Creative & Cool: Submitted For Your Consideration In 2010

Hi there!

New year, new decade. Here's hoping it rings in a whole new burst of creativity for marketing at asset management companies.

First, I confess I got a chuckle over a chart that appeared on The Reformed Broker blog right before the holidays. Here's a snippet of it but be sure to go to the post for the rest—plus comments.

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Assuming you're in the right mind, we hope you'll laugh, too. Oh, those Aughties. By the end of them, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing communications had gotten pretty predictable, not very informative let alone inspiring. (And the Reformed Broker is making some larger points about the products themselves.)

The asset management industry is getting out of the 2000s just in time. That was then and this is 2010. What and how are you going to communicate in this brand-new year?

In our last post, we reviewed some of our "must-read" and "great" financial services tweets. We've mined our tweet stream for the "cool" stuff, augmented with a few additions, to compile the list that follows. You may have your own virtual notebook of the cool and creative—naturally, we'd welcome your Comments below.

We gave you Monday to re-enter, Tuesday to re-engage but today let's think about revolutionizing the way you communicate online. Do the following spark any of your creative juices?

Shake Up Your Unsubscribes

Of course, you offer your email list an unsubscribe option. Check out this screencast to see how one company acknowledges unsubscribes. While you're not likely to "punish" an employee, could you add any flavor to those vanilla Unsubscribe confirmations?

Depicting Characteristics of Companies

Here's an interactive data visualization that maps parameters of stocks in the S&P500 to animated visual outputs. It's called a STOC (Stock Ticker Orbital Comparison).

Commenting In Context

While we know that the vast majority of you are not accepting comments on your sites just yet, take a look at the state of the art—the addition of dimension to commenting. Poynter.org provides a great explanation of it below and you can see it in action toward the bottom of this WashingtonPost.com page.

Media Mashup

Is there a business reason for your Web site visitors to mix their message with a more venerable one? In this creative example, users can add their message to Bob Dylan's signs.

OK, have at it. While we'd love to work with you, we understand that some of you are going to head off on your own. That's cool, too. All we ask is that you keep us in the loop. We'll be updating the Rock The Boat Marketing Best Practices page in the coming weeks and it will have plenty for room for your work.