There’s a lot of promise in research released yesterday by the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) and Anderson Analytics. MENG is a national group representing senior marketing executives from across industries. Until the revolution when digital marketers claim their rightful place as eCMOs or some such, these are the people who green-light online plans. (At this point, I should say that I’m a MENG member, agitating on your behalf from the inside.)

It’s good news that two-thirds of respondents to the Third Annual Marketing Trends Study have a more optimistic business outlook for 2010. Marketing budgets are being increased (by 24% of respondents), innovation and research and development (R&D) is being funded (36%) and about 30% of executives say they’re hiring.

You can find a complete copy of survey results at www.mengonline.com/visitors/newsroom. We went straight to the Online Marketing & Social Media Strategy part of the report and there it was. Overall, marketers intend to spend 45% of their budgets online this year, 55% offline. Nice, very nice.

Company size factors into the spending. Large companies (defined as having 2,000 or more employees) will spend just 30% of their budgets online versus 48% spent by small companies. That’s OK, large companies have bigger budgets. The dollars will be there.

Research is conducted to answer questions, but one looming question emerged out of this research: Will the results of heightening spending be there?

The MENG/Anderson survey is comprehensive and covers a range of topics from executives’ assessment of growth in geographic markets to their own job satisfaction. We were interested in the list of marketing concepts that respondents consider “the most important to pay attention to.”

Marketing executives’ top marketing concept for 2010? Marketing ROI. And, Social Media ROI ranked as #15.

Return on investment, that again. The ROI mandate is inescapable this year (see our post on asset managers' special challenge in demonstrating social media ROI).

But take a look at the marketers’ list of top 15 marketing concepts. Where’s Web analytics? How can anything online be evaluated without a focus, at the top of a marketing organization, on analytics?

Digital marketers, this is your call to arms. Web analytics—and we’d broaden the term to make sure it encompassed analytics of off-site strategies, too—ranks #19 on the MENG/Anderson list of marketing concepts that executives are focusing on. That’s too low for what needs to be demonstrated and understood in 2010.

This data, which may or may not reflect responses from asset management marketing executives, confirms what asset managers’ Web analysts already know. At too many organizations, analytics is a siloed capability, typically too low in a marketing structure and almost always focused on reporting as opposed to taking part in planning, anticipating, learning, testing and sharing.

In this year of “Where’s the ROI?” digital marketers need to seize the moment to communicate the value and limitations of analytics. Don’t fault the marketing leaders for analytics not being top of mind. It’s your job to command their attention. Find a way to present insights (not auto-generated reports) that widen executives’ eyes as opposed to glaze them over.

Your work, your organization’s online presence and its future effectiveness depends on your speaking up this year. Take another look at that list—how hard could it be, really, for Web analytics to unseat Blogging as a top marketing concept? Go.

We sat in on a Forrester Research Top 10 Financial Services Web Site Best Practices of 2009 Webinar this afternoon and thought we’d pass on a few highlights.

App Turns Phone Into An ATM

USAA’s mobile phone app (released first for the iPhone and in January for the Droid) enables registered accountholders to deposit checks simply by photographing the check and submitting the image via the phone.

We covered remote deposit capture (RDC) seven years ago when the payments industry introduced it as a solution for commercial customers that met volume requirements. It's exciting to see the capability downstreamed to consumers for one-off use.

Brad Strothkamp, Forrester principal analyst, singled the app out for two reasons.

First, it’s a best practice of offering content differentiated from what Internet banking applications offer. If you're working on a mobile strategy for an asset management company, be sure to consider the medum—offering just a miniature version of your mutual fund or ETF site won't cut it.

But more important, this app is an innovation that makes doing business with USAA easier.

According to USAA's January press release announcing the Droid app, in the five months since Deposit@Mobile was introduced in August 2009, customers deposited more than $300 million using their iPhones.

USAA provides financial services (including mutual funds) to military members and their family—a very mobile group. More than 1.2 million members use USAA's mobile platforms to manage daily transactions.

Mint.com Bases Cross-Selling On Potential Savings

Mint.com, the online personal finance site we've been encouraging you to keep an eye on for the audience it's building and the tools it's delivering, is now doing “smart” cross-selling based on transactional information. According to its site today, more than 1 million people have uploaded their checking, savings and investment account information to Mint and 3,000 are signing on each day. Mint is tracking $175 billion in transactions, $47 billion in assets and has identified more than $300 million in potential savings for its users.

In the cross-selling example that Strothkamp cites, when Mint "sees" discount brokerage commissions, it can cross-sell a lower-cost provider. Let’s set aside the other discussion we could have—i.e., How long until Mint begins to cross-sell based on mutual fund expense ratios?—this is smart Web site functionality.

Social Media Stimulates Trading

The TradeKing community is a Forrester favorite and you can read more about it on the Groundswell page. The community allows for traders to share trade and balance information at the aggregated level. Most intriguing in Strothkamp’s comments was that TradeKing finds the more active a trader is in the social community, the more they trade—four times more!

Across financial services businesses, “there’s a lot of interest in figuring out social tools,” Strothkamp said.

“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. 

FINRA held its long-anticipated Webinar on social media guidance today. (A replay will be available in a few weeks, social media vendor Socialware has posted a summary and we wrote a brief AdvisorTweets blog post.)

When we commented on the release of the guidance last week, we characterized it as FINRA kicking the ball into Compliance’s court. Well…not so fast—there’s somewhere else the ball has to go first and that’s to management. Management needs to be on board that “social media” is an appropriate use of what will be significant resources. (Read the Socialware document for a sobering look at what compliance with FINRA’s recordkeeping and supervision requirements entails.)

What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of social media? It’s a question being asked across all industries, but it’s especially germane to the highly regulated investment industry. At companies in other industries, maybe, a skunk works can be formed for experimenting on the cheap. Or the work might be outsourced at first. But that wouldn't work in this industry. Before the first tweet can take flight, expensive resources have to be consumed, ideally developing strategy and certainly focusing on risk mitigation.

And, for what? What are the stated expectations of social media? Or are managements being asked to take a flier? (Good luck with that.)

I had just completed presenting a Social Media Overview Webinar Tuesday afternoon when a question came in from one of the participants: “I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but how does it make me more money?”

When that’s the question that’s being asked, it demonstrates that we haven’t been broad enough in our discussion. That we haven’t focused on the transformation that’s going on in communications, with many of the trends leading away from what asset management companies rely on today. Interruption advertising, vanity collateral and product-based email blasts are fast becoming passé.

We haven’t been sufficiently disciplined in measuring what we do to understand that the effectiveness of our traditional communications is declining.

Can you think of a time when more people were talking about investing and the markets? It's not that investment managers’ products, services and personnel aren't relevant—it's the communications that are static and stale.

The idea that “markets are conversations” was a thought first articulated more than 10 years ago in the Cluetrain Manifesto. Web site users began talking to one another years ago on message boards. The online sharing of words and pictures and videos started in the last millennium, too, and today social bookmarking buttons and RSS feeds are ubiquitous on most Web sites.

Investment companies’ digital communications (and maybe the systems underlying them?) have trailed behind. FINRA's social media guidance cited Pew Internet and American Life Project research that 46 percent of American adults who use the Internet logged onto a social networking site in 2009. And yet, investment management communications rarely figure into online conversations. Out of sight, out of mind.

Online, where marketers compete with content, the rich, well-substantiated (thank you, Compliance) commentaries, whitepapers and other research you and your colleagues produce are overlooked by search engines. Web searchers looking for the very information your company offers end up reading inferior, shallow content on SEO-optimized article submission sites.

Social media represents a full-on assault on the way communications are planned, processed, published and evaluated within many investment management companies today. Even setting aside the compliance parameters, there is a lot of work to do to figure out how asset managers can meaningfully interact online.

What's the ROI of social media? That's the right question for management to ask. But if you're asking for a social media budget, we encourage you to recast your question. You don't need funds to develop a Facebook application or invest in an archiving solution. You need support to disrupt current communications practices and seize cross-functional time and attention to focus on a more contemporary, more effective, better measured approach to communicating and marketing.

Does your company want to grow? Do you need to raise awareness of what you do and how you do it? Would you like to know your clients better and respond to them more quickly and more relevantly? How close are you to the market? How fresh is your product development? Could your organization stand to be more competitively alert?

Companies that are active on the social Web point to these as benefits, and that's where we'd start the conversation about the payback of a comprehensive social media strategy.

The following was also posted at our AdvisorTweets.com/blog.

At about mid-day today, FINRA released its 10-page Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites. (A tip of the hat to @BillWinterberg who was first among our tweeps to spot the regulatory notice.)

Others might disagree or read something in between the lines, but to us the guidance seems reasonable. Of course, FINRA will insist on record-keeping and supervision. And specific investment product recommendations are obviously trouble--in fact, FINRA says a prohibition would be a best practice unless the content posted was previously approved by a registered principal.

But we think that the door to the marketing potential of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for financial advisors and firms swings open with FINRA's distinction between "static content" requiring the prior approval of a registered principal and "non-static content," which does not require prior approval.

FINRA acknowledges that Twitter and Facebook provide for non-static, real-time communications, such as interactive posts. "The portion of a social networking site that provides for these interactive communications constitutes an interactive electronic forum, and firms are not required to have a registered principal approve these communications prior to use," FINRA says.

This could have been the deal-breaker. What FINRA describes as static content on social networking sites--profile, background or wall information--must be approved by a registered principal prior to posting. It's more work for a Compliance review group but it's manageable. If, on the other hand, all tweets by everybody needed to be approved prior to posting, social networking would be dead on arrival for FINRA-regulated entities in the investment industry.

Please read FINRA's press release and the regulatory notice for all of the details.

There will be much more to come on this, including at the February 3 FINRA Webinar. (FINRA announced its rescheduling from March 17 via email this afternoon.)

From our perspective, the topic of social media participation today moved from "FINRA won't let us" to "How long will it take for Compliance to prepare our policies and procedures?"

This announcement is great timing for tomorrow's Investment News Webinar on Advisors and LinkedIn. See you there?

And, of course, we're interested in what you think of the FINRA guidance--as always, we welcome your comments below.

Have you ever been part of a meeting when an idea is presented—maybe with some passion even—and the response is just a lot of shifting around in seats? Is it a good idea? Should we run with it? Or…? Nobody wants to say. With any luck, there’s an alpha in the room who is only too happy to step in and pronounce it.

When Fidelity announced its “Be the Green Line” Video contest on Tuesday, we decided to hang back a little and see how it played. It’s one of the first overt social media efforts by an investment company so naturally we’re happy to see something getting done. Go, Fidelity! We're rooting for you.

Week 1 of the contest, a YouTube promotion, has produced a few takeaways. First you'll need the contest's description. And you can watch its video, too.

Fidelity wants to extend its Turn Here advertising campaign with an online contest. The commercials feature a green line “that underscores the firm’s ability to help investors navigate all stages of life with financial guidance and appropriate investment options.” So, the contest invites entrants to create videos that give the impression “through creative interpretation” that “they are the Green Line.” And, the phrase “stay on the line” must be said in the video.

We're surprised that the commercials haven't been uploaded as standalone files to the channel. There's a really short clip in the contest video but Fidelity seems to be counting on consumers' recall and not expecting them to search YouTube for fuller versions. Because there are some non-authorized Fidelity green line videos, including some spoofs, out there. Permissions issue, maybe?

But we press on. The final prize winner wins $5,000 and the submissions of as many as 10 semi-finalists will be featured on the Be The Green Line YouTube page, according to the contest rules.

“Fidelity risks YouTube treatment with video contest” was the headline on Investment News’ coverage. We think it's a qualified risk. The submissions need to comply with YouTube's community guidelines and we bet that Fidelity staffers will be keeping an eagle eye on all uploads.

The public votes only on the semi-finalists.The selection round will be judged by Fidelity according to these criteria:
• Originality/creativity in presenting the entrant as the “Green Line” (50%)
• Overall technical quality of the video submission (25%)
• Appropriateness to the Fidelity brand (25%)

OK, YouTube is not really where you go for technical quality and brand appropriateness, but we can give them a pass on that because, well, we’re all just learning as we go, right?

Not so much. Sometimes we compare these early days of social media to the mid- to late 1990s when asset managers were launching primitive and wobbly Web sites. What’s comparable is that there are pockets of knowledge and experience amid confusion, uncertainty and a little intrigue.

It was all upside then. Nobody expected much from an asset manager’s Web site. Animated gifs? We all cheered at the animation of the growth of the $10,000 mountain chart line no matter how long it took to fully draw.

That was then, this is now. Forty-plus comments on the Boston.com (Boston Globe) article describing the Fidelity contest serve as a ready example of how social media can be a little trickier than launching a Web site was back in the day.

The crowd has expectations

Everybody—the general Internet population—has expectations now. Even newcomers are held to standards loosely defined by everybody, not professional reviewers. Investment companies’ social media doesn’t get a pass, it gets compared to Starbucks’.

Fidelity says they're bringing their campaign online because of its popularity. As often happens online, the detractors are better organized and post their snipes faster than the supporters—you will see some Fidelity defenders among the comments.

The brand is not in charge

In conversations, which is what social media is described as, both parties get to change the subject. When the Turn Here campaign was launched in March 2009, chief marketing officer James D. Speros explained that the intent was to position the brand as a guide and a navigator.

In other words, Fidelity didn’t want to talk about the markets, it wanted to talk about its value to investors. But when it’s their turn, people still want to talk about the market collapse and what it did to their investment portfolios. And there’s some of that in the comments.

We’ve observed this before and we encourage you to factor it in when you make your social media plans. 2008 has left some people distrustful and negative toward investment companies, and the people with computers are still working through it on the Internet. We believe that consumers will be light-hearted and carefree with other companies and other industries before they’ll relax with you. They want to see you working.

Sometimes the conversations will include the brand, sometimes not

By disabling comments on its YouTube page, Fidelity guaranteed that the commenting wouldn’t take place there. But people could be talking about the contest just about anywhere else—and to be the subject of conversations is the intent of viral.

The contest is getting coverage on video production blogs, broker blogs, investor blogs and even on EcoFriendlyGreenMattresses.com. Hooray! Here’s the impact of all that: It’s pushing down the official Fidelity announcement on the Google results pages.

On Sunday, Fidelity didn’t even shown up on page 1 of results for a “Fidelity green line” search and barely made it onto page 1 for “Fidelity you tube.” Contest coverage and more criticisms from social networks are ranking higher. Luckily, there were still some tweets circulating about the contest (another reason to make sure your news is covered on Twitter). A Google AdWords buy might have to assure Fidelity official’s presence on page 1 for contest-related keywords.

No matter what others’ agendas, it’s all worth paying attention to

Peanut gallery? No, brands really have to bury that dismissive phrase once and for all if they’re going to use social media to reach people. For marketing professionals who've knocked themselves out on a campaign now being reviewed as "lame-o," it can be demoralizing and the temptation may be to write the online critics off as just a few kooks. That’s risky, riskier even than social media.

We’re going to keep an eye on this contest and encourage you to, too. There's more to learn from Fidelity and the videographers it's inspiring (videos must be uploaded by February 19) about how social media and investment marketing mixes. 

Every year in December I review the photos I’ve taken throughout the year. Some will be the basis of gifts I give or pranks I play. Looking at them all together as a 12-month set satisfies some need to put the year in context.

I had the same instinct this week to review a quite different collection, also something I’d spent the year creating: the 1600-plus  @RockTheBoatMKTG tweets of mostly references to financial services and digital marketing-specific Web content. There was good stuff in there!

For this final Rock The Boat Marketing blog post of the year, I’ve indulged a stroll down memory lane (the stroll itself made possible via the free social media archiving capability of Arkovi.com). The following is an edited, chronological list of tweets to content that’s especially worth an investment marketer’s attention. Of my 1600 tweets, I’d tagged only 28 as “must-read.” Most of them have stood the passage of time and are listed below as they were first published.

Below the must-reads, if you’re still with me, are tweets about content that I considered “great.” You may notice a degradation in quality and focus as, depending on the day and the hour, my head can get turned by a cute Valentine animation or an interview with the Mad Men props guy. In all, I described something as “great” 71 times; what’s below is a more heavily edited, more financial services-specific list.

If you’re new to reading tweets, you may need this quick explanation. RT means that it’s content someone else created and all I’ve done is forward it. Because tweets can be only 140 characters long, URLs are shortened and you’ll see multiple shorteners (e.g., bit.ly, cli.gs) in use.

My hope is that you’ll scan the list below and find something of value, maybe something you missed during the year. As I hope the list suggests, there’s a lot of relevant financial services marketing-specific content being discussed on Twitter. If you’re not out there, 2010 is the year to check it out. When you do, please follow us at @RockTheBoatMKTG and @AdvisorTweets. The tweets below and our RockTheBoatMKTG and AdvisorTweets Twitter lists can give you a good idea of who else you’ll want to follow.

And now the tweets:

The future of your work will be influenced by this, a must-read for marketers: Obama's Internet strategy http://cli.gs/X3DNyZ

Biz Week's take on financial advisors, inside and out. Must reading for asset management marketers http://cli.gs/q47UPz

A must-read and follow for public companies: Tweeting material news http://bit.ly/157eGv

Must-read RT@CaleInTheKeys Why money messes with your mind. http://ow.ly/1Zk5

Must-read/listen for #financialmarketers: Asset managers' optimization of CRM: ppt at http://bit.ly/12ddCb, notes at http://bit.ly/DSngm

Must-read for investmentmarketers @newrulesinvest: Case study on investment advisor using social media to build practice http://bit.ly/QuKmn

RT@lawain Must-read: Compliance Dangers & Insights for Advisers Using Social Media http://bit.ly/S0FAn

Update on my must-read tweet about redefining the delivery of financial advice--You're going to need the link: http://bit.ly/pEt6a ;)

Online analytics isn't just for marketers. Must-read on how other biz groups benefit. http://bit.ly/17oKhu

Must read: 5 reasons corporations are failing at social media http://bit.ly/zKieb

Must-read for Investor Relations pros on the fence about taking part in social networks http://bit.ly/7ubiLU

Must-read for all--not just Marketing types--responsible for mutual fund communicating http://bit.ly/7biJMG

Must-read: A financial advisor explains why he tweets (via @rwohlner) http://ow.ly/KPBj

Great WSJ article illustrating in plain-English what affects Google search engine rankings http://cli.gs/aetG84

Love this, great aid for party planning! Twitnest visualizes who knows who among your followers.http://bit.ly/oLK8a

Great idea with lots of potential: Geo-segmenting an opt-in email list http://bit.ly/ALHN

Financial services marketers, the drumbeats are getting louder for using visualizations to tell stories. Great article: http://bit.ly/OHMal

Great read: 147 slides from Mary Meeker on economy/Internet trends. http://cli.gs/Whn6he (thanks, @JDavidMorris)

Great article on using Twitter as your help desk (customer support) http://bit.ly/86dMC

Great article about online communicating--Site visitors are "more than skin and bones with credit cards" http://bit.ly/Tqhbn

Great way to start the morning! What's new? Just check out this news map of trending topics: http://bit.ly/3wmS9z

Great first-person account by a financial advisor determined to build high ranking blog You go Jeff! http://bit.ly/XTmLf

RT @RussThornton Great post from @BehaviorGap on managing wealth vs managing investment returns > http://su.pr/1BsWbQ

Great data on the time spent on content sites. Content rules! http://bit.ly/EQ2VM

Great, practical article on social media monitoring http://bit.ly/oTpKZ

Great infographic and what am I doing looking at this on a Monday? The Hierarchy-of-Digital-Distractions http://bit.ly/3q9hLQ

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.

This is such an imaginative time to be a marketer and especially a digital marketer. As busy as we know the next few weeks will be for most, here's hoping that you can find some time to follow the links below to some outstanding content that collectively aims to describe what marketers will be working on in 2010.

We're counting on your liking predictions as much as we do because our next post is devoted to them, too. We’ll be publishing Rock The Boat Marketing's 2010 predictions for digital marketing at asset management companies early next week—subscribe to our RSS feed now or please remember to check back then.

Broad Marketing Trends

11 Smart Marketers Shared Their 2010 Predictions is a MarketingProfs round-up from a motley group of marketers representing agencies, consulting firms and a municipality’s Zoning Board of Appeals.

Examples: One of the ad hoc panelists says that tailored campaign microsites with unique URLs will be abandoned, and social media networks will become destination sites/pages for product launches. Another expects 2010 to be the year when the practice of allowing Sales and Marketing to operate as separate, conflicting silos ends once and for all, due to an urgency to get online and social marketing right. In a statement that a few commenters push back on, a third predicts "2010 will be the year that 'true' mobile marketing takes off."

Social media silliness will give way to private social networks. Video will become increasingly important for selling higher ticket items that require repeated exposure and graduated commitment to complete the sale. As video becomes commonplace it will make sense to develop content creation processes that simultaneously lay down all three types of media (video, audio and text). Those are among the 5 Bold Marketing Predictions from direct marketing consultant Clayton Makepeace’s The Total Package Web site.

Email And Contact Strategy

In keeping with the season, there’s an evergreen quality to a few of the email predictions on EmailInsider (e.g., opt-in processes will become friendlier and landing pages will convert better). But writer Chad White’s comments on how ISPs evaluate engagement metrics when making deliverability decisions and the expected heightened use of email preference centers are worth your attention.

Let’s include a few forecasts in this post on predictions. Almost half (48%) of businesses are increasing overall marketing budgets next year, according to a StrongMail survey reported on this Research Brief on Mediapost.com. Email and social media are two channels that offer high ROI, StrongMail notes.

Source: 2010 Marketing Trends Survey, StrongMail

Marketing Automation and B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 were written by Eloqua's Steven Woods, whose book Digital Body Language we’ve recently read and highly recommend. Now that companies can learn so much from customer and prospect behavior online, expectations of physical meetings are being reset, Woods says.

"In 2010, in sales organizations we will see a rapid recognition of the new reality that buyers are less willing to take an initial call from a vendor salesperson with an assumption of only exchanging basic information,” says Woods. A more productive first meeting should be the benefit of getting to know a prospect's online profile.

Brand

“A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement,” writes Brand Keys’ Robert Passikoff in his top 10 brand and marketing trends for 2010 on PizzaMarketplace.com.

Oh and also, according to Passikoff, “Consumers are on to brands trying to play their emotions for profit."

Online Creative

8 Experts’ Predictions for 2010 gathered by iMedia Connection provide creative agencies’ views of what will work next year. Experts from Razorfish, Mediasmith and others say that “Want better marketing? Create a better product” will be a relevant theme, and better products will determine the brands likely to succeed. As for agency work, effective execution of ideas won’t cut it—“agencies need to help clients build brands that do something” as opposed to just helping them formulate effective messages.

Social Media

If 10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010 is your first exposure to Mashable.com, the exceptional social media blog, make it a two-fer. Read founder Pete Cashmore’s survey of what’s going on and what’s coming and then find time to browse Mashable. The demand for real-time information, location-sharing and the “voluntary erosion of privacy” are among the trends Cashmore names.

The Church of the Customer offers a too-short Out/In list. Blogger Jackie Huba's thesis is that social media will get boring in 2010 as businesses seek to integrate social media into business functions. That means policy-writing, and business goal and team alignment.

When you think about it, why do we have to go to a separate site just to search? One of the 5 Social Media Predictions for 2010 on this Social Media Today list expects Search to be phased out as a separate function next year—“users will receive meaningful, personally relevant search results within the context of whatever they are currently doing.”

See you back here next week for Rock The Boat Marketing's 2010 marketing predictions for asset manager digital marketers.

"Is now a good time for us to take a look at what people are saying about you when you're not around?"

That's how we tee up one of our favorite parts of the Rock The Boat Marketing Introduction to Social Media for Asset Managers workshop. We usually get to it right around the time energy is ebbing—a condition we attempt to reverse with our collection of tweets that we've seen about our client and other asset managers. Not all are as complimentary or as playful as the one we show here.

Whether you're ready to participate on Twitter or other social networks or not, your company is being talked about. Of course, you care about what's being said.

As important as listening has always been, it's essential now. Your company can't opt out. Customers, prospects, partners all are active on the social Web. (The expected benefits of listening to Twitter-using financial advisors is what drove us to develop and operate AdvisorTweets.com.) 

Some of your shareholders and advisors are having problems and grousing about your service, others are describing needs that your products could or will address. Your competitors may be talking about their ideas and business opportunities. Your own employees or vendors may be inadvertently sharing disclosable information.

If you're responsible for the digital marketing efforts of a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) organization, the very first step to take is to lead or at least call for the development of a listening competency at your firm.

One of the leaders in the social media monitoring product category is Radian6, whose Director of Community Amber Naslund took part in a panel discussion yesterday at a Chicago chapter meeting of MENG (Marketing Executives Networking Group).

We caught up with Amber after the meeting and asked for her thoughts on the following questions:

• What's the argument for companies to start "listening"?
• Who tends to initiate listening as a discipline within an organization?
• How are companies organizing to listen?
• We know there’s a cost to not listening. But how much are companies investing in listening?
• How are companies in regulated industries like financial services approaching listening?
• …And how are companies responding when they hear something?

She says a lot in this six-minute video. We hope you listen.