“That wouldn’t apply to us because… [wait for it] we’re in a regulated industry.”

There’s an underlying current in asset management marketing that trends that affect other industries don’t apply here. It’s an illusion that is almost never true online—what’s affecting other Web sites is probably affecting your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) site, too.

We’ve written about how Facebook and other social networking sites are gaining at the expense of asset manager and other destination Web sites.

But there was a report this week about Facebook’s influence in driving Web site traffic that merits attention. Compete.com data cited by the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday suggests that Facebook is now a more important traffic driver than Google.

“Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites,” the Chronicle reported.

Other types of sites even including investment manager sites? Yes, according to Compete.

Here’s what we found when we took a look at the Compete referrer data for the top 30 (based on assets under management) mutual fund and ETF sites for January 2010. Facebook.com appears on Compete’s lists of the top five traffic referrers to five investment company sites: AmericanFunds.com, DavisFunds.com, Dimensional Fund Advisors (Dfaus.com), Fidelity.com and GMO.com.

 Facebook Ranks Among Top Referrers to 5 Investment Company Sites (January 2010)

Source: Compete.com

The sites experience very different total traffic levels. Given the Davis Funds' site relatively low traffic and few (24) sites referring traffic to it, Facebook's appearance as a top referrer in a given month might be easy to understand.

But Fidelity and American Funds are industry behemoths and, try as we might to produce alternative explanations, there’s no denying Facebook’s breakthrough as a top referrer. Fidelity.com is the 157th largest site, according to Compete. More than 12,000 sites refer traffic to it and yet Facebook catapulted over those to rank as the fifth top referrer in January? Fidelity's self-directed investors could help explain the popularity and influence of Facebook. But a heavy retail bias doesn't help explain Facebook traffic to American Funds, sold exclusively through financial advisors.

The implications of Facebook supplanting Google as a top traffic driver is being contemplated across all industries this week. We invite you to provide your own interpretation and comments below. Here are a few of our thoughts:

Your Referrer Data

The San Francisco Chronicle report was based on a single month's data (December 2009), and this post is based on one month, as well. One month is what Compete makes available at no charge. In fact, if you follow the links included in the table above to the Compete profiles after the January 2010 data rolls off, you may see a different result.

It's possible that other fund companies are getting more Facebook traffic in absolute numbers but, because their other referrers are more dominant, Facebook is lower on their list of referrers.

Site traffic is reported using multiple measurement methods. Compete reports clickstream data based on a 2 million-member panel of U.S. Internet users. It’s common for Compete, comScore and Experian Hitwise and Quantcast data to be at odds.

Bottomline: The availability of the Compete data makes this comparative analysis possible. If you’re responsible for digital strategy at your firm, you need to dig into your own Web analytics to better understand where your Facebook traffic is coming from, where it’s going and its quality.

Facebook Links To Investment Sites

Of the five firms, Fidelity has a Facebook page with little more than 1,000 fans, and American Funds has a page for members of its Web group only. We couldn’t determine whether advertising links from Facebook count as referred traffic by Compete. Even if it is, our guess is that only Fidelity would be a likely aggressive Facebook advertiser of these five.

In the absence of robust Facebook pages or ads, that must mean that the Facebook traffic is coming from links posted in the Notes areas. Amazing, almost incredible. Congratulations to these companies for producing content that others think enough to link to. To get a sense of it, do a dfaus site:facebook.com search on Google and see the links from Facebook pages of advisory firms. Institutional firms that have thought that social media is just for retail investors might want to think again.

Forget Search To Focus on Facebook Optimization?

Some have interpreted the ascent of Facebook as a traffic driver, often accompanied by a decline in Google-referred traffic, to mean that people are no longer searching and increasingly prefer to discover content socially. Such a shift in Web user behavior would have significant implications for search engine optimization (SEO) and search marketing. That’s true in particular for digital strategy planning in this business, where much SEO remains to be done.

We agree with this post on Search Engine Land that aims to put the Facebook findings in context. The work involved in thinking about how searchers frame their information requests and the measurement and analysis of the effectiveness of various keyword phrases can result in deeper customer and prospect understanding. Please don’t think that you can skip the work now that Facebook users are recommending investment site content—especially if these recommendations are not as a result of a deliberate strategy of yours.

Facebook—and its 400 million users—is awesome. But maintaining a Facebook presence requires a well-considered strategy and ongoing resources. In an October 2009 post, Facebook: Don’t Expect A Lot of Warm And Fuzzy, we noted a certain crankiness toward investment companies by Facebook commenters. (We saw the same early this month in the early reactions to Fidelity’s Be The Green Line YouTube contest.)

But while your Facebook page may be on a backburner pending strategy, policy and resources, we suggest you take this January 2010 referrer data as inspiration to learn more about Facebook. Your firm doesn’t need a fan page in order for you to explore more about how investors are interacting with your content and how they may want to interact with you. 

Have your repeated requests to speed up your Web site been falling on deaf ears? There’s a change in the works that might give you the argument you need for IT to move site optimization up to the top of the priority list.

Watch this video from Google on the global benefits of a faster Web and then let’s consider how their advocacy on this could affect the success of your firm’s digital marketing strategy.

You’ve figured it out already, right? Of course, if Google wants the Web to be faster, the search engine is going to reward fast sites and slow sites can expect to sink in search engine rankings.

This isn't an arbitrary position on Google's part. Faster sites drive visitor satisfaction and conversions—they’re a win-win for site provider and user.

To get a rough idea of how your site will fare as search engine attention is directed to site speed, go to WebPageTest.org and run a test.

Below is a video of the test we ran. But first here’s some background. In a blog post a little more than a year ago, we used Google Trends to note slowly building interest in the search term "IRAs" toward the end of each year. But search interest was off toward the end of 2008, prompting us to suggest a compressed opportunity in the first four months of 2009 leading up to April 15.

That turned out to be true, as you can see in the graph below.

It’s essential to be discoverable by searchers when they’re looking, especially when the search term is important to your business. To illustrate the importance of winning speed races on key search terms, we're using an updated search term ("rollover IRA") and comparing the site speed results of three pages that currently rank on Page 1 of Google’s results.

They are pages on rollover IRAs from WellsFargo.com, Schwab.com and SmartMoney.com. To round out the quartet, we added a landing page from T. Rowe Price.com, a pay-per-click advertiser on the term.

We'll tell you what you're about to see and then watch for it in the video.

The results:

1. Wells Fargo (bottom right quadrant in the video) was on top of our Search results and fastest to load at 4.5 seconds.
2. T. Rowe Price (upper left), the pay-per-click advertiser, comes in second. Page speed is already a factor in Google AdWords quality score. We expected T. Rowe to do well and, in fact, it loads in 6.5 seconds.
3. Loading at a slow 9.5 seconds is Schwab (bottom left).
4. SmartMoney, which we included because publishers’ content-rich sites are among your toughest search competition, takes 14.5 seconds to fully load.

Is your site as fast as it needs to be to win rankings on Google? Our recommendation: Get with your IT partners and make sure they're aware of what's happening. (Maybe do a few competitor comparisons of your own.) To quickly bring them up to speed, refer them to WebPageTest.org. Also, Google maintains an excellent site on Web performance resources. Oh and better hurry!

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.

Two financial services companies issued multimedia press releases this week that are ready examples of how content assets can be used to tell rich stories, useful to the media as well as in advancing Marketing’s goal to raise awareness and drive Web site traffic.

Northwestern Mutual’s press release on survey results (“Young Americans Say They Need Millions to Retire”) and John Hancock’s promotion of its “Find The Answers” ad campaign and microsite can give mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers ideas on how to think beyond the all-text, suboptimized, largely boilerplate press releases that do little for reporters and even less for profile-raising.

The Northwestern Mutual press release wins the award for the most number of links from PRNewswire.com to pages on Northwestern Mutual domains—we counted 26.

Some links go to pages, others to expandable chart images (shown above) that the media or others could use. We wish that more attention was paid to the page titles and that the images were optimized for image search, which can be a significant traffic driver. The press release links to Northwestern Mutual's financial literacy Web site, Themint.org and other sites, as well.

A video is offered on the press release, as served from YouTube (with comments disabled). Offering the embed code would encourage reporters and bloggers to use the video.

The John Hancock press release, from MultiVu.PRNewswire.com, is branded. It offers a single downloadable image and a sample of the commercial featured in the ad campaign. It's interesting that the video, embedded below, is served from Tubemogul.com, a site that publishers use to distribute their videos to multiple sites. These commercials may be showing up on other sites, too.

Both Northwestern Mutual and John Hancock encourage sharing and commenting on the news by offering links to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and other social sites.

These features approach the social media press release, which has been in existence for about three years. Its creator Todd Defren even offers a template for it on his Web site (image of it below).

As you can see, the Northwestern Mutual and John Hancock releases don't offer all of the features suggested by the social media press release template. Still, we find their offering of multimedia content encouraging and will be interested to learn more about their experience—and whether others will follow.

For more on the evolution of the online press release, check out this presentation by Shel Holtz, principal of Holtz Communication + Technology and co-host of one of our favorite podcasts For Immediate Release.

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.

It’s been fun this week watching the growing social media success of State Street Global Advisors's exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing. A SPDRS commercial introduced in June is getting uploaded to YouTube, as well as to other video-sharing sites, and commenters love, love, LOVE “the video.” (Note how the commercial aspect shrinks when the message is sufficiently appealing.)

Reviewers like the dogs, they like the accompanying song so much they want to buy it…and guess what else? According to their comments, some say they might even give State Street a look.

Watch the commercial for yourself and then let’s bat around some thoughts.

 

What was State Street’s added expense for distribution via You Tube et al?
None, its production costs were unaffected. On the flipside, at fewer than 10,000 combined views as of this writing, it’s hard to claim that their added reach has reduced the expense.

Still…In “letting their content go free” (a social media maxim), the commercial is embedded on a Russian site, a Spanish site and a site that offers basic French lessons, among others. Now, it belongs to the world—and the video views are coming from markets that would be cost-prohibitive to buy into.

What’s different about appearing on television versus YouTube?
The question is too simply posed, maybe, but think of the different context of YouTube. All television viewers are aware that advertisers pay for their time and, on some level even if in some small way, that can discount the impact of a message.

Every uploader of this video is endorsing it for its content—that’s different. The engagement of “users” in uploading, commenting and otherwise interacting with a brand message marks a transition point. Do you remember the Diet Coke and Mento’s stunt? That didn’t belong to the brand, that belonged to the users who took what Diet Coke provided and turned it into something else.

The SDPRs commercial is becoming an homage to dogs. Dogs, animals, lizards all have been the center of commercials previously. But, video-sharing makes it possible to adopt the animals featured.

Below is a screenshot of the Statistics & Data of the highest-viewed copy of the video (not the video we link to above). The video that appears on this page was recorded off a television showing CNBC somewhere in Illinois. It was submitted in the Pets & Animals category (where it's doing very well) and attributed to an entity called State Street SPDR Financial.

Will the added exposure help State Street justify the marketing spend to the number-crunchers, if necessary? (It's easy to imagine CFOs struggling with the soft-sell of this ad, but we seem to remember that State Street is contractually obligated to invest in SPDRs marketing support.)
While State Street no doubt anticipated the popularity of this creative among pet-lovers, we doubt that it was a target customer segment. One of the benefits of being on the Web today is the ability to target, and yet the SPDRs example shows that social media can be messy.

If your professional work gets submitted to a content-sharing (video or otherwise) site, you can expect multiple files—including copies lacking the professional quality that you originally delivered. You can expect people to impose their own organization—e.g., SDPRs might have preferred an investment-related category to pets and animals. There is no dictating or controlling which group or groups may become fans.

Viral distribution is a compliment to the content producer but it also represents more work. When content is safe at home on your site, you know where it is. When it's socializing, you have the added burden to keep track of it and how it's being received.

Still and all, as most CFOs will recognize, added unpaid positive exposure for a television commercial is all upside.

How will State Street evaluate the impact of its new-found attention?
The commercial itself does not include a URL to the site and only one of the video uploads does. Search for “dog commercial” and SPDR or “dog commercial and State Street” and you won’t find the advertiser’s Web site. Now the social Web’s embrace of State Street's content is competing with them!

SPDR Marketing may need to fire up a Google AdWords campaign to secure a place on the first page of search results. We couldn’t find mention of the commercial on either the SDPRs or the State Street site, but adding a search-optimized page with content about the commercial and the file itself would be an idea. Once related content is offered on the brand's domain, the Web analytics team will be able to track how many “dog commercial” searches drove traffic to the site. We’d manage expectations, though—the commercial itself and its afterlife is all about creating awareness. It may be hard to find a cause-effect in the site analytics.

Congratulations to all involved at State Street—there's no doubt that the puppy love will drive video views further. After having endured everything short of famine, drought and pestilence in the last year, investment marketing is showing some life again, isn’t it?

When we talk to clients/prospects about what they’re doing on the Web, the conversations focus on what more they could be doing. Of course, there’s always more to do, especially for those responsible for how mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other investment products are marketed.

But we are always mindful of the range of work—development and strategy—that’s done, day in and day out by eBusiness, Internet Marketing, Interactive Marketing et al teams.

And now, here’s a picture of it.

Every online marketing team leader may not have hands-on accountability for every piece of this schematic by Yvo Schaap but odds are good that you at least attend meetings on them. When someone asks you what you do, show them this. It communicates your story better than a long-winded monologue from you, doesn't it?

There’s an irony of my stumbling over this illustration (a ReadWriteWeb article featured Schaap and drove me to his site). I was looking for some examples of visualizations to again beseech investment management company marketers to begin to adopt more illustrative styles of communicating—in other words, more work for the Web team (and lots of other collaborators)!

If you’re still “making the donuts” (writing copy and pushing it out there), please take a moment to consider how instead you might begin to illustrate what your organization has to say.

To repeat what we commented on in a January post (see Fresh Ways to Explain the Financial Crisis), easy-to-understand visualizations are valued by everyone.

Only good things will come to you as a result of launching a visualization. Your success in producing an interactive data-based “picture” may be rewarded by a netizen’s highest compliment—he or she will call it out to their social networks. Based on my extremely focused monitoring of the Twitter stream (see my explanation of how I use Twitter), I’m here to tell you that there is nothing that gets passed around more by financial advisors than a good story with pictures.

A well-done visualization has an excellent shot at achieving what every site needs and that’s “linkbait”—something that other sites link to. And the search engines just might take note of how engaged, as measured by time on the page, your visitors become.

As for you, people will seek you out at parties, the vending machine will never lock up on you again and the hair salon will find someone other than you to train the shampoo girl.

Of course, you will need to prioritize your other heroic work (c'mon, does the advisor-only site really need another thingamajig?) but you can do this!

For inspiration, here’s a random list of visualizations I’ve come across since my January post:

• Geography of a Recession
• Degrees of Hank Paulson
  
• The Changing Market Caps of the Banks
• How Far Have We Fallen?
• Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
• Interact: Watch 24 Brilliant Hours of U.S. Flights

Across the country, businesses and individuals are focused on making their dollars go further. It’s an exercise that includes a forced examination of wasteful habits. Forgo that second coffee mid-morning, for example, and you’ll be saving a few dollars a day.

In that spirit, we have a suggestion for managements of mutual fund, ETF, broker-dealer and other investment-related marketing teams: stop using “Click here” as your anchor text.

Anchor text is the visible text—what’s clickable—in a hyperlink (on this page Adobe Reader is the anchor text). Search engines pay attention to anchor text. When all is working as intended, the anchor text should include keywords relevant to the page the hyperlink appears on, and the words in the anchor text should be relevant to the page being linked to. Consideration of the anchor text can help search engine rankings.

When “Click here” is what you use as the text in your hyperlink, you’re wasting an opportunity for visibility. Inattention to this is rampant across the Web, of course. But it’s an epidemic in this industry where hundreds of thousands—maybe millions?—of Adobe Acrobat files are being offered with the inviting "Click here to download." And, we’re noticing that just the word Here is gaining in popularity as anchor text. That's a step in the wrong direction.

Test your own site now by entering inanchor:“click here” site:yoursite.com in Google. Then for fun, enter inanchor:“Learn more”, inanchor:“Read more”, inanchor:More… you get the idea.

The preferred alternative would be for your content’s author to be giving thought to the words to be hyperlinked so the content can be found. Hyperlinking “Why XYZ Portfolio Managers Rock," for instance, helps the search engines tell you apart from the Click here brigade.

Search engine optimization specialists debate how much this is going to do for you. More important to search engines are the words in the anchor text used in other sites’ links to you. (Type “click here” in Google and you’ll see Adobe.com sitting on top of 1.3 billion results. That’s a function of all the Web sites using the words to offer downloads of Adobe Reader.)

Still, these are the days of stretching resources and making the most of limited opportunities. Even if a change in your approach to anchor text doesn’t produce a detectable improvement in your search engine rankings, the tweak is likely to improve the experience you’re providing to current users.
 

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.

My first job at a mutual fund company was at Kemper Funds, a few years before the commercial development of the Internet (and my dearly beloved Kemper.com). At that time, competitive intelligence in our shareholder communications group took the form of quarterly meetings scheduled once we’d collected enough shareholder newsletters of our competitors. The purpose: To review what our competitors were doing and to borrow from the best ideas.

Even at that time and even though Kemper was based in downtown Chicago, it felt as if we were an outpost operation relying on the Pony Express to deliver news of the outside world. Given the inherent delay—we were reviewing publications from the previous quarter in the best case—it seemed like a hopelessly stale way to “keep up.”

The Internet has made everything better, of course. Financial services marketers, specifically, have easy real-time access to how their competitors’ are communicating. Now there’s no need to try to read the minds of distributors---either the broker-dealers or the financial advisors themselves. Ditto for the end-investors. Web sites, blogs, message boards, feeds, alerts, tweets—all of it can keep the curious marketer informed. (And we try to help, too, by tracking Best Practices.)

Thanks to the financial markets madness, your business—the marketing of investment advice and products—has been on the mind of lots of governments, organizations and one-stop shops lately. Have you seen how others are communicating about what’s going on? Today's generation of marketers can learn so much and yes, be inspired by the following fresh approaches and smart use of online delivery.

A Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis, a "loose flowchart" from WallStats.com, is masterful in its simplicity. Compliance would insist on a whole lot more disclosure. Still…why not take a stab at more story-telling graphs with fewer words?

Two Understanding The Financial Crisis videos have been created by Enspire Learning. Enspire describes itself as “a team of training professionals, creative writers, multimedia artists, and game developers” whose work includes some financially-focused videos. I’m linking to the first Understanding The Financial Crisis YouTube file embedded in a financial planner’s blog, Prudent Investing by Adam Zuercher.

The point: Easy-to-understand explanations are valued by financial advisors—and they often show their appreciation by linking to your content. One of our favorite topics lately is how Marketing can add significant value by creating content with legs.

This Flash video is an example of a financial planner (the Behavior Gap) taking it upon himself to produce an interesting way to present a story every investment management company uses the long form to tell. Again, a similar Marketing/Compliance collaboration would have produced lots more attribution but let’s be honest with ourselves: Would Compliance have flat-out vetoed this approach? I doubt it.

Times are tough, the ranks are thinning, nobody’s happy and you could be worried about your own survivability. Here’s hoping these inspire you to re-focus and find a way to take a fresh crack at telling what may be the most important story of your career.