What's New For You In The Latest Research On Financial Advisors And Social Media

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For an asset management marketer’s purposes, the best surveys of financial advisor social media adoption and usage are conducted by other asset management firms.

Their questions tend to be most tailored to what mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) businesses need to know. For example, fund companies know it’s important to capture the interest of advisors who are restricted by their firms from full participation. In fact, the latest data suggests that about one in five advisors consumes social media content passively.

And so, the release of two surveys—one from Putnam Investments and the other from American Century Investments—in the last two weeks presents us with an embarrassment of riches.

Let’s acknowledge upfront, though, that advisors have been surveyed on this subject for years now. Little in the new work is eye-popping. What's impressive—and encouraging for social media strategies—is that adoption continues to build across the board. There doesn't seem to be the fickleness that’s been seen among consumer use of various social networks over the years.

The 2015 research offers a few incremental insights, and there are some differences in the findings in the two reports.

On the assumption that the advisor trade publications will well cover what the research has to say about advisory business gains, where and why (and extensive detail on those firm restrictions), below I offer a few parochial notes about what I see in this research.

I recommend you check out the complete Putnam and American Century reports, including their different methodologies. The third annual Putnam survey of more than 800 advisors was conducted in partnership with Brightwork Partners LLC. This is American Century’s sixth annual report, based on a panel of 300 advisors, a sample provided by Research Now.

The 22-page American Century report can be found here. As a supplement to its press release, Putnam’s AdvisorTechTips blog has teed up an infographic and some high level data. Putnam tends to leverage the research by publishing additional findings throughout the year. My thanks to the firm for making the full report to me.   

More Than LinkedIn

The comprehensiveness of Putnam’s data collection and analysis enables it to substantiate a fine point often overlooked in other broad-brush surveys: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the big three in the advisor's social toolbox and they are being used for specific reasons (click on the image to enlarge).

Putnam made the same point in its first survey two years ago, but the aggressiveness of LinkedIn marketing aimed at this space (and precious little targeted effort from the other networks) might lead you to believe that participating on LinkedIn will give you a lock on advisor attention. No.

The research found that advisor usage of Twitter for business and personal purposes grew 16 percentage points from July 2014 to July 2015. YouTube usage grew by 12 percentage points. That's my doing the math for you below on Putnam's graph.

And, according to responses to a separate question that explicitly seeks to understand any year-over-year change in platforms, Facebook is on top. 

Almost six out of 10 (58%) respondents said their Facebook use has increased. The leading reason: That’s where the advisors’ clients and prospects are active. Four out of 10 advisors—even more from regional broker-dealers and banks—say that Facebook plays a “very significant role in [their] current marketing.”

Advisors On Asset Managers

No matter how many surveys surface in the year, I believe I’m safe in saying that American Century is the only firm that 1. Asks advisors how asset managers are doing 2. Publishes the responses. Thank you for that, American Century.

You have to love the big strides noted in three of advisors’ four answers to the question about their opinions of asset manager use of social media (emojis added by me). 

A subsequent question gets down to brass tacks, leaving little room for doubt that advisors favor non-promotional non-firm-centric content. More than half say they’d follow an asset manager for content they can’t get elsewhere.

In another question, the ease-of-use of the social site is cited by 42% of the respondents, and that’s a datapoint I’d pay attention to. Whether via any one of the major platforms, content finds the social media-using advisor—the advisor doesn’t need to go to each (often password-restricted) site in search of what you're offering that's new and valuable.

American Century’s 2012 study was the first to report that LinkedIn Groups were the most important social media offering an asset manager could offer. I didn’t understand it then or in successive years, as it’s continued to be top ranked in the study above blogs, Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. Hmm, dunno.

Did anything in either of the surveys catch your eye? Please comment below.

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?

By Accident Or By Design? LinkedIn Exposes Advertisers' Campaign Data

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Update: I published the below post early this morning. Mid-day I received an email from someone in LinkedIn’s Corporate Communications saying, “We were made aware of this issue that enabled a limited number of LinkedIn members to see this campaign data. It has since been fixed.”

That’s good news, it was inadvertent and not by design. I can confirm that I for one can no longer see the Sponsored Update campaign results of more than a dozen investment companies and other firms, as I described below.

But I still have questions regarding the visibility of the data, how it became visible and, ultimately, what sorts of protections and monitoring that LinkedIn has in place. Without a better understanding of LinkedIn’s controls, advertisers’ interest may very well cool.

When I hear more, I’ll update the post. I’m doing this piecemeal because my email goes out at 3CDT and this first update should be in place, at the minimum.

Something happened on LinkedIn this week (is still happening as of this posting Thursday morning) that serves as a fresh reminder about the hazards of relying on others’ ever-evolving platforms.

On Tuesday, while in the process of working on a client’s competitive review, I noticed that LinkedIn was showing the results of firms’ advertising campaigns—the impressions, clicks, interactions, followers acquired and engagement rate of sponsored updates. I was dumbfounded.

To give you an idea, below I show a J.P. Morgan update, one of the best-performing updates in the samples I reviewed and off-point for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms.

On the company page, the shaded sponsored update campaign results (under the heading "Gained from Sponsoring") appear to be a show/hide module. I would have assumed its display would be driven by the account login—only those with admin access to the company page should be able to see results for only their own campaigns.

When I first realized what I was seeing, I'll admit that I made a beeline to check out the BlackRock company page. LinkedIn has singled BlackRock out for its sponsored update success (see a related post), and I wanted to see the data for myself.

Curiously, no data could be seen in most of the BlackRock campaign results modules. As shown in the example below from 10 months ago, the campaign name (revealing the target audience) and elements displayed but with zeros where the data would be. That can't be right.

BlackRock Sponsored Update Zeros

Also new to me Tuesday: Each company update that hasn’t been sponsored has a "Sponsor update" button that opens to a sponsored update promotion. That seems odd to show to all, given that only the company can sponsor an update on its own page.

From time to time, I use my clients' logins to access their LinkedIn analytics. Thinking that my use of multiple logins may have somehow confused things, I cleared my cache but still saw the data.

Then I asked several others to tell me whether they could see what I was seeing. Most logged-in desktop or laptop Chrome or Internet Explorer browser-users could. The one who couldn’t see the data was accessing LinkedIn via Safari on a MacBook Air.

Investment companies were my focus, but I also found that I could see the campaign data from companies not in the financial services space, too. 

Firms whose campaign data was visible in my spotcheck include:

  • Aberdeen Asset Management
  • Calamos Investments
  • Deutsche Bank
  • Franklin Templeton
  • Goldman Sachs
  • LPL Financial
  • Morgan Stanley
  • OppenheimerFunds
  • Putnam Investments
  • TIAA-CREF
  • T. Rowe Price

If you work for one of these firms, I'd reach out to your LinkedIn account manager and demand to know what the heck is going on.

The question for LinkedIn: Is the publication of this data by design or by accident? I’d sent a tweet about my discovery Tuesday and then an email to LinkedIn’s press account Tuesday evening but have yet to receive a response. I’ve been checking Twitter and Google search results for any official or unofficial commentary on this. So far, crickets.

When and if I hear from LinkedIn, I’ll update this post. My expectation (and hope) is that this is a programming glitch that will be promptly addressed. In the absence of a credible explanation from LinkedIn, I find this breach and its persistence for most of a week to be unacceptable and inexcusable. Shouldn't somebody be paying closer attention?

What About Protections For The Advertiser?

Sponsored updates are an important source of revenue for LinkedIn. They drove almost half of the Marketing Solutions' $140 million quarterly revenue, which was up by more than double since July 2014, according to the company's July 30, 2015, earnings announcement. There is every intention to build on that, and the financial services vertical has been one of the areas of sales (and content) focus. 

Let’s proceed with the assumption that showing others’ campaign data is not how LinkedIn expects to drive sponsored update adoption. This episode nonetheless is a teachable moment for all of us increasingly intrigued by the possibilities of using social platforms to more effectively reach audiences.

If you’ve ever used a social network for any length of time, you’re likely to have been surprised by changes it’s made. Facebook is notorious for this but every platform—and especially the public companies under pressure to demonstrate growth in usage and revenue—will change things up without notice. And, that has frequently included the exposure of additional data. While most of these surprises have affected individuals, brands and companies acting as content publishers have been caught unaware and needed to scramble.

I submit that advertising on these platforms raises the stakes, for both platform provider and the brand willing to commit a piece of its advertising budget.

Social networks are disruptive by definition. They don’t necessarily play by existing rules. As I thought about seeing all that campaign data this week, I wondered whether advertisers may be making assumptions that those running the social platforms either don’t share or aren’t aware of.

What assurances have been extended—more to the point, where is it written—that campaign results aren't something to tinker with by publishing or otherwise sharing?

By now, and through some trial and error, the networks have learned the importance of safeguarding personal data. But how much vetting has been done by advertisers to understand the steps that are taken to make certain that competitors don’t see one another’s marketing response data?

How seriously do LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook et al take the need to protect their advertisers, for some of whom advertising effectiveness is a leading indicator of their business results?

We have all been impressed by what the social networks say they can do. Their targeting capabilities and the level of reporting available surpasses what’s available from traditional media sites. They've been compelling enough to command significant sums for pricey products. 

This episode makes it obvious that we need to broaden the sales discussion to explicitly communicate what we require new marketing partners to do, and to confirm that platform and advertiser are aligned on the importance of keeping campaign results private. 

The Latest And (Marketing) Greatest At The Morningstar Conference

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So much of this business happens virtually—marketers, especially, spend little time in the physical presence of their financial advisor clients or their competitors.

MARIO GABELLI AT MORNINGSTAR CONFERENCE

MARIO GABELLI AT MORNINGSTAR CONFERENCE

To me, the novelty of everyone coming together under one big tent is at the core of the appeal of the Morningstar Investment Conference and what drives so much of the energy of the sessions and the Exhibit Hall. The conference is where industry participants come out from behind their desks and mingle, and where luminaries such as Mario Gabelli navigate the Exhibit Hall within easy reach of mere mortals.

The 2015 affair, held Wednesday through Friday last week, didn’t produce the OMG factor of Bill Gross in sunglasses, as happened last June and reverberated the rest of 2014. Regardless, Morningstar produced another successful and engaging event. I attended as a guest of Morningstar's Leslie Marshall, Director–Events, Magazine and Social Media, and my thanks to her and her team.

As I’ve done the last few years (see the 2014 and 2013 posts), I made a couple of random notes to mention to you. While others have reported on the substance of what was said at the event, the focus of these comments is on how content and marketing messages were shared. Pioneering work from previous years—whether in social, the mobile app, Exhibit Hall creativity—was improved upon in 2015. By and large, the change I spotted this year was incremental forward motion.

A Whole Lot Of Tweeting Going On

An event is about the exchange of ideas, and that’s something that happens from the presentation dais, in the Exhibit Hall and in one-on-one conversations. Social media amplifies it all. Let’s begin with Leslie’s report on the 4,600 #MICUS tweets and 31 million timeline deliveries by what I'd guess is the largest number of engaged Twitter accounts to date.

Asset managers continue to sharpen their use of the #MICUS hashtag. The following tweets showed that Wells Fargo and MFS were paying attention to the general sessions while simultaneously pursuing their goals to drive booth traffic. Well played.

Twitter is the back channel but this year for the first time, Morningstar displayed tweets on the big screen in between general sessions. Even more reason to give your conference tweets some oomph.

Now Including LinkedIn

The #MICUS focus centers on Twitter, which makes sense because that’s where most of the conversation takes place. But a few asset managers also brought Morningstar into their LinkedIn posts.

In addition to live tweeting from its @Vanguard_FA account, Vanguard created a LinkedIn update about what others tweeted from a product manager's Morningstar appearance.

One almost never sees this: A Calamos LinkedIn update quoted the comments of another asset manager, PIMCO, on active management while linking to a Calamos piece.

The App As A Content Repository

It’s official—the head nod is being replaced by a session attendee lifting up a smartphone to snap a picture of a slide. Is there a better compliment for a presenter?

But maybe this too will go by the wayside. Although not explicitly promoted this year, Morningstar is starting to use its browser-based app more as a go-to place for content—slides, whitepapers, links, etc., according to Leslie. She calls the app a "resource repository for attendees."

Attendees don't need to strain to take a photo of a slide if their event app contains a link to the entire presentation. And, tweeters can just take a screenshot of what's on their phones. More to the point for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers, this is another means of distributing your content.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the Morningstar app event listing for the general session featuring J.P. Morgan’s David Kelly also included a link to the slides to the J.P. Morgan deck. 

JP Morgan Morningstar App

But this year a link to an asset manager document was uncommon. Typically, the event listings linked to a Morningstar deck associated with the breakout sessions (featuring representatives from multiple firms). A PIMCO general session listing linked to Morningstar’s June 2015 analysis of PIMCO.

The Social Media Center Comes Into Its Own

A few years ago, the Social Media Center was an oasis occupying an impressive amount of real estate in the otherwise bustling Exhibit Hall. I used to enjoy shooting the breeze with Blane Warrene and crew, only occasionally interrupted by financial advisor attendees. Most seemed to speed up as they passed.

But, props to Morningstar for sticking with it because last week the social media center was hopping. No more playing around with social media—it seems the surveys are getting it right, advisors are engaging.

Experimenting With Periscope

I looked forward to the conference as an opportunity to experiment with Periscope, an app released this year that enables a user to livestream or “broadcast” to Twitter.

Where better to use Periscope than to livestream what's happening at an event? That’s what I thought prior to the start of the conference and that’s what I continue to think, despite a fairly rough go of testing it myself.

My experience illustrates the hazards of working with new platforms. I was using Periscope for Android, which was released in late May. Things can go wrong or at least not as expected, and that can be discomforting in a professional setting when the value of the communication is that it’s live. Luckily, this was all for my own experimentation and no animals or clients were harmed.

My vision as I took to the Exhibit Hall first thing Thursday morning was to start Periscoping in the hopes that others would follow and interact with my account. (Because Periscope offers only a follower search, I even added #MICUS to my Twitter account profile just in case someone was searching for #MICUS Periscopes.)

Assuming all the correct settings are turned on, account followers are notified when a broadcast is live. They can interact with the broadcaster to comment, ask questions or send a little love in the form of a stream of hearts. This is so new, I wasn’t expecting a gang to pile in, but I was hoping there’d be some interest.

yes, it's a selfie stick

yes, it's a selfie stick

Prior to Thursday, I’d tested everything I could—streaming and talking and walking. Also, I came packing a sophisticated livestreaming camera aid that you may also recognize as a selfie stick (but aimed outward).

The value of Periscope is the livestream. But I wanted to save what I’d created so I’d tested the autosave to Camera Roll feature, too. The sound levels, available bandwidth and overall energy of the Exhibit Hall that morning all were things that couldn’t have been tested ahead of time.

As one of my first “scopes,” I created a 16-minute video during which I walked the hall, taking time to show each booth. In my wildest dreams, I was providing a service for the stay-at-home marketer who might want to check out his or her own firm’s booth or get a feel for the Hall layout in general—in real-time!

In fact, this happened—Natixis’ John Refford spotted me Periscoping, sent a request via the chat note within the app to see a livestream of the Natixis booth and the team. So, I created a special livestream just for him. It worked, sweet.

Periscope Broadcasts

I wish I could show you both of those videos but for some reason I can’t. The videos were saved, I can watch them as a replay within Periscope and on my phone. But despite repeated efforts to download them in a variety of ways, these videos won’t budge. There's barely an online user community to reach out to, and I’m still waiting to hear from Periscope’s support.

Two videos are able to be accessed, and their quality will likely reassure you that you’re not missing much not seeing the other two videos. There’s a lot of pixelation, the audio and video are out of sync at times, the lighting and the volume are not great.

If all I wanted was to create a video to show later, my camera on my phone would have done a much better job. Periscope offers the promise of both showing a stream live (and I had higher quality expectations) and saving that stream to use later.

Having hopefully managed your expectations, the following are two livestreams (since saved and lightly edited as videos) that I created. My hope was that they might draw a live question or two from Twitter at large but none materialized. Even so, I'd underestimated the distraction of watching the phone for viewers to join or chat while filming an interview at the same time.

MainStay's Virtual Greeter

The first video shows MainStay’s virtual greeter, which was easily the most innovative booth traffic-driver (my tweet referred to it as booth bait) at the conference this year. MainStay is 2 for 2 for producing the Exhibit Hall's top head-turner, following an equally innovative campaign last year.

MainStay’s Director of Social Media Frank Ranu explains how the lifelike motion-sensitive greeter uses a few opening lines to draw attendees in to watch brief video clips.  

T. Rowe Price iPad App

T. Rowe Price was one of a few firms that seem to have devoted their booth space to their apps (J.P. Morgan Funds being another). I wandered into the booth and found myself talking to Darrell M. Riley, Asset Allocation Group. We’d planned on doing a demo, but the demonstration iPad happened to be low on battery at that very moment (the heartbreak of live). Darrell smoothly segued into an explanation of the MarketScene app strategy.

Later, I just had to chuckle about what I put these two gentlemen through. The Exhibit Hall was dotted with professional lighting and video setups, and it was their luck to be visited by a woman waving a dinky phone on a stick, asking them to talk to it. Oh and to remember, “Everything is going out live to Twitter!” They were sports.

I encourage you and your teams to research Periscope—and vertical video in general—yourselves. There are lots of possible applications for a livestream and it could be awesome. As with all other platforms you don’t control, just remember to limit your dependency/exposure and have a Plan B communication method ready.

Were you at the conference this year? Please use the space below to tell me what I missed.

3 Areas Of Intrigue: Another Fund Data Site, Social Financial Literacy, Pace of Social Finance

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Chicago’s weather has been unsettled (is it or is it not going to rain?), the Chicago Blackhawks have yet to truly assert their superiority in the Stanley Cup Final, and more business meetings/calls have been cancelled in the last few days than have happened. Things are not quite coming together this week.

And so it’s no surprise that I couldn’t close on one of three ideas that caught my attention—what follows is a bit on all three.

New Insights On Fund Distribution

On Tuesday, BrightScope launched Fund Pages, promising to deliver individual investors and financial professionals “deep [data] insights which were previously expensive or hard to find.”

As a quick refresher, BrightScope is “a financial information and technology company that brings transparency to opaque markets.” The firm got its start providing retirement plan ratings and analytics and extended the business a few years ago by building a directory of financial advisors. It’s not much of a leap from its previous work to see it diversify now into mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) data display that includes a fund scorecard and trended analysis.

According to the Website, the firm obtains its data from both publicly available and private sources, including regulatory filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Lipper. A rather prominent note on the fund pages encourages asset managers to make contact about "streamlining" your fund data feed directly onto the platform.

It seems like an uphill climb for BrightScope to take on other fund data sites, Morningstar among the most prominent, but I wish them well. Update: I didn't take it upon myself to compare the product data offerings but some RIABiz coverage published after this post addresses that. 

Here’s what’s new from my perspective.

The offer to connect investors with advisors

Fund companies largely rely on advisors to introduce their funds to investors. But BrightScope thinks it could work the other way around. Investor awareness of a fund could prompt a call to an advisor.

For example, this screenshot shows the three advisors displayed on the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (Admiral shares) profile. 

Clicking on one of the advisors goes to an advisor profile page where there's a contact form. The page also includes a list of the funds the advisors uses.

That’s different and so interesting. It closes a loop in a way that hasn't been done before.

Comparisons of fund company Websites to other product manufacturers’ sites have never quite held up because there’s been something missing: Where and how to buy the product. Every other manufacturer offers product availability information for its retail visitors.

Sure, some old-school firms still conclude all content with the suggestion that investors talk to their financial advisor. But this feature goes much further: Like a fund? Here’s who sells it. 

Unlike most of the data on the pages, Advisors Using This Fund information will not be extracted from BrightScope’s database, it will be self-reported by advisors registered in the system and the names displayed in what looks like alphabetical order.

My guess? Adoption will be spotty unless BrightScope finds a way to share success stories (leads) with advisors.

The display of wholesaler information

According to the blog post, registered advisor users will automatically see the wholesaler for the fund they are viewing, and they can email the wholesaler directly through the fund pages.

There’s even more information on that in this MFWire post including a surprising quote from Ryan Alfred, BrightScope co-founder, president and chief operating officer, that “we want to make it easier for advisors to connect with wholesalers.”
Surely, that’s something on which asset managers and BrightScope agree—but who knew that it needed to be made easier?!

BrightScope plans to build public-facing wholesaler pages based on whatever can be found in SEC and FINRA data.

Your firm is probably capable of distributing product data to every new data distribution partner that emerges. But this BrightScope feature raises a question about the readiness of your wholesaler contact data and your ability to take advantage of visibility opportunities on BrightScope and other third-party sites in the future. 

If you haven’t already (and my impression is that many firms have not), I’d get your wholesaler information into a database. Clean it up, make sure the go-forward maintenance responsibility is assigned and prep it for distribution to augment whatever files others can pull from the regulators' data feeds. 

Another intriguing vision worth learning more about: “FAs [financial advisors] will see data and be able to tie in articles they [wholesalers] write on, say, a specific fund or firm, to be seen by investors.” To date to my knowledge, wholesalers are writing few if any articles and likely none to be seen by investors, but we shall see where that goes.

Ad-targeting capabilities

Ad targeting is mentioned in the MFWire post but not in the BrightScope post. Already a site with some advertising on it, BrightScope plans to leverage its advantage of running a platform of registered users by offering the capability to target specific users as well as viewers of specific pages.

Insights Into Social Financial Literacy

Early in the week, I saw a few mentions of an infographic presenting the highlights of a Transamerica study of social financial literacy.

The infographic embedded on the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog presented only the results of LinkedIn users’ (oh, LinkedIn, there you go again, being all LinkedIn-y). Later, I found a Transamerica SlideShare deck dated June 5 presenting the overall results, although not the same kind of data highlighted in the LinkedIn deck.

The first screenshot below is from the overall deck. What I found most interesting: Of all the social networks, Reddit and Twitter users are most likely to pay to meet with a financial advisor. 

This second image below is a combination of two datapoints from the LinkedIn deck. As you can see, eight out of 10 LinkedIn users say they won't pay to meet with an advisor, although four out of 10 say they have met with an advisor. Two-thirds of LinkedIn users say it's unlikely they will pay to meet with an advisor. Oh my.

I made an effort to find someone at Transamerica who can provide a narrative on the results but no luck so far. June 19 update: Evidently, I've jumped the gun on this. Transamerica has reached out and said they're about two weeks away from giving this work the formal reveal it deserves. Watch this space—assuming there's more to share, I'll write another post.

Kudos to all of you who prepare infographics to present survey results. Just be sure to include the basics about the survey on the infographic so it can stand on its own. Without knowing the total number of responses, the methodology etc., it’s hard to know what to make of these somewhat alarming findings. The overall deck is embedded below. 

Can Social Finance Work?

Executing in financial services can be tricky, nobody needs to tell you that. But you might be interested in following a discussion that’s happening this week about whether social finance can work.

If it can, of course, your job is headed for change. (Last month, 77% of surveyed financial services marketing executives told the 2015 Makovsky Wall Street Reputation Study that they are concerned about losing customers to alternative providers.)

I had mixed reactions to Tuesday’s TechCrunch blog post, “Why Has ‘Social’ Failed In Fintech?” I thought it had value as a round-up, if pessimistic, and the comments showed an encouraging level of interest in the topic.

But a few points in the post didn’t sound right. Example: The statement that “a recent analysis of Facebook Ads by Salesforce.com shows finance ads to have one of the lowest click-through rates at 0.2 percent.” The work is from 2013, and while CTRs on finance ads were not the best, they also were not the worst performers.

Ultimately, I decided against sending a tweet about the post but it continued to weigh on my mind.

Then Howard Lindzon, StockTwits founder and the real deal in fintech, published a response that disagreed with the TechCrunch blogger’s premise. Social has not failed in Fintech, Lindzon wrote in “What Is Taking Social Finance So Long?” It is underway.

However, Lindzon wrote, “The author fails to point out that social finance has been guarded by antiquated rules of FINRA and the SEC, and no other industry that has tried to become more social has faced more regulatory and incumbent pushback.”

This cheered me and I thought it would you, too. Take heart—even the would-be disruptors find your environment challenging. And, also like you, they’re not giving up.