Bandwagon Schmandwagon—Hooray For The Asset Manager Ice Bucket Challenge Videos

The Ice Bucket Challenge videos in support of donations to the ALS Association have been circulating all summer, and plenty of observers have copped a sort of bored-with-it-all attitude.

But I’ve gotten excited about things much less fun and engaging. I’m not going to restrain myself on this, not on the occasion of the investment management industry arriving (if characteristically late) to the ALS challenge to raise money to find a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and help fund care for those suffering with the disease.

I am a sucker for humans stepping out from behind company logos, taking part in what’s important to others—and on others’ timelines—and specifically supporting worthy causes. Although the challenge was originally presented as an alternative to donating money, I would think that donations accompanying the drenchings would be de rigueur from participants in this industry. 

Over the weekend, I came across a Boston Globe report that tracked mentions of Ice Bucket Challenges on Facebook and Twitter, including the accounts responsible for driving the most attention. It’s quite a comprehensive analysis, but I wish someone would plot the spread from industry to industry.

(If the videos were being posted to LinkedIn, this kind of a network map would be a cinch. LinkedIn is too serious for hijinks, unfortunately.)

As shown to the right, Wikipedia organizes its list of Ice Bucket Challenge participants by industries, but Financial Services let alone Investments have yet to make it on the list.  

The phenomenon, which the Boston Globe traces to starting in earnest in June on Facebook, seems to have been picking up speed in this industry in the last few weeks of August.

The first investment-related challenge video I remember seeing was from LPL CEO Mark Casady on August 8, just a few days prior to the start of the LPL Focus conference. Click through the tweet to see how much people liked it. 

Videos from several advisors, mostly from the LPL conference, followed. Yesterday, Suzanne Siracuse, the publisher of InvestmentNews, published her bucket challenge video.

Are You Listening For Challenges?

Starting on Friday, I spotted the challenges spreading in all directions, just like you’d expect of something, well, viral. With this post, I'm giving in to an urge to try to aggregate the videos created by mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms. Together they present a view of you that the rest of us rarely get to see.

First are the people-to-people challenges.

In their videos, MarketWatch’s Chuck Jaffe challenged Vanguard’s John Bogle, and ETF Trends’ Tom Lydon challenged BlackRock’s Sue Thompson (see her response below) and Jim Ross from State Street. On Friday, Morningstar CEO Joe Mansueto challenged Ariel Funds' CEO John Rogers, among others.

(Picking up social challenges is just another reason to have a social listening routine in place.)

In addition, a search of the investment manager Twitter accounts I follow (see this post for how to do an advanced search) and scan of the mutual fund and ETF Facebook and YouTube accounts surfaced videos from firms themselves.

When you publish yours (or if you already have and I missed it), shoot me an email and I’ll add it to this page. I should note that even Wikipedia is trying to manage expectations—it starts its list with this line: "This is an incomplete list that may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness." That goes for this list, too.

What's Strategic About This?

“Pat, what are you getting all worked up about? What’s strategic about this?” an exasperated friend asked me yesterday.

OK, that’s a fair question and I don’t have an on-point answer. Just a few thoughts follow.

  • Earlier I took a shot about asset managers being late to the phenomenon. But look at the Boston Globe charts. The tweeting and Facebook posting peaked on August 4 and today is August 25. The firm that’s able to rush through all the approvals, clearances and production issues to get this done is virtually showing off a capability and temperament that not all firms have. Oh and strictly speaking, if your firm or executive is issued a challenge, you have 24 hours to respond.

Related: Producing a fun video suggests that everything else is under control in your domain. If your second quarter factsheets aren’t out yet, you’re not going to make this a priority.

I’m a little late with this post, incidentally, because I’ve been waiting for State Street to post its video, which it did Friday afternoon. Check out how State Street gave early notice—starting on Tuesday that a video response from CEO Joseph Hooley was imminent. When you need to buy time, these kinds of tweets work, don't they? 

  • If your firm’s style is to be buttoned up in its presentation and robotic in its communications, people will like seeing you this way. Unpredictability can be a good thing in a relationship. As a call to action, “donate” is a refreshing break from “download.”
  • When interests align over a piece of online content, sharing usually follows. Investment company videos might expect to see their fair share of sharing from those who spot an investment executive getting drenched online and recognize this kind of activity is against type. It's impossible to resist watching no less than Mario Gabelli taking multiple buckets of water. Already, the sharing of the videos is off to a strong start.
  • Activating one’s employees to amplify the brand messaging has been a focus for many brands for most of 2014. In this space, firms continue to work on developing the policies and procedures to enable key people to create LinkedIn profiles and share firm content, for example.

When it comes to social media and regulation, the fewer words used the easier it is to share—I’d look for a sharing bump from the loved ones and business partners of all the unnamed armies standing behind the speakers in these videos.

  • These videos also give us a peek at investment personalities and brands interacting with one another or other brands. Two years ago, in my Content Highlights of 2012 post, I commented on the playful trash-talking that was taking place between the Oreo and AMC Theater Twitter accounts. At the time, I couldn’t envision how this kind of thing would take place in this industry.

Well…investment firm employees and firms have all kinds of business relationships, and it’s likely that these videos will be created in the context of those. For example, last week's DST video was created in response to a challenge from H&R Block. Again, it’s going to be near-impossible to map but it's fascinating to see the challenges materialize and from where.

Without further ado, here’s who’s throwing ice buckets at themselves as of the morning of August 25.

BlackRock, Sue Thompson (video posted on ETF Trends' YouTube page)

Mario Gabelli, Gabelli Funds 

Legg Mason Dragon Boat Team (video posted on Legg Mason Facebook page—click on image)

Pinebridge Investments 

Schooner Investment Group

With a pledge to donate $100 in the name of an advisor or the advisor’s firm if 1)they pledge to do the challenge 2)have already done the challenge or 3)will make a donation to ALS. The firm is committed to donate up to $10,000. For more see, the MFWire story. Click on the image below to go to the video.

State Street

Voya Investment Management

 

How Does Your Content Look In Flipboard?

This post isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s a tad technical and requires you to get your hands dirty by popping the hood and at least exploring how your Web pages are made.

You may be tempted to bounce now.

On the other hand, as marketers, we’re known for sweating the details. The color of the firm logo has to be exactly right when printed on a four-color press. Some of us insist on using the full product name in all instances, even when those names do go on and on. Banners on booths have been ripped down because a comma was out of place.

If you care about all of the above, you may be willing to hang in here to consider some issues affecting how some investment management content appears on Flipboard, one of the most popular news reading apps available for iOS (iPad and iPhone) and Android smartphones and tablets.

Some Background

More than 100 million people use Flipboard, and it's regularly included among the top 10 apps recommended for financial advisors. If you’re not familiar with it, this Putnam wholesaler’s explanation will bring you up to speed.

Essentially, Flipboard provides the equivalent of a magazine reading experience by extracting content from user-specified sources, including blogs and social network accounts, and presenting them in an attractive layout. It's a personal magazine, I love it.

Here’s how Marcos Weskamp, Flipboard’s head of design, described its inspiration to Mashable in 2012: “If there is one element I've always admired from what [magazines] do, it's how every element placed in the page has a specific purpose. I just love how each story flows into the other one, how your eye can surf each page by jumping from headline to headline to photo, to pull quote and into an article. In the magazine world, each page is a small composition of a larger piece, and everything is in a way trying to pull you in to read the story. You can easily scan a magazine, and the moment something interests you, just dive in.”

Flipboard makes subscribed-to content more inviting to read. Theoretically, content that someone chooses to read through Flipboard should get a lift from the enhanced display, often including a related image, headline and a text excerpt. It’s a rich opportunity for content providers to draw more readers in.

The screenshot below is of a Flipboard page, illustrating how Flipboard can showcase content linked to in a tweet. 


Due Diligence On Distributed Content

A few years ago we only dreamt that our content would grow wings and fly to distant places. Today broad distribution on platforms other than investment firms' own domains is effectively extending the reach of what you all have to say. And, kudos to you for originating and sharing content that attracts a following.  

But with this extended distribution comes the need to be ever-diligent that others’ publication of your content is working as expected. Unfortunately, the Flipboard experience isn't ideal for all content. The presentation of some mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) content is disadvantaged in Flipboard, primarily because of what’s being extracted from the HTML and displayed. 

This post isn’t meant to call anyone out. It’s impossible to describe what’s going on without showing a few examples of issues that are occurring regularly and keeping people from exploring the content. We all need to look out for one another.

Oh, and I should say, if there's an adjustment that needs to be made to the way your content is displaying, it's not going to be Flipboard that makes the change.

Some Specifics

I regularly use Flipboard to keep up with tweets from asset managers. You could do it, tooall that’s required is a one-time add of the Rock The Boat Marketing Investment Managers Twitter list or any select Twitter accounts or other social media accounts you’re interested in.

Obviously, my view is of 100% investment management content and may/may not be the way most advisors or investors see your content on Flipboard. They may view your tweets as part of an everything feed. That raises the level of competition for attention. Also, the page layouts are dynamic. An excerpt that takes up almost all of a page one time may be reduced in size the next time you open Flipboard.

However, the reading experience itself is always the samethe composition of each page to be flipped includes multiple entries of varying sizes and accompanying images, all pulled by Flipboard’s algorithm. More about the algorithm later.

The most appealing content is what gets attention within Flipboard and when you’re in the habit of flipping through, the typical user is unlikely to notice let alone dwell on anything sub-optimal. There’s too much interesting stuff "flowing" on any given page, the reader will move on.

What prompted this post is something that I happened to notice about a J.P. Morgan Funds item in Flipboard.

Campaign? Why would J.P. Morgan use campaign in a headline?

Clicking through the excerpt to the page on J.P. Morgan’s site confirmed that “campaign” wasn’t used in the headline. But a check of the HTML shows that “campaign” is in the metadata of this page and many other pages.

Noticing this about a month ago has made me hyperaware of how investment manager content is being displayed in the Flipboard app. Most of it looks great. Firms that are sharing images and graphics should be attracting lots of eyeballs, especially. But upon closer review, it's dismaying to see how widespread some issues are: Headings and text that firms don’t intend or expect to be published are often showing.

The problems seem limited to links to content on firms’ own Website pages and sometimes just sections of sites as opposed to links to posts on blogs. Links to other publishers’ content seem to be displaying just fine.  

Sometimes—in the instances of the Legg Mason and UBS examples below—the extract is simply underleveraging the value of what’s being shared. The most common issue is that Flipboard is extracting a navigational heading referring to a type of content (e.g., Insights, Press Releases, Education and News Center) as opposed to the unique title of the work.

More people will be drawn to a headline like, “Who’s Afraid of Rising Rates?” than Global Thought Leadership Document Gateway. And note that the content extracted in the Legg Mason example is the Website user agreement.


But certain USAA and Eaton Vance extracts show Website messages instead of content, and it’s apparent that something is not working as it should be. This is a lost opportunity, and then some.

Most of the examples shown here are from the iPad app. The Flipboard smartphone apps use the same algorithm so the result is the same but mitigated by the fact that the content of the tweet is more prominent. Still, if you know that someone is taking the time to catch up with his or her news and you have a screen to yourself with which to engage the reader, it’s a shame to fritter the opportunity as is happening in this @BlackRockUSDC example below.

Addressing The Issues

The issues involving the titles may be able to be easily addressed, probably depending on your content management system. (And just a general word of warning to be careful about the words included in your metadata. A few years ago, the FDA ruled that the same rules that govern pharmaceutical companies’ advertising, labeling and promotion also apply to metadata. I wouldn’t rule out this industry’s regulators coming to a similar conclusion.)  

I’ve sent a few of these other examples to Flipboard, hoping they could provide some guidance, but after a month they haven’t had much to say.

Flipboard extracts are based on their algorithms, which they don’t share information about.  

One commenter on Quora speculated, “The parsing and extraction can be done by looking for relevant HTML tags (e.g. <p>) which contain the more textual content than usual; they also analyze other aspects of the HTML such as relative position (main content tends to be more centrally located), tag affinity (article text tends not to be mixed with lots of other types of non-text tags). Some algorithms use more sophisticated techniques which require it to be trained on sample data.” 

To view how Flipboard is extracting your social updates, look for your social account using the Search capability in the upper right-hand corner of the app. 

If Flipboard is publishing “the wrong” content, you have three obvious choices: 

  • You and your IT support will need to troubleshoot and ideally address the page-specific issues.
  • If you fail to identify a way to address these, you may want to take your limitations into consideration when selecting what to tweet or otherwise share.
  • You could choose to not be bothered by how Flipboard is displaying the content. 

Lots of attention right now is being paid to the Twitter profile changes, the deadline for which is May 28.

But remember that it’s a minority of Twitter users who read your tweets on your Twitter profile page. Much more likely is that they’re consuming the content you share in the app or news reader of their choice. As important as it is to make sure that the Twitter profile aligns with your brand, my recommendation is that you take care to also check out your content where and how your firm's followers are experiencing it.