In addition to tracking marketing predictions (see our 2010 Marketing Predictions, Part 1 post for a round-up and see this article for 100 more), we’ve been keeping an eye on business predictions for 2010. And, the short version is that asset-gathering isn’t going to be any easier.

If you’re a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer, you can expect competition to heat up as your marketing counterparts do what they can to encourage investors to return to equity funds, evaluate their Roth IRA conversion prospects and use new, improved tools and expert advice for investment portfolio-building and re-building.

Digital marketing strategy and tactics will be at the center of all of these, that’s a safe guess. Below are five Rock The Boat Marketing’s predictions for asset manager digital marketing strategy in 2010, sprinkled with a smattering of wishful thinking.

1. It’s catch-up time for asset managers and how they interact on the Web.

We liken the modus operandi of most asset managers on the Internet today to the neighbor who moves into a bustling subdivision, pulls the shades, keeps the kids from playing outside and refuses to take part in the block party. In 2010, we expect some asset managers to more fully participate as citizens of the World Wide Web.

Of necessity, we expect to see some companies introduce or step up practices that others have been following for years. Linking to other Web sites (which is done minimally or on an exception basis by most money management firms today), developing content designed to draw links from other sites, introducing multiple email newsletter offers, adding RSS feeds. We expect to see more marketing communications writers being tasked with writing search engine-optimized copy. “Unfriendly” URLs that are so prevalent on asset management sites are going to be rewritten.

The current M.O. dates back to a different time, when the assumption was that someone would come to your site and take the time to browse it. Oh no, they won’t. An earlier Rock The Boat Marketing post commented on the decline of traffic to destination sites across all industries, including asset management. The asset manager that stands still next year and makes no change to its current approach to Web publishing will suffer a loss of visibility it can ill-afford.

A few money managers are developing new plans, ones that acknowledge the value of using content to pull information-seekers to them (and what’s required to do so) while simultaneously recognizing that most content will be accessed on sites other than their own domains. Also a part of the plan: how to support mobile phone users.

2. Some asset managers will rethink financial advisor sites.

Having worked on asset management Web sites since the beginning, we recall the original objective of advisor-only areas of asset manager Web sites. The intent was to drive engagement—registered advisors would be more than just users of mutual fund products, they would be advocates, or so the argument went.

It’s time for a reality check on exactly what advisor-only sites are accomplishing today. Multiple surveys (including kasina’s What Advisors Do Online and the SwanDog/Morningstar Marketing To Today’s RIA) suggest that these sites are lightly used by advisors.

American Funds and other managers that command significant market share or have thoroughly and completely committed to the channel may be pleased with advisor reliance on and use of their sites. But the majority of firms that pop the Web analytics hood and look around will see a gaping discrepancy between advisor registrations and log-in activity. Just about everywhere else on the Web is livelier and more engaging than a dusty advisor site that is mostly a document repository and makes no pretense of offering community. Junior advisors who could be expected to most benefit from the resources of an advisor-only site are especially likely to recoil in disappointment after an initial visit.

In 2010, practical asset managers will resolve to objectively look at the site usage data and feedback. We think a few will pursue alternatives and deploy resources in other ways to provide more meaningful value to advisors as a means of engaging them.

3. Relationship-building will become a group exercise, with the digital marketer one of the exercise leaders.

As a digital marketer, you may have a reputation within the company as being a “techie.” In 2010, we predict that you’ll play a pivotal role in Marketing’s responsibility for relationship-building. Relationships will be even more important in 2010 as countless firms set their sights on independent advisors and specifically registered investment advisers (RIAs), whose online reliance is well documented.

We see many changes coming (and needed) in how asset managers manage their online relationships. One example: Having communicated so long via print, many asset managers continue the mindset online. The economics of paper and ink dictated the development of a mass message, but many-to-one communicating isn’t the only nor is it the best way online.

Cogent Research’s Advisor Touchpoints 2009, released in November, quantified the volume of communications that advisors are being bombarded with today. According to Cogent, the average advisor has 14 asset manager relationships that produce more than 100 e-mails, phone calls and mailings per month. The most active communicators among mutual fund firms average 16 client contacts per month; ETF providers average five per month.

Next year will be no different than this year—advisors will open and read the emails that are the most engaging and relevant. The difference in 2010, we predict, is that many firms will be tuning their communications with the help of enhancements to their customer relationship management (CRM)s and based on intelligence from their email and Web analytics systems. With your perspective, you're in a position to add lots of value to what should be a cross-functional mandate.

Look for progressive asset managers to segment their email communications and sequence their messages based on individuals’ response. For those managers, conversation about (and Sales' pushback on) the number of emails sent will have evolved. How effective are online communications in initiating and nurturing relationships? That's the question for the new year.

4. The benefits of social media will drive its evaluation.

At least a few companies in 2010 the focus of the discussion on social media will switch from the risks to the benefits.

As the differences between the relationships that asset managers have with their clients (advisors and shareholders) stand in stark contrast to the transforming dynamic between other companies in other industries, some asset managers will want in. Barriers and sticky issues—and there are plenty—will be ordered and addressed.

Adoption will be incremental. We’ve watched Vanguard pursue this path as it offered content ratings on its site, launched a YouTube page, a Facebook page and later enabled comments on it, and introduced a blog on Vanguard.com. The same is true of TIAA-CREF who just today used its Twitter account to announce its iPhone application.

The Rock The Boat Marketing Twitter list of investment managers now includes 17 companies including Fidelity, The Hartford, Nuveen Investments, MFS, Lord Abbett and Putnam. Throughout most of the year, we’ve commented on the marketing uses of Twitter. But it’s a bona fide customer service channel in some industries, and we regularly see tweets that suggest that investors expect fund companies to be listening, too.

Why don’t you have a social media strategy in development? Is the answer “Compliance won’t let us”? While wariness of social media might have been considered an appropriate, measured stance in 2009, we predict thinning patience for this in 2010. At some point, clients and executive management are going to interpret it as an excuse for inaction.

5. Ambivalent, tepid marketing will give way to aggressive, spirited content marketing.

Our work requires us to spend lots of time on asset manager sites. There is a sameness to them. It's no wonder advisors and investors forget where they saw what. But it’s in the content offerings where we see companies differentiating themselves today.

You and your colleagues in 2009 have delivered phenomenal market analyses, for example. It’s clear that you made them a priority this year and we know from experience how you needed to work your relationships with Investments and Compliance personnel to get Sales what they needed and were no doubt clamoring for. ...And then you "posted them on the Web," right? Or maybe a day or a week later sent out an email to your entire database with the tantalizing subject heading: Whitepaper Updated. (We kid because we love, always remember that.)

Next year some companies will realize that Sales isn’t the only audience for the thought leadership they provide and that they’ve been hiding their light under a bushel (or buried within an Adobe Acrobat file, as the case may be).

Some companies will take a look at the budget they invest in new product hoopla, for example, and re-allocate a portion of it and FTEs to public relations, advertising, email and even social media tactics designed to leverage the marketing potential of the content. Each whitepaper, interview transcript, portfolio update will be announced externally with the same zeal it's announced to Sales.

We’re looking forward to the promise of next year. 2009 and 2008 were not for the faint of heart, to be sure. But they required largely defensive marketing. We think the environment will be conducive to a little more rockin' the boat in 2010.

What do you see in the new year? Do you agree with our predictions? Do you disagree? We welcome your comments below.

Happy Holidays to all! We won’t post next week but will be back the week of December 28. Throughout of course, follow us on Twitter—@RockTheBoatMKTG and our alter ego @AdvisorTweets.

American Century Investments will tell you that they’re “just experimenting” with social media. Currently, they’re adding two posts a week to their Facebook page and one to three tweets a day on Twitter.

These are not volumes that will turn the heads of anyone outside the asset management industry. But within this space, theirs is a story of pushing ahead, slowly and in lockstep with their approachable Legal and Compliance partners, even as they’re figuring things out.

Twitter and Facebook is just a start, explains Jennifer Sussman, director of eBusiness.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to learn what’s being said out there about us and how we can influence that. If you don’t know what’s being said, you can’t act on it. We want to make sure we really understand what the needs of our clients and prospects are, to ultimately get the chance to engage clients and prospects so we can have a stronger relationship with them,” she says.

“You can’t look at what’s happening in the industry and not recognize the power of being in the environment and having these conversations. We need a new kind of dialogue,” says Sussman.

As far as we’ve been able to observe (American Century is not a Rock The Boat Marketing client), the company’s efforts to date are thoughtful and consistent with evolving best practices. Over the last few months, we’ve watched the company become the most engaged Twitter-using asset manager (out of a total of 14 companies with accounts to date). They’re hoping for followers but they’re following others, too. They tweet, they reply and on occasion they’ll re-tweet, all of which are communications that are routed first through Compliance.

Sussman explains that the pace is determined partly by the fact that internal policies are still being developed and that the social media account managers Jamie Needham and Brent Bowen have other work to do. Social media is jointly owned by eBusiness and Corporate Communications.

While the firm is currently relying on Google Alerts and TweetDeck to monitor mentions of American Century online, Chris Doyle, vice president of Corporate Communications, says he’s evaluating other, more powerful tools.

As you can see from a screenshot of the tweet stream above, recents posts cover a wide range, from callouts to staff, local announcements, investment commentary and mentions of the American Century Championship and its tie-in to Livestrong, the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Lately, the team’s Twitter account has been promoting a Webinar for financial advisors.

The Webinar promotion caught our attention and when the account published a #aciwebinar hashtag and started liveblogging Wednesday's event, we had to learn more.

One of the effects of social network participation is the blending of audiences. Verified celebrities are mixing on Twitter with fans and critics, the media and their family members. Unless a Twitter account is protected—meaning that the owner approves each follower and that the tweets are not included in the public stream—the tweet-writer should assume a melting pot audience. In American Century’s case, the result of its tweets is a motley group of organically grown (no auto-follow schemes) followers including golf enthusiasts, shareholders, advisors and prospects.

Our first question to American Century: So, you promoted an advisor event using a public channel? Yes, Sussman said, advisors were the target audience, which the tweets and registration form made clear, leading registrants to “self-select.” If a stray retail investor were to wander into the Webinar, there was no exposure because the content was retail- and advisor-approved.

The live blogging was accomplished with a combination of pre-written tweets and tweets drafted on the fly and approved by Compliance sitting in the same room to accommodate timely review and posting.

“We work within clearly drawn limits,” according to Doyle. “Opinions are acceptable but there can be no product discussions or mentions.”

The purpose of using a hashtag, in this case #aciwebinar, is to cluster comments. Most live events, presented offline and online, offer hashtags nowadays so attendees can track comments made related to the event and re-tweet (forward to others). To see this for yourself, go to search.twitter.com and search for #aciwebinar. It’s a best practice that in this case was lightly used—the team’s individual Twitter accounts re-tweeted the tweets. Most important is that it was done, to learn from, for next time.

Another common practice is to invite listeners to post questions via Twitter and then follow the answers via Twitter. That plan fell through the cracks as the team was preoccupied by an onslaught of questions coming in via the WebEx interface. Next time for that, too.

To date, American Century says it’s encouraged by the return on its investment of creativity and effort. The company’s first experience with Twitter was to promote the golf tournament, and Sussman says Twitter drove the majority of traffic to the American Century Championship landing page.

Needham says that there were more clicks on the tweets promoting the Webinar URL than from the banner ad promoting it on the company’s advisor site. And, the Twitter account added 12 followers in the following day.

There’s another encouraging measure that we reported on AdvisorTweets.com's blog yesterday. In our analysis of the 6,000-plus financial advisor tweets containing content links in the last two months, a handful went to content on five asset manager domains—AmericanCentury.com being one.

How significant is what’s happening on social networks to the research, distribution and investment in investment products? The numbers are tiny and it’s very early. But what we heard from American Century is that it’s not too soon to experiment and to add to what your firm knows about interacting online.
 

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.
 

Song selection. One of the maddening things about the American Idol competition is what consistently trips up the final 12. Their raw talent or personality gets them just so far but those who “go home early” fail to read the judges’ minds about the songs they should be singing.

Word selection. That’s the ground on which Web sites compete for search traffic. But unlike with the Idol wanna-bes, there’s no need to guess. There are ways to know which keywords drive traffic. The challenge for the leader of digital strategy at mutual fund, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other asset management companies is in persuading colleagues to use the more commonly used terms when they create content.

Amateur performers on Idol have youth and inexperience as their excuse for ignoring the judges' cues. But professional communications today need to cede to the easy-to-track "wisdom of the crowds.”

Journalists years ago agreed to follow the Associated Press style, and book publishers mostly conformed to the Chicago Manual of Style. But even companies that adopted either the AP or Chicago style tended to produce their own addendums documenting the instances when they wanted to deviate from common practice. Words are invented, hyphens are attached with abandon, spelling reflects individual manager’s preferences and then gets institutionalized. Nobody picks this bit of muscle-flexing as a battle that’s worth fighting.

But there’s a price to be paid for spelling and word idiosyncrasies, and your Web site traffic, your content, pays it. This is inadvertent, of course, and that’s why it’s up to you to point it out. Asset managers are publishers now and need to think of their readers.

We're going to take a look at a few generic examples but it's a safe bet that you have your own sacred cows worth toppling. Granted with the examples below, you can expect your content to be competing for attention in search results with serious heavy-hitters who publish more often than you do. Page 1, position 1 on Google may not be a realistic goal. At the very least, you want to make it possible for the people who are searching for Your Company Name + Generic Term to find the content they expect you to have. Especially since you probably do even if you call it something funky.

We reviewed the following using Google Insights for Search, limiting the search to the last 12 months, from within the U.S. and in the Finance and Insurance categories. You could also refer to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which will show you information about traffic and advertiser competition on your keywords as well as provide data on related keywords.

Example 1: “Unfortunate market anomaly,” "market meltdown," "uncertain markets" all might have been how your investment team preferred to refer to the recent financial crisis but that’s not how the rest of the world thought about it or—more to the point—searched for information about it. Companies that conformed by using “financial crisis” in their work had more takers. Those that shied away from the term were irrelevant.

Example 2: How do you refer to the narratives that present your company’s view of the financial markets? Years ago when I was a journalism school intern working at my first newspaper job, my editor published a column called "Looking Around with Orv." Does your narrative have a similarly precious title? Your Orv may not like it but it’s time for a change.

Here's your decision, though: Not all but most investment management companies seem to be settling on "market commentary." But look what people are searching for—more "outlook" than "commentary." What you call yours should reflect what it offers but if you're leaning toward "outlook," here's some data to start the conversation about expanding the scope of the content.

Example 3:There’s an abundance of high-value content on the Web today, and luckily there are several monitoring tools (e.g., Google alert) that enable people to keep up. When people set alerts, they’re not thinking of your company—they’re made aware of your content only when what you publish matches the terms they’re on the look-out for. That’s the argument for using common terms like "financial advisor" with an "o" and not an "e." "Financial professional" or "investment professional" are umbrella terms that appeal to marketers because they are not distribution channel-specific but they’re non-starters in search.

As I write this on July 1, just a few days from Independence Day, I can anticipate writers feeling that writing for search engines represents a loss in freedom of expression. I get that.

I remember conversations that I’ve had with journalists while recruiting them for marketing communications jobs. The transition to marketing does represent a compromise, not all of the words you first put down “on paper” are likely to survive the routing process. But for what you trade away, you gain in having a role in using your communications ability to advance a business. There’s a rush in that, in knowing that your content—including the words you chose purposefully—is succeeding in attracting information-seekers to your company. That’s what this is about. Findability isn’t every writer’s top priority, but it must be for a business communicator today.

Happy Fourth of July to our U.S.-based readers. Rock The Boat is goin’ fishin.

Web strategist and Forrester Research consultant Jeremiah Owyang this week wrote about the effect of letting a Web property get SNOWED—his acronym for Stakeholder Needs Overwhelm Web Experience Design.

That’s an issue that asset management marketers struggle with in trying to provide equitable support for multiple business lines—mutual funds, unit investment trusts (UITs), retirement plans, annuities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), separate accounts—sometimes in multiple geographies and seemingly always led by warring managers.

You may start by working with a single business in a single market as a beta test for a new, cool design. But what’s produced in the test stage is almost never what’s delivered once all the various stakeholders get their crack at it, is it?

Who knows—maybe the American Airlines case study that Owyang cites can provide a neutral starting point for you to start chipping away at this matrixed approach to Web work. For today let's consider a related but less daunting challenge that calls for you to use logic, reason and expertise to appeal to your colleagues in Marketing.

Here's an older video that brilliantly presents the problem. Thanks to Owyang for calling out to it in his post.

Like Microsoft, financial services marketers need to follow brand standards. Standards are created to control the effect of too many cooks following their own recipes. Standards preserve order, leverage enterprise investments and, not incidentally, they typically originate from Marketing! There’s no undermining the importance of standards.

But when communicating digitally, in small spaces, in quick bursts, there is a tightrope to walk between slavish adherence to rigid or narrow standards and fresh canvas expression devoid of all reference to the brand. When the branding is choking the effectiveness of the digital delivery, those of us responsible for leading digital strategies (and achieving digital success) need to speak up.

Here’s where we see the tensions surfacing:

• Online display advertising: The logo, the tagline, the line drawing of the corporate headquarters—all cannot appear on every frame of the ad. Not if you also have a message to convey. Something must give.
• Brand identity in widgets: In providing valuable information as opposed to marketing messages, widgets are almost the antithesis of online banner ads. Fight the reflex to weigh the widget down with intrusive elements. The available real estate will be even smaller when you're designing for a mobile phone application.
• Branding on Twitter: Your Web site is where you show off your brand plumage. The point on Twitter is to be conversational—you know, less about your firm as an entity and more about its place in the world. If you can do this, starting with your profile, your background, your phrasing of your tweets, you’re likely to attract more followers. (For much more about Twitter, see our Social Media directory.)

• Email subject headings: No doubt your approved editorial style is the result of a hard-working thoughtful committee that produced guidelines, all of which assume that communicators have more than 1 second to attract attention. This is not a safe assumption online. We could point to any number of examples but think of just the email subject heading, the thinnest of all communications and yet one of the most powerful.

  Marketers find comfort in the production efficiencies of re-using templates and subject headings yet lament about low open and click-through rates. It's common practice for asset managers to standardize on subject headings—to wit: "In The News," "Quarterly Commentary" and our favorite: “Another Update from Company XYZ.” Stop the madness! Creativity matters more in digital communicating, not less. Each email sent deserves its own unique heading.

We encourage you to take on the tyranny of the standards. Gather your analytics, collect some examples, including from other industries, and call a meeting to put the question on the table. “What room is there for our communications standards to be more flexible to support the business objectives we intend to achieve using digital tactics?”

Confronted with the facts, right-minded, well-intentioned marketers will find a way to reach a compromise.

Today we're publishing the start of a social media directory for the asset management industry. We've aggregated what we can and now we turn to you for your contributions.

• Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Social Media
• Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Twitter
• Broker-Dealers Using Social Media
• Financial Advisors Using Social Media
• Financial Advisors Using Twitter
• Investment Media Using Twitter
   

As described in our recent eBook "Who Says You Can't? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media," social media is a mixed bag for those involved in the manufacture, packaging and distribution of investment products. It's trendy and seems like fun but for some, it's too new, too transparent, too unstructured. Overall, social media is too much for many highly regulated investment companies to be comfortable with yet.

As you'll see on the Mutual Funds and ETFs Social Media and Twitter directory pages, only a handful of investment product providers have seized the opportunities in communicating on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. (The broadest definition of social media includes blogs and the availability of RSS feeds, and our recent eBook does discuss them. For this directory we've elected to list companies and individuals that are participating off their domains. Let us know if you disagree.)

We hope that we've missed some in this first airing of the list of social media-active asset managers and we hope you'll drop us a note about any omissions at your earliest convenience. The same goes for the even sparser listing of broker-dealers using social media.

Why even bother with a directory at this time? Because in the investment product distribution chain, it's the financial advisor (your product distributor, if you will) who's closest to the investor, your end-user. The advisor does the lion's share of communicating, and lately that's been a make or break part of the job description. Independent financial advisors are showing interest in leveraging social media tools. And, this interest is notwithstanding their significant compliance considerations--our Financial Advisors Social Media directory page cites several excellent articles describing the guardrails.

In social media, advisors see ways to enrich conversations they're already having. Our position is that these tools present asset management marketers with opportunities to have conversations (listen, then talk) that were never before possible.

A listing of Twitter-using advisors can serve as a quick-start to know who to follow as a means of understanding what's important to them and as a step toward enhancing the relevance of your marketing, including communications and customer intelligence. This will be to the mutual benefit of your company and the advisors. We expect the Twitter and social media directory of individual advisors to build quickly, and its organizational structure will evolve, as well.

Finally, there's the media. As our Investment Media Twitter directory pages show, the media are out there on Twitter, listening and interacting. You and your PR support can learn from their 140-character comments and, if you're talking, you'll be part of their input, too.

So, check the directory pages out and let us hear from you on what we can do to enhance this as a resource as you and your company inevitably contemplate social media.
 

While checking my RSS feeds this morning I came across an article that I reacted to with mixed emotions.

That right there should have been a tip-off: I approach the morning feed-reading like a transfusion—gotta catch up, gotta find out what’s been going on since the last time I checked in. No time for emotional responses to HTML.

But this article—How Does Your Web Site Make Visitors Feel?—slowed me down. I was intrigued and really wanted to spend some time thinking about it.

These lines, for example, took me to a place I don’t ordinarily go at 6-ish on a Friday morning:
“You have before you a computer of some type or perhaps a cell phone. It’s equipment that contains the energy forces that made it (with all their fancy scientific names). Some scientists are exploring whether objects contain the consciousness of those who built it. This is similar to organ “memory” where an organ transplant patient has the memories and physical habits of their donor.”

The author of the article (which I recommend to you) is Kim Krause Berg, a highly regarded Usability Consultant with UsabilityEffect.com. She explains that she’s been “exploring and researching the relationship between computers and people.” She describes herself as fascinated by Web sites and how and whether decisions made by Web site designers and bloggers, for example, affect us “emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually.”

Berg says she’s been tackling the theory that “our online behavior and the actions we take after visiting a Web site are somehow tied to, or dependent on, unseen energy forces.” She then cites work by John Gerzema and Ed Lebar on the “energy-driven enterprise.” According to Berg, Gerzema and Lebar, authors of The Brand Bubble, perform energy audits as a means of getting to know a new client. They believe that a firm’s brand, organizational, operational and cultural energy can factor into a competitive advantage.

Applying it to the Web, Berg asks, “As a well branded company, are there in-house human instabilities that can be sensed by your online consumers?”

OK, no matter what time you’re reading this, it’s a lot to take in and yet on what basis would we dismiss it?

This was the third time in 18 hours that I’d thought about feelings, computers, the Web and myself (and soon we’ll get to you and your job).

#2: Yesterday, I entered my Twitter username in Twanalyst for an analysis of my Twitter profile. I was stung to read the assessment ROBOT--until I read that meant that I mostly pass on links, which is true. No argument there. But I am not a robot. I have more energy than a robot. Even though Twanalyst wasn’t calling me a ROBOT per se, I know there’s more I can do to synch my online personality with my offline.

#3: I went to a reading last night by author David Sedaris, who improvised a little as he was talking about finally getting on the Web. He described going to Google to find out how tall Rock Hudson was. Sedaris had entered only “How tall is…” when Google offered “How tall is Jesus?”

The elfin Sedaris assumed this eager to please, eager to help, Radar from M*A*S*H personality when he impersonated Google anticipating the search. “Is it Jesus? Is Jesus who you're looking for? Do you want to know how tall Jesus is?”

Sedaris, a Web user for less than a year, nailed it. Think what you want to about the company’s agenda, Google.com stands on its head trying to get us where we want to go.

All of which brings us back to investment management Web sites, maybe not a moment too soon.

If, as Berg posits, every site has an energy, what’s the energy of your site? Does it accurately represent the energy of your company and the interest your company has in effectively communicating online? If you could synch the energies in the most positive way, could that work effectively support your online objectives?

Is it time to explicitly care—and learn about—how your Web site makes visitors feel?
 

Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?

It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That's why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!

A question to the managers of these sites: Are you leveraging them as the link bait you should in order to draw visitors to your site, first to that page and maybe to explore the rest of your value proposition?

1. Fidelity Investments’ Historical Yield Curve
Of all the gorgeous, exciting visualizations of data to be found on the Web today, this isn’t one of them. But it’s a true gem, very, very cool. A site visitor could spend minutes on this page learning. Marketing managers, when it’s time to hire again and you have a green marketing communications staffer, park them in front this.

2. Legg Mason’s Timeline
For a showier production (although less interactive), Legg Mason’s Learning the Lessons of Time timeline provides some perspective on the markets over time (“The Dates May Change But the Headlines Stay the Same”), as illustrated with Time magazine covers. There's also an accompanying brochure available in .pdf form.

3. Janus Funds’ Interactive Newsletter
Anybody and everybody can post the Adobe Acrobat file of an investor newsletter that was originally produced for print distribution. This newsletter takes advantage of the medium it’s delivered on—and notice the Web exclusives.

4. Russell Investments' The Economic Recovery Dashboard
Throughout the financial markets crisis, Russell Investments has been acknowledged by the media and financial advisors for the depth of its communications. The dashboard is the interactive part of its Helping Advisors microsite. This was launched at a time when others were just getting their analyses of the financial crisis out the door, making Russell’s focus on recovery look even more timely. We bet the producers wish, as we do, that its data refresh could be more frequent.

5. Barclays' iShares Exploring ETFs Video
In case we miss an opportunity to say so after Barclays sells its iShares unit, can we just say now how much we have admired Barclay iShares? From our vantage point, Barclay’s innovative marketing support of ETFs has played a significant part in the next-generation investment product vibe that ETFs have today. Check out this interactive and entertaining video. It will keep you waiting because it doesn’t load quickly but bravo on the look and the messaging. Also note that the heavily branded yet ETF educational video can be downloaded.

Congratulations to Vanguard Investments which launched a real-live blog in mid-March, continuing a tradition of online leadership that dates way back to its early work with America Online.

Never mind that more than 100 million blogs have preceded Vanguard, and more than 300,000 blogs are about investing alone, according to Technorati. Check out this widget that tracks the use of investing terms on all blogs—with its blog, Vanguard joins lots of others talking about the business it is so dominant in.

Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere

This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords.

investing vs. investments vs. stocks vs. bonds vs. mutual funds

» Configure this widget for your site!

Corporations have approached blogging cautiously. Given the advertising rules governing their communicating, money managers, including mutual fund companies and ETF providers, were never going to be at the front of the line.

Most important is that Vanguard got it done, and with little compromise that’s discernible to the outside eye. Comments can be submitted but there’s no ability to publish them, which blog purists might take issue with.

Here’s how Vanguard acknowledges that a blog should be two-way and leaves room for hope:
"At Vanguard, we’ve always believed in candid, direct communication with investors. In fact, it’s one of our core principles. We created this blog so we could talk about what we see happening in our industry and hear what’s on the minds of our shareholders…
We hope you’ll use the Comment feature to respond to our bloggers. However, although we hope to be able to publish readers’ comments in the future, we’re unable to do so at this time."

Five authors are on board posting every few days, linking to outside sites and completing their thoughts with what seems to be a restrained number of lines of disclosure. Marketing communications veterans might be surprised (secretly delighted) to read the following un-hedged line on John Ameriks’ March 31 post:
"At the risk of giving away my age, I’ll tell you that that suggests buying stocks right now could be the deal of my lifetime."

The "deal of my lifetime"? Sign of the Apocalypse? No, hope not. (Maybe let’s save that for money manager adoption of Twitter!)

A handful of other asset managers do maintain blogs—the first one we’re aware of was the Gabelli blog and by far the best blog is Navellier’s. But Vanguard is the largest mutual fund complex and its site was the 7th most visited investment/finance site in February.

If social media—the relatively unstructured, informal exchange of information between human beings—can make it anywhere in financial services, it ought to be able to make it on Vanguard.com. Vanguard is showing by example that there are people who work for the company, people who are leery of Jim Cramer and people who consider themselves "crummy forecasters." In revealing more than what the standard dry investment commentary reveals, Vanguard should be even more successful in engaging its audiences.

If your company is behind Vanguard—and every asset manager is—it's time to plot how to catch up.
 

Work and some recreation kept me from posting this in time for St. Valentine's Day. Hate when life keeps me from the computer. Without further delay, the sites I love and think you will, too:

1. Quantcast.com
Quantcast is a free service established for marketers, agencies and publishers to serve as a basis for media planning. If you're buying online ads, you may already be familiar with its data about media sites.

I love it because of the Web site traffic information that’s available about you and your competitors. But, don’t count on Quantcast (or Compete.com) for precision. If you’re involved in mutual fund or ETF marketing, you know the byzantine collection of Web sites, microsites, Extranets etc. that you’re responsible for, and your colleagues are no different. Quantcast data may over- or under-state competitor traffic.

What should be reliable is the information reported on the Lifestyle Summary tab: a list of sites also visited. Below is data about FranklinTempleton.com.

2. iMediaConnection.com
This is a very commercial site on the subject of interactive marketing, with much of the content authored by vendors. I, for one, think there’s nothing wrong with that. The site publisher does a good job of mixing fresh content and submitted content that’s been in the queue. The offerings may be broader than you need, but there’s a lot to learn from the articles, videos and podcasts.

3. Marketleap.com
Marketleap is not a site you’ll love for its looks. Then again, it’s been out there serving online publishers well before Web 2.0-designed sites were at the wireframe stage. Marketleap is a free, reliable way of keeping an eye on who your competition is for keywords, for tracking the popularity of links and for insights into how well represented your site is in search engines.

4. Delicious.com
Read an article, tag it using your Delicious account and you’ll be able to find it again even if you’re using another computer or browser. In addition to using it as a personal organizer of your notes, you can find content using Delicious’ search of others’ bookmarks and notes.

Frustrated by useless search engine results, many people favor this “social search” because user bookmarks can be a tacit endorsement of valuable content. Delicious offers lots of flexibility in organizing and re-organizing tagged content, sharing what you want and setting controls over what you don’t want to share. Another (relative) oldie, but a goodie.

5. SlideShare.net
Back in the day, I believed that the best content could be found doing filetype (*.ppt and *.pdf) searches on Google. But, that meant unnecessarily opening and closing a lot of university and government agency presentations with misleading slide titles. I’ll still search by file types but not until after I've checked out what's on SlideShare.

Thousands of content creators—many of them prominent names--upload their presentations to share on an array of subjects. Digital and other forms of marketing are especially well represented. You’ll learn something, if only it’s insight into how someone else presents a story. Note that this is a platform you could use for publishing content, too.

6. Twitter.com
OK, I’m the person who years ago sought to build a following among family and friends by creating "amusing" answering machine messages that I published daily. Who thinks that the letters to the editor are the best part of the newspaper (which I now read on the Kindle). And who tracks Google Trends as an RSS feed. I like to keep up.

Twitter isn’t for everyone but as marketers in one of the most commented on industries, Twitter should be for you. At the minimum, go to Twitter Search, search for some terms (your company name, products, portfolio managers) you want to monitor and add the RSS feed for the queries in your feed reader. (See a related post on what people have been saying about financial advisors.)

No doubt your employer’s Compliance department has rules for you to follow regarding posting company-related Twitters, but there is no harm in reading. You can’t be expected to do your job in a vacuum, and Twitter is one free, effective way to stay in touch with what an increasingly influential community is saying. The more you learn about Twitter, the more you'll see that it's much more than a Web site.

I use Twitter mainly to call attention to fresh Web content about two topics: digital marketing and the financial services industry. Naturally, you’re invited to follow me.

7. StumbleUpon.com
I discovered this site a few years ago while in the midst of a challenging Web site launch. It was right around that time when my mind split the Web into two for me—the work Web, which involved a lot of stressful CMS-related testing of the new Web site—and the Web I play on.

Sign up on StumbleUpon.com, select topics that interest you and prepare to browse the Web in the same way that you use a remote control to channel surf television programs. Every time you “stumble,” you’ll be taken to a Web page you probably haven’t seen before but could conceivably lose yourself in.

Your thumbs up or down on the content you see will be an input into the powerful recommendation engine that feeds subsequent content to “like-minded” users. This is very cool stuff and has significant traffic implications for you if your site publishes something that catches a StumbleUpon wave.

You may hear much more about Twitter but a report earlier in the month claimed that StumbleUpon has7 million users—or twice as many as Twitter.

8. ReturnPath.net
Email services providers tend to offer a generous amount of content on their Websites, but ReturnPath’s site is one of the richest. Lots of the typical whitepaper resources but also a good multi-author blog and podcast.

9. Webmaster Radio.FM
Free business-to-business Internet Radio that I recommend for Internet marketing, search engine optimization and advertising content. Some of the hosts take a while to start the show, others seem to be on permanent ego trips but hang in there for unequaled real-time commentary and insights.

Download the desktop application and, if you listen live, you can benefit from participating in the chat rooms. Or subscribe, as I do, to the podcast feeds.

10. Alltop.com
Alltop is a self-described "online magazine rack" that enables our best browsing and content snacking instincts. Above is a screen shot of Personal Finance but Alltop aggregates content on a variety of topics from a vast array of sites.

Enjoy but back to work--would the headlines you're posting on your content compel a browser to click for the rest of the story?

So, those are my random 10. I make a point of not pestering readers for feedback because I realize you're subject to Compliance restraints. On this topic, I'm making an exception and hoping you can find a way to post from a home computer and email account. What sites would you send belated Valentines to?

We could keep this up all the way to Sweetest Day...and maybe a week or two after.