This Time It Was Different!

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Bravo to all the investment company marketers who dropped everything this week in order to orchestrate (whether writing, editing, routing, cajoling) a stream of market and even some product communications to an information-hungry following.

Having tracked the industry's real-time response (shallow and slow—see this post from way back when) to the seemingly much worse September 2008 turmoil, I’ve spent the week marveling at the output prompted by the August 2015 market swoon. It was a quarter’s worth of work in a week, and it has been magnificent.

What explains the difference in response this year from seven years ago?

Keep Calm And Communicate

Firms today are much better equipped to communicate in fresh, short bursts. Everything that’s been done—all the scoping and planning and building of a content publishing infrastructure—has led to this moment. Advisors, investors, the media all turned to their online news sources and (many of) you were there.

Of course, you accepted invitations to television and radio programs and other places where your investment experts were invited, and you sent emails with PDF updates to the advisor names in your database. That's old school. Most impressively, you found a way to get yourselves to where others were online and you contributed to "the conversation." Yay for you and everyone on your extended teams.

I’ll leave others to react to the substance of what your firms had to say. The notes below focus on what you did. 

Tweets, Obviously

Twitter, the pet platform for breaking market information, was the quickest, no-friction way for asset managers to communicate.

Starting on Friday, market-aware tweets were posted to deliver simple messages to investors, and to notify advisors of hastily scheduled conference calls.

Firms used Twitter to circulate information—see how Fidelity’s Jurrien Timmer tweeted a New York Times graphic that the @Fidelity account and 21 others then retweeted. Isn't it great to be part of a village?

I happen to love how Nuveen’s Bob Doll used Twitter to provide some added info around a CNBC tweet quoting him.

Nuveen Bob Doll Tweet.JPG

Those Blogs Come In Handy, Don’t They?

It’s wondrous what can get done when there’s a publishing system in place, with a known process and identified roles and responsibilities.

Of the 50 or so asset manager blogs I subscribe to (see related post), maybe half had published a market-specific post by Wednesday. In fact, I was surprised by a few that didn’t (why launch a fund 30 days ago if you’re not ready to use it for this?).

Each firm has its own challenges, I get it. But for those with content benches, this was the time to show them off.          

It wasn’t a surprise that the Eaton Vance blog was all over what was happening, given that volatility is one of its three investing themes. The firm posted no fewer than 13 updates in the last three days (nine on Monday alone). And, they had some recent Advisor Top-of-Mind Index survey work (more content marketing!) to be able to cite.

Not everyone could whip up visuals on such short notice. This may be one of those rare times when all you needed were words.

Notable: The Columbia Management blog had a table at the ready listing crisis events since 1929. I’d show you but the warning on the site about further distribution discouraged me and probably others from sharing.

I’ll also call your attention to a little visual relief on the Guggenheim commentary, which doubled as a readymade (and provocative) tweet. Clicking on the callout goes to the @ScottMinerd tweet and five tweets responding. My former colleague and buddy Todd Donat tells me it’s just a matter of HTML playing nice with the style sheet.

Cut, Print And That’s A Wrap

I believe First Trust was first out of the gate Monday morning with a video report (unembeddable—click on the link to view). “Yes, it is a correction…” is about as unambiguous as it gets.

And the directness of the Nuveen video, Bob Doll again, is quite effective.

For Facebook, Photos

Asset managers also reached out on Facebook, appropriately so as it was recently reported that Facebook is the leading source of news for affluent millennial investors.

Content posted was mostly images with and without links, as shown in these Putnam and Fidelity screenshots.

Putnam Facebook Image

Did Any Of It Make A Difference?

There can be a bit of skepticism when people see Marketing types hustling around the office trying to get something out. Does any of it really matter?

Consider this: That Bob Doll video mentioned above? From Monday to the close of business Wednesday, it attracted about 800 views—easily more than 99% of the months-old videos on Nuveen’s YouTube channel.

Others from Northern Trust and Vanguard saw similar fast builds. Franklin Templeton’s video featuring Dr. Michael Hasenstab, recorded Tuesday and published Tuesday as the others were, was closing in on 1,200 views this morning.   

I haven’t mentioned LinkedIn yet. That’s because I saw just a few asset managers jump on it Monday or Tuesday. Those who did posted a few links and linked somewhere else or cross-posted their blog updates to their Company pages. My impression of this week's content on the Banking & Finance channel is that it was prepared well before the breaking news.

However, LinkedIn appears to have been the site of most sharing of asset manager content published elsewhere. I say this based on a spot-check of Buzzsumo data, and it's consistent with what we've seen previously.

Franklin Templeton really got the word out as its Macro View About Market Volatility post seemed to be everywhere I turned, including Advisor Perspectives. Courtesy of its blog, here's a look at where the two-day-old post was shared.

On Twitter, it was more about visibility versus retweets or favorites. Accounts may very well have grown this week, if only because of heightened tweeting. Few investment company accounts were using some of the more popular hashtags (#ChinaMeltdown and #selloff).

A decision may have been made to communicate with existing followers as opposed to using descriptive hashtags to garner attention. That’s debatable, and I would debate it. 

And Product Updates, Too

Product updates are tricky for mutual funds, especially on the very day the market is tanking and the fund has yet to be priced. Still, Wells Fargo found an elegant way for their portfolio managers to say something on Twitter.

In the glass half-full department, a few firms saw fit to comment on the "absence of volatility" among senior loan products.

Direxion has been publishing daily "notable activity" reports, including notable one-day creation and redemption activity. Granted, Direxion is a firm that offers products, for traders, that benefit when the market goes in either direction. Still, this is added data (screenshot below is an excerpt) that I don’t recall seeing published in 2008.  

Props also to @DirexionINV for using Twitter to acknowledge pricing issues. Other firms with Twitter accounts had problems, too, but didn't think to use the channel. When something's not working on a Website, Twitter is the first place many people think to look.

Many tweets directed to ETF providers and about ETF tickers went unanswered. Next time—and let’s hope it’s not as soon as next week—I’d look for ETF product providers to be more responsive in close to real-time. In the near term, I’m guessing many of you will be firing up stop-loss order explainers.

Finally, I’ll close this with a nod to @AdvisorShares, one of the most consistently entertaining asset manager accounts. To data only the CEO has retweeted it, but I’m sure I wasn’t alone in appreciating this tweet.

Is it Friday afternoon yet?

Yes, But...How Fund Marketing Is Evolving

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There’s a striking evolution underway of investment product marketing/communications. You may need to use a machete to find it, cutting through all the market insights, retirement and personal finance updates that overwhelm asset manager content streams. But look at just the product-supporting communications that are being created using modern-day publishing tools and you'll see what I mean.

There’s no question that we were due for a change, as I was reminded of Sunday via a tweet that I was cced on (yes, that’s a thing).

Tom Brakke aka @researchpuzzler lifted a “fund marketing flowchart” from a partial book draft written in 2000 by Clifford Asness, founder of AQR. Asness described the chart as a decision-making model.

Now, I might have been tempted to dismiss this as nothing more than nostalgic. But three accounts retweeted this Sunday morning tweet, six accounts favorited it and one account piled on. @MikeCraft6, a self-described “bond fanatic,” suggested that a fourth box be added: "Merge Fund into One of the Above."

I don’t know for sure that Brakke—an investment advisor and consultant respected for his views on investment management process and communications; I’ve mentioned him before—meant to bait me. But I took the tweet and the response to heart.

Fund performance advertising has been hated since well before the year 2000. It’s easy to understand why. The basis of the derision is that performance records aren’t something anybody can safely use. As has been repeatedly documented, too often investors felt suckered into “hot funds”—what we advertised. Craft’s add-on jab about merging funds just underscores that “fund marketing” has a trust problem that continues today.

Fund Marketing > Performance Advertising

We did more than performance advertising 15 years ago, but I’ll concede that performance advertising may have been the most outward sign of fund marketing dollars at work. Advertising space purchased to showcase a table of index-beating returns was a concise presentation. The results were offered as a shortcut for what there wasn’t room to say about how those results were produced. Good numbers were enough to get everybody's attention.

The top performers were the funds advertised, absolutely. This is a point that Asness said he had no issue with. “There is hardly a business in the world that insists on pushing its ugly tough-to-sell products as hard as its attractive ones,” he wrote in his book draft.

“Furthermore, if investors insist on shunning anything doing poorly recently, and buying only recent winners, it would be very unfair to blame only the fund companies for the selective advertising practices I discuss. They should not be required to tilt at windmills.”

Excellent, we’re off the hook with the man who created the flowchart in 2000. But it’s obvious—not just in this week’s tweets but elsewhere, including Brakke’s comments on this blog in December—that marketers need to do more than promote performance in order to build trust in mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) communications.

Unbounded by the constraints that limited Marketing's ability to communicate previously (i.e., explicit budget, production/delivery time and expense, and physical space to accommodate the message), today’s product communications are extending in many new directions.

Fund marketing is more than the one-trick pony that some may still see. Yes, space is still being purchased and top-performing funds are still being advertised. But the URLs and social icons included on the ads? They lead to a wealth of additional information that should foster smarter investment decision-making—hopefully resulting in fewer of those gotchas that sting advisors and investors.

As a test Sunday through Wednesday of this week, I sifted through the tweets sent by asset managers (as tracked by the Investment Managers Twitter list) and followed the links to just the product communications. This sample of this week alone suggests a bit of what’s changed since performance advertising defined fund marketing 15 years ago and more.

Going Direct

Access to their own publishing platforms enables firms to go direct, overcoming the budget and finite space limitations of using a media partner to reach advisors/investors. A regularly updated blog combined with social network updates provides for relevant, time-sensitive and friction-free communicating about much more than performance.

For example, here’s AdvisorShares, which weekly takes it upon itself to report on the active ETF market share, including tables of outflow and inflow data showing other firms’ funds.

And, of course, fund companies aren’t the only ones practicing their new publishing skills.

In the office today, marketers continue to sweat over the display and use of brand assets. Meanwhile, there’s a whole community online that’s also newly empowered to share their own text and graphic commentary about your products in the open on the Web.

While short-term performance consumes a significant amount of the attention of those posting to Seeking Alpha or StockTwits, other attributes are discussed as well. Below is a tweet with a screenshot that shows the changes in an ETF’s assets under management. For those paying attention, these product tweets provide insights on what's interesting to others about your products.

Multi-threaded

Previously, fewer than a handful of funds received extra marketing support. Those were the funds whose impressive performance made it easy for wholesalers to engage advisors. It was a backward-looking approach, no question.

But today's product-focused blogs support multiple products. It’s the rare firm that hammers home one fund and ignores all others.  

In addition to aiding investor understanding, this multi-threaded support serves at least two purposes for a firm:

  • It showcases the thinking of all the teams. The “global breadth and depth” of the firm is made real with posts from a blogging stable that includes portfolio managers, portfolio strategists, investment and research analysts.
  • A continuous (vs. sporadic) focus assures a ready supply of content, which will help when the market rotates and there’s heightened interest.

Check out Franklin Templeton’s Fixed Income Almanac, a new "one-stop shop" for portfolio manager perspective and historical data.  

Back in the day, portfolio management had a top-down, locked down approach to being available to Marketing. As a former shareholder report-writer, I sometimes wondered whether the goal was to reveal as little as possible.

This kind of thing from Motley Fool Funds just wasn’t happening in 2000.

From Advisor-Only To ‘Please Share’

Content-sharing isn’t a new concept to fund marketers. But the party line has changed quite a bit. Having thrown in the towel on keeping advisors from sharing product content with their clients (more can be said when the content is prepared for licensed professionals), marketers now are motivated to create shareworthy information.

With this enlightenment comes the recognition that it’s a short list of people who are going to share your product performance data with their social networks. Performance is only one attribute of an investment product and maybe even the least differentiating. There’s also the fund’s story including its process and its holdings, its portfolio management (often featured in old tyme advertising but in a more distant way), its role in a portfolio, its expenses (the focus of many ETF communications).

The qualitative information that’s provided via these product communications is something that robo-advisors aren't able to factor into their algorithms. 

Where previously we would have relegated a risk discussion to the smallest typeface at the bottom of a printed page, check out WisdomTree's 800 words on risk.

The post comes to a favorable conclusion regarding the index underlying the EPI ETF. But does that mean that this content is little more than self-serving?

If we were talking about those posts that begin with, “Is it time to consider (insert product category here)?” I’d have to agree, yes. Not a fan. But WisdomTree's elaboration leads to a more informed buyer of its ETF after a run-up.

And then there's this Rochester Funds tweet about Puerto Rico sales tax collections. It’s a narrow, product-related update that couldn’t have been effectively distributed, and wouldn't have commanded any marketing support, in the old world.

Storytelling possibilities expanded with the rise of ETFs and specifically slice-of-the-market ETFs. A story is much easier to engage with than past performance.

See this infographic on the global water supply, which Guggenheim distributed along with its press releasecommemorating World Water Day 2015. Guggenheim started with why and then closed by focusing on water “as an attractive investment opportunity” and its global water ETF CGW. 

Sometimes—as happens often with PureFunds’ tweets—the connection between the story (another cyber hack) and the solution (the cyber security ETF HACK) is short and sweet. This series of tweets represent a whole different interpretation of drip marketing.

It Takes A Village, Not A Family

The presentation of products on fund company Websites has improved immeasurably in the last 15 years.

But for this post on product marketing, there’s one change worth mentioning: The opening up of fund comparison tools to include all products. It really wasn’t so long ago that these tools were limited to building portfolios with just the Website sponsor’s products, the so-called family of funds. I believe that Putnam deserves credit for blowing that model up, and most if not all firms have followed the lead.

This represents a shift in understanding toward a practical emphasis on how the products can be used. In isolation, past performance helps not very much. Over the years, marketers have learned that fund providers should help with how their products work with others' products.

Content-wise this week, Nuveen offered almost 12 minutes on to how to use small caps in a portfolio and Ivy Funds commented on using a commodities allocation. Wells Fargo Advantage Funds launched a month-long series on using alternatives.

If you’ve been on the inside these last several years, the changes occurring aren’t news to you. The social launches, the video production, the whitepaper manufacturing all have added both to the workload and the expectations of fund marketing. And, you have the best understanding of how much more there is to do.

Will this work serve to bolster trust among those unimpressed by the attention given hot products? I believe it will, with more, and more relevant, communicating yet to come. As always, your thoughts are welcome below.  

A few of the examples above are from firms that I have worked for or currently work for. To exclude them from a round-up post would be to penalize my clients. However, I was not involved in/compensated for anything cited above. When I refer to something that I’ve done for a client, I disclose it.

42 Mutual Fund And ETF Asset Manager Blog Feeds For Your Reading Pleasure

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Every time an asset manager launches a blog, a team of angels gets its wings. Or something like that.

There’s a lot of prep required to bring a blog to life, never more so than when you have to prove the business case, grease the Compliance wheels, collaborate with IT on a platform and corral highly compensated investment talent to commit/submit to a regular writing schedule.

Loomis Sayles Launches LandScape: A Blog Focused on Research http://t.co/Cq7G4pyqb5pic.twitter.com/1mHeiuCGdM

— Loomis Sayles (@LoomisSayles) September 23, 2014

On the occasion of both the Loomis Sayles’ blog launching this week and the one-year anniversary this month of Vanguard’s Institutional blog (yep, not only do institutional investors “use the Internet”—they read blogs, too), I thought I’d share my list of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) RSS feeds.

As I’ve noted previously and elsewhere, an RSS feed reader is an easy, efficient way to plow through the news. But, subscription numbers available from the leading RSS feed reader, Feedly, suggest that relatively few asset manager blogs are read this way. Not even the most popular Vanguard blog clears 1,000 Feedly subscribers, although that number has doubled in a year. Most investment company blogs have just double- and even single-digit Feedly subscribers. Apparently, the more common way to keep up is via email subscriptions from each firm.

Not all of the feeds are labeled "blogs." Some firms prefer to avoid the expectation that a blog should allow for user comments. This collection doesn’t stand on formality—if a site offers an RSS feed for its content updates, it’s included. (If your firm offers a blog or an RSS feed and needs to be added to the list, just shoot me an email.)

Lots For Marketers And Advisors To Learn From

For marketers, there are plenty of best practices to learn from:

  • Check out how often firms are communicating, mostly with substance.

  • Note what a difference a strong graphic can make when previewing a post through a feed reader. Below is a screenshot of the Guggenheim blog posts as viewed through Feedly on the desktop.

GuggenheimBlog.JPG

  • See that some firms enable the full text to be read within the reader while others offer just an abstract, in the hope that readers will follow the link to the site for the rest of the content. Sometimes they do.

  • Blogs aren’t forever. In reviewing the list prior to publishing it, I noticed a few blogs launched in the last few years have gone to Blog Heaven. They can be a lot of work. When the interest externally or internally isn't there, the smartest decision can be to pull the plug on a blog.

Of course, for financial advisors, investors and others, these updates are a font of relevant, timely information.

Accessing The Feeds

Without any further ado, here's how to access the list.

If you go to this page, you’ll find a list of 42 asset manager blog feeds, including those for the public, those specifically for financial advisors and specifically for institutional investors.

The screenshot below shows an excerpt of the page and where to copy the feed link address from to paste into your own feed reader. Note that the address is not a URL that will take you to the blog. If you prefer to follow the blog via email as opposed to an RSS feed, you’ll have to go to each site to subscribe.

Interested in following all 42? Just download the .OPML file (using the orange download box in the top right of the page) to your computer and then import the file into your feed reader. I like the way you think.

Included among the 42 feeds are:

For The Public

 For Advisors

For Institutional Investors 

Unfortunately, Feedshare.net, the tool I’m using to share these feeds, pulls them in with the file names used by whoever created the feed at your firm. Maddeningly, the list can't be alphabetized or ordered in any other way.

Haven't had enough of asset manager blogs yet? You might also check out Naissance Partners’ Best Blogs of the Week feature on their blog.

Asset Manager Content Sharing Takes Off—Don’t Be Left Behind

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There was a time not too long ago—seven months ago-ish—when the sharing of content published on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Websites was at low levels across the board.

That’s changing.

A comparison between the September 2013 sharing of content on the sites I blogged about in October with sharing in April 2014 shows that some fund companies are beginning to see significant sharing to social networks. Primarily to LinkedIn but not exclusively. The gains are stunning for BlackRock. Other firms are participating too, as you'll see below.

Why Isn’t Your Content Being Shared?

As for those of you whose content isn’t attracting the support you would hope for, it’s time to delve into why.

When nothing much is happening for your peers either, it’s easy to shrug your shoulders—i.e., uh, maybe nobody shares investment content. But now that others are starting to experience more of a social lift, what's keeping your content from participating? Let’s answer the question with a few questions: 

  • Are you making it possible to share? If you’re still publishing your commentary via Adobe Acrobat files, none of this applies to you. PDFs don’t get shared on social networks. Even if you and your content team are knocking yourselves out with the narrative and the graphics, you can’t be a contender and that’s unfortunate. This is particularly true of smaller firms—firms whose limited marketing resources could most benefit from a little help from others.

If at all possible with the Compliance direction at your firm and your Web publishing capability (or whatever it is that prompted you to default to PDFs in the first place), I’d find a way to add some HTML commentary to your site, along with social sharing icons.

  • How visible is your content? Waiting for others to find your content and pass it around is one way to go. The more effective way is to use your firm's own social accounts to call attention. 

Investment content sharing happens on four networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The data suggest that the most significant thing you can do to increase the visibility of the content you publish is to post it as a company update to LinkedIn. If you’re not doing that yet, I’d make it a priority.

A company presence on LinkedIn, hopefully buoyed by some support of your loyalist followers and even employees (where possible), should make a difference.

What we don’t know is the extent to which firms are paying for broader exposure through LinkedIn sponsored updates or advertising. That is the X factor. However, to my knowledge, there is no way to buy shares. Followers yes, but shares still need to be earned.

As shown on the graphs, LinkedIn casts the longest shadow here. There’s no site I looked at where tweets generated the most shares in April. But I want to put a word in for Twitter. Twitter is an effective means of calling attention to the availability and relevance of your content to the world at large, including topical news-hungry financial advisors, the media and other influential accounts. As impressive as the LinkedIn numbers are, don’t underestimate the power and reach of a few tweets. 

Facebook may be fading as a network where investment firm content gets shared to. In the set of data I looked at, Facebook shares were most important to Franklin Templeton's Beyond Bulls & Bears blog in the fall. That contribution seems to have dimmed since the start of the year (see below).

Google+ is a no-show in this data. With the singular exception of the Vanguard experience, little content produced by investment firms has been shared there over the last seven months. Now, after the surprise departure last week of Google+'s business leader and reported staff reorganizations, the prospects for the platform as a whole is in question.

  • Is your content visually appealing? A sea of gray text is going to get you and your content nowhere. You need images—lists, charts, even stock photos. And how about some subheads or pull-quotes to give your content a fighting chance?   
  • What’s the quality of your content? The availability, visibility and appeal of the look of the content is where most firms need to focus, I suspect. But in my analysis, I did come across a few firms that were posting to LinkedIn and not seeing much sharing. 

Creativity in this space and elsewhere has raised the content bar. You can’t expect to attract many eyeballs, let alone stimulate sharing by publishing one post after another all with the headline “Market Update.”

As difficult as this conversation may be with your content creators, you need to have it, to make the most of your collective effort. Take the data with you to the meeting. 

Some Sharing Successes

My analysis in October looked at the sharing of investment commentary-type content published, mostly on blogs, by 10 firms (AllianceBernstein, BlackRock, First Trust, Franklin Templeton, Guggenheim, MFS, OppenheimerFunds, PIMCO, Vanguard and WisdomTree). I used the SharedCount multi-URL dashboard to look at how many times a URL was shared on social networks. This data should be reliable as it’s based on direct queries to the networks.

Included were URLs to all posts published by the firms in September, a total of 111 posts. The mix included 22 updates from BlackRock on the high end and 4 from MFS on the low end.

Please see the post for the full report. To give you an idea, content published on all 10 domains resulted in 1,500 shares on LinkedIn. 

After recently noticing much more sharing on some sites, I decided to return to SharedCount for an update.

Sure enough, sharing is up across the board. 

If I were a digital marketer at a firm not benefitting from sharing, I might be tempted to discount the BlackRock results. There can be only one BlackRock and you may never be able to match BlackRock’s blog post production (21 posts in one month), helping drive 7,400-plus shares.  

But the pattern across multiple firms suggests that sharing of your content should be on the rise, too, regardless of the size of your brand’s footprint or even how often you publish. One of the blogs I looked at earlier was MFS’ On The Lookout, which published five posts in September. There were just two postings in April and yet one post produced 77 LinkedIn shares versus 5 total LinkedIn shares of all five September posts.

What's more, the sharing has been building. To confirm this, I analyzed the URLs of all BlackRock (the most prolific blog in this set, consistently producing 20-plus posts each month) and Guggenheim (the least prolific, producing a steady four Macro View posts a month) content published from September through April. Who's to say that April represents the top?

The additional graphs that follow are included not for the absolute numbers involved but to show the change.

What are your thoughts?

Where's The Fun In The Investment Business?

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In real-life some of us can be quite the cut-up. Do investment marketers, and other communicators at investment firms, really have to check their humor at the door?

Before digital, before social, the answer was uh-huh, yes. On a rare telephone conversation a few weeks ago (who needs to talk when you can tweet?), InvestmentWriting’s Susan Weiner and I laughed about the days when something as informal as contractions were frowned upon in investment commentary.

Money management is serious business. Tomfoolery isn’t something that endears a brand to financial advisors or investors. But here and there it is possible to spot some signs of lightening up. Over the last few years (!), I’ve been bookmarking some noteworthy examples. Finally, a few items surfaced this week, bringing my collection to enough of a critical mass to share.

Enjoy these now and I will continue my life's work of funspotting in the investment business.

ETF Tickers That Tickle

Not taking oneself too seriously is a sign of a contemporary communicator. As exchange-traded funds (ETFs) positioned themselves as mutual fund challengers/disruptors early on, it was natural to show a little sass in the selection of their ticker symbols.

MOO (Van Eck Global Market Vectors Agribusiness), DUST (Direxion Daily Gold Miners Bear 3X) and TAN (Guggenheim Solar ETF) are just three ETF tickers representative of the naming creativity among issuers. 

One of my all-time favorite product names was from the now-defunct Claymore Securities (a former employer but this naming predated my stint): the Claymore/Zacks Yield Hog ETF, which perfectly communicated the fund’s objective to traders. Sadly, it was later renamed to Guggenheim Multi-Asset income ETF, defaulting to words believed to appeal to a broader audience.

When A Cartoon Can Capture The Culture

We're all familiar with the difficulties of finding imagery to communicate the features and benefits of the non-tangible investment business. This can be a significant obstacle when faced with the need to provide some visual relief on a Website.

Branding that relies on illustration is rare on the Web. Even rarer is the investment firm that turns to humorous cartoons. The cartoon below is from Ajo Partners’ Philosophy page. I also like the cartoon on the Contact Us page, too. It's a bit edgy for this space.

The Fun In Being Interactive

For some, fun comes wrapped in a quiz. Quizzes have been the rage online for a while now (of all the content published by The New York Times in 2013, a quiz ranked as the most popular).

In this category, there’s no more prolific fund company than U.S. Global Investors. This commodity producer quiz suggests the fun and educational experience provided.

In its award-winning FutureMoves iPhone app released in 2011 (followed with a Website), MassMutual stepped out a little with irreverent messaging intended to focus Gen X and Gen Y on possible retirement scenarios. As shown in the video below, the app involves the addition of a photo of someone and then ages the image, making some predictions—see the first at 0:52.

It’s funny (“hilarious,” according to one iTunes reviewer) and makes the point.

#TBT

As you can tell by now, a fun communication doesn’t require belly laughs. People who consume investment content all day every day appreciate any effort. An unexpected reason to chuckle, smile, even snicker is all we’re looking for to mix things up. It will be remembered, if not always shared.

Let’s start with a fairly new, social-initiated holiday—#ThrowbackThursday or #TBT—and work our way to the high holy day last celebrated Tuesday.

There’s nothing to bring a community together like taking part in a hashtag. #TBT involves the very specific task of sharing an old image (read more about the meme here), and every Thursday brings a new set of updates from brands and individuals, all clustered together by the use of the hashtag.

A handful of investment firms can be counted on to post #TBT updates on Twitter, Facebook or both some Thursdays.

Here are a few recent #TBT posts from Northwestern Mutual, Fidelity and Scottrade.

Obviously, there's room for more firms to take part in Throwback Thursday and with even more imagination. If your firm has any story to tell whatsoever, you can come up with some image-based reminiscences that will both entertain and give your followers a glimpse of your firm's roots.

Not Just For Lovers

Valentine’s Day-related social updates from firms are quite common. But I still LOL when I look back at some 2012 tweets that resulted from a #FedValentines groundswell. They were loosely related to the U.S. economy and Fed policy. (It was what Business Insider called one of the Internet’s nerdiest memes yet.)

The iShares #FedValentines tweets (two examples are shown below) were mostly self-serving, didn’t drive a lick of Website traffic but c’mon, don't you like iShares just a little more because of them?

3 Takes On April Fools'

The April Fools’ celebrations this year started slow.

Fidelity offered a Popsicle-stick quality joke on Twitter and Facebook.

A publication has more latitude than an investment firm. Still, there was extra effort shown when The Economist devoted its daily chart to the comparison that all others know to avoid: Apples to oranges. I loved this, actually. The screenshot below is just a slice—be sure to check out the whole piece.

Finally, the imaginary prize in the investment space for celebrating April Fools' 2014 had to go to FMG Suite. The firm, a marketing solution for financial advisors, created a genuine spoof video for a "world where people still have fax machines."

You have to click on the image above to go watch the 1:30 video on the FMG site, which will take you away from this site. That's OK, don't worry about me. Go. Enjoy yourselves. I want you to have fun!