the last few weeks, from Mashable.com to Information Week to Six Pixels of Separation’s site.

I encourage you to step through the presentation below and read Brinker’s related post, the coverage and also the comments. I’ve been thinking about the proposal off and on since I bookmarked Brinker’s March 2008 post.

Who’s ‘Got It’?

Can this role truly deliver as promised? It’s intriguing. As a digital marketer and now consultant to digital marketers, I have seen many instances where communication between Marketing and IT didn’t happen. Not all resulted in tragedies, but most involved time and cost setbacks, which were unfortunate because they could have been avoided.

The scenarios remind me of what happens when a baseball is hit into the outfield. Unless two fielders call it, there’s the risk of nobody catching the ball and it falling to the ground. By screaming some derivative of “I’ve got it!” and waving his colleague away, a fielder can typically make the catch. Where this analogy breaks down is that neither a Marketing nor an IT fielder knows everything that’s needed to make sure that a technology-based Marketing initiative doesn’t crash and burn. Brinker’s suggestion is that we need another player who’s at ease going to both his/her left or right.

But that’s what I have my doubts about. When Marketing projects stumble, Marketing alleges that IT didn’t provide adequate support. IT claims that the requirements were incomplete or fuzzy. Can a new layer—“a hybrid of the two worlds”—be expected to provide the coverage to make sure not just that nothing falls through the cracks but that Marketing’s initiatives are optimized?

In visualizing how the CMT would work, I bounce it against use cases of Marketing/IT conflict issues I’ve seen. For example:

• Investing in and implementing a content management system (CMS) that uses dynamically generated URLs that are a combination of letters, numbers and symbols—the opposite of SEO-friendly
• Web pages with missing or sloppy metadata—and read this article entitled, “Who’s in Charge of Your Invisible Metadata?” to get an idea of the trouble that developer inattention to metadata can cause
• CRM system implementations that don’t take into account, let alone provide for, Marketing current and future tracking, reporting and customer intelligence needs
• Web analytics implementations lacking the necessary linkages to correlate traffic and traffic sources with content with campaigns, etc.

A Shifting Or A Shirking Of Responsibilities?

To provide true benefit in the above examples of significant enterprise undertakings, the CMT office would have to be involved not just at the project start but throughout. How will it find time to pay sufficient attention to Marketing strategies and execution while remaining current with IT issues and marketing technology advances?

The chief marketing technologist “is more than a liaison to IT,” Brinker wrote on AdAge.com. “Because increasingly, IT isn’t necessarily a participant. With many marketing technologies now delivered over the web via software-as-a-service—and with sufficient technical savvy under marketing’s own roof—new solutions can be implemented with minimal or zero IT involvement.”

In other words, the CMT would have the discretionary power to evaluate and commit to marketing technologies without involving IT? Hmmm. I see the potential for the CMT function to serve both as a scapegoat and an empire-builder, posing new challenges for a CMO to manage.

I have to wonder whether the creation of this additional infrastructure could be avoided by mandated respectful collaboration between the CMO and Chief Information Officer (CIO) and staffs.

Finally, is it realistic to think the CMT will nurture and develop Marketing’s technical proficiency? I can envision that objective going by the wayside in a production environment, where the expedient move might be to hire from the outside.

I’m inclined to cheer any idea that streamlines communications and results in better work. I’m not opposed to Brinker’s suggestion. But my skepticism about the practical application has kept me from pursuing it.

What would help is to hear from you–-what are your thoughts about the concept of a Chief Marketing Technologist? Can/does such a function and configuration work? Please share your thoughts and insights in the comments.

As inspired by our dear departed Yahoo Internet Life’s Old Way/Net Way feature years ago, we last month teed up the idea of contrasting some Old Way/Social Way examples. This is the second in an occasional series.

Old Way: Advisor Log-ins

Nearly every mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web site has a financial advisor area that requires registration. The old old way (still practiced on some sites today) is to present all unregistered or un-logged-in advisors with a roadblock—a page with nothing on it but a form to use to register or to log in. More progressive sites (see Wells Fargo Advantage Funds and Lord Abbett) start communicating even as they’re asking advisors to register for more.

Our perspective on site registration has evolved. Registration is not necessary to surface new names for asset managers. There is a finite universe of professionals licensed to sell investment products and it’s available from Discovery. The typical asset manager has access to this database and works with a CRM that includes records of advisors’ augmented by Sales’ notes.

An argument might be made that “leads” come in the form of advisor registrations to the site. But Sales tends not to value these. With some notable exceptions, asset managers have yet to fully integrate registered advisor Web activity and CRMs. If there is a link, it tends to be weak (i.e., registrations may be noted but subsequent site use not noted, not reported and not consulted by Sales or Marketing).

Finally and most germane to this discussion, the majority of content behind a password is Compliance-approved for client use. By and large, it is not content that only advisors can see. We expand on that below.

In other words, the practical value of site registration has fallen far short of the theoretical argument for it. Oh—and this is what we’ve grown increasingly sensitive to—registration on a site satisfies asset manager requirements. Customization and personalization is offered on some sites today, but user experience was never the primary motivation for registration.

Site functionality that favors the site sponsor and not the user? That’s the old way.

Social Way: Web Authentication

Elsewhere with Web-delivered communications and increasingly on mobile phones and televisions, people are connecting. While the majority of people are still spectators (see Forrester’s Social Technographics ladder), they’re showing a strong interest in content that’s shared and endorsed by their community. The integration of content and community adds relevance and heightens the value of the experience of consuming content. Hence, the hundreds of comments on blog posts, live chats during podcasts, the Twitter crawl on CNN.

Developers are hustling to accommodate the growing preference for what’s called “social browsing.” Here are just a few examples.

On the desktop: RockMelt is a browser launching in beta this week that frames the browsing experience with the social activity of the browser’s Facebook and Twitter connections. The first six minutes of this video with Robert Scoble and the developers will give you an idea of the interaction that’s being delivered.

Using applications: Flipboard is an iPad app that attracted a lot of attention when it launched a few months ago. I can give personal testimony to my ride on the bandwagon. Flipboard is an awesome way to keep up with the content that’s being recommended by the people I follow on Twitter and my skimpy collection of Facebook friends.

Over the weekend I read a Fast Company blog post that reported that 21-29 year-old females spend as much as five hours per day on Facebook. The finding: Social browsing including reading status updates and clicking on content links had “largely replaced all other forms of Web browsing.”

There were lots of skeptics and critics among the commenters to this post. But I realized that it’s true of me (not the five hours on Facebook part) and I am neither 21-29 nor an enthusiastic Facebook user.

Because of the experience Flipboard provides and the integration, I spend most of my recreational (versus purpose-driven) browsing time with the content endorsed by my social circle. (We’ve commented on the power of social circle search results before. This is a step further.)

Take a look at this screenshot from my Flipboard app. It shows an article from Mashable. Yep, I’m connecting with my favorite site publishers on Facebook. I like this better than reading the same article on the open Web, and see how easy it is for me to weigh in and see what others have to say. Flipboard may push me to do a better job of connecting on Facebook just to include others as content curators.

Bottomline for content publishers: Want to get my attention or the attention of other social browsers? Get somebody to endorse it on the social sites.

On the television: Among its innovations, the Google TV platform enables the watching of a Twitter feed on the same screen as a televised event—think of watching the World Cup or the Dancing With The Stars finals and related tweets on the same screen. To see that specific feature, go to 1:25 on the video below.

Authentication For A Different Purpose

So by now, are you thinking what I’m thinking? The maintaining of advisor-only Web sites that require proprietary registration schemes is at odds with the social sharing that’s sweeping the Web today.

At the highest level, your firm produces content for advisors to use and, ideally, share. What are the obstacles? It’s not that advisors don’t share—of course, they do, as can be seen daily on AdvisorTweets.com, in their LinkedIn and Facebook activity and on their blogs. It’s not that your content isn’t high value, it is and you’re steadily working on improving it. The obstacle is what years ago was meant to serve as an obstacle.

What if asset managers flipped this whole authentication procedure on end? First, how about offering a second option for signing in? Options include Web authentication standards Facebook Connect (the most controversial and yet most ubiquitous), OAuth (used by Twitter) and OpenID. (See this article for a great current discussion of the differences between the three.)

The screenshot below shows the log-in menu on WashingtonPost.com, one of more than 80,000 sites that had integrated Facebook Connect which had been used by 60 million people as of December 2009. See how it accommodates two sign-in procedures that would yield more information to the publisher and yet it also offers the Facebook Connect sign-in.

In the Facebook scenario on a mutual fund or ETF site, the advisor who wants to maintain his social identity would sign in using a fast and easy process that links his Facebook account to the site. In doing so, he authorizes the site to publish his interaction on the site to his Facebook news feed. A Facebook activity feed plug-in could be added to your site showing what other Facebook users’ have recommended and shared from your site.

No doubt, there is a continuing reason to insist on site-specific password registration for sensitive information (account access, for example) or for true advisor-only messages. But we’d push for the password requirement to be invoked less broadly than it is today. It needs to be limited, to keep from turning away advisors seeking information.

Imagine a freeing of your content to be integrated with other content in an advisor’s newsfeed or shared across an advisor’s connections. You’d be able to track reactions, good and bad, from advisors, other advisors in their networks and non-licensed others who see your freed content. You want people talking about your firm, after all.

Some of the commentary would likely fail a Compliance review. But remember that the discussion would be taking place off your domain, as it has for years out of Compliance’s reach on Yahoo! Finance Message Boards, Morningstar and elsewhere online and offline. The difference is that you’ve enabled it and that the content you produce would finally be part of the “conversation.”

We know there’s huge untapped value behind the log-in on advisor sites. At a time when it’s getting easier and easier to navigate and interact with most other Web site content, the password-restricted advisor site will be left behind by all but loyalists. It’s the old way.

We encourage you to start thinking about the social way and its potential to drive advisor interest in what your firm has to communicate. What would you give up? What would you gain? What size mountains would need to be moved?

There are zillions of technology, practical, policy and people issues and we don’t minimize them. Try not to let them intimidate you. Asset management firms can’t afford to wear blinders to changes in the way advisors and investors are gathering their information today.

If thinking about the possibilities intrigues you, we have two articles for you to read next, both from Jeremiah Owyang, Web strategist and Altimeter Group industry analyst:

• Social CRM: When Registration Pages Go Extinct
• Research Note: Integrate Social Networks with your Corporate Website with ‘Social Sign On’

When something is new, a little scary and yet ubiquitous, it may be human nature to want to limit what you absolutely need to know about it. Jersey Shore, for example, is something I’ve decided that I don’t need to follow.

In the case of investment company Web sites, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers early on realized that their sites wouldn’t be e-commerce sites. That freed them (us as I was on the inside at that point) from thinking about transaction funnels, search engine optimization and other best practices that e-commerce sites need to master in order to survive.

And yet, a spot-check of industry sites in 2010 shows many e-commerce influences—e.g., the navigation and filtering, the conversion architecture supporting online advertising response, the “literature” shopping carts.

E-commerce shaped online users’ Web site experiences and expectations, and it may have been inevitable that asset managers would ultimately catch up and strive to provide sites on par with other retail sites.

Today, as commerce becomes increasingly social, this seems likes a déjà vu moment. The temptation may be to think that social commerce—online collaborative shopping influenced by recommendations, ratings and user-generated content—is just for retailers. But we’re keeping an eye on it because we think social commerce will inevitably influence how investment products are evaluated online.

Back in the day, I was crazy about a magazine called Yahoo! Internet Life. YIL carried a feature called Old Way/Net Way, a theme I borrowed to give my own presentations on the Old Way/Net Way for this business.

Here’s a new comparison, as inspired by social commerce.

Old Way

Some investment company sites today offer fund comparison tools, expense calculators and hypotheticals displaying their funds and their funds alone. We know of at least one company that reprints magazine article “top fund” listings—and evidently pays to have the page re-typeset to exclude all but that company’s funds on the list!

OK, really? This practice betrays both a desire for control and a cluelessness. It’s just not possible—let alone desirable—to control what the information consumer sees. A hobbled presentation doesn’t do anything for anybody. There’s always another Web site that a user can and will leave yours for.

As social commerce becomes more common, single sponsor fund presentations and other tools will be glaringly out of step, dated, useless.

Social Way

At the highest level, what underlies social commerce is an organization’s desire to deliver a good experience thereby building loyalty. It’s Macy’s telling shoppers what Gimbels sells, updated and applied to the digital relationship.

Retailers and retail Web sites, for example, are starting to nod to other companies, including competitors. For mainstream coverage on this emerging trend, read the New York Times article “Buy My Stuff And Theirs Too.”

Back to this business, the days of expecting advisors to sell a family of funds are over—and the client-focused asset manager acknowledges this by offering tools that consider the universe of funds.

Yes, there are Compliance concerns about showing other fund companies’ products. But T. Rowe Price and a few other fund companies are figuring those issues out (by sourcing third-parties for data, for example) in order to be able to present the whole picture for the convenience of their Web site users. This is in the spirit of the “social way.”

I believe that we in the investment industry lost time by not paying attention to e-commerce as it was evolving. Social commerce is a new concept. Learning as the rest of industry learns will provide insights as you and your firm make your plans for future Web-based communicating.

We recommend these two sites for you to become acquainted with the thinking behind social commerce:

• RiseofSocialCommerce.com, a conference site in support of an Altimeter Group event held in October. Altimeter is sharing presentation slides and there’s a Ustream available of most of the presentations. Altimeter is all about being open—see our review of Founder Charlene Li’s book Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform The Way You Lead.
• SocialCommerceToday.com

We’ll be taking a looking at a few more Old Way/Social Way examples in the coming months. Can you think of any?