Hearty congratulations and bubbly all around to the online marketing professionals who produced GetAlts.com, a microsite launched this week by Rydex|SGI to create attention for alternative investments.

I landed on the site with minimal expectations but some curiosity about the name. Compliance officers in my past would have killed “GetAlts” for any number of reasons so the first kudos goes to Rydex for delivering a name with some marketing magic.

More important, though, is the interactivity on the site. I’ve spent a bit of time on it now—long visits that the search engines will duly note and credit the site for—and haven’t read more than 200 words. Instead, I’ve been working with the interactive graphs and charts.

If you’ve been involved in the sales and marketing of mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for any length of time, you’ll recognize all of these—the checkerboard of annual asset class performance, the efficient frontier graph, etc.

Distributing these in print or on the Web as flat communications has sub-optimized the information value of these charts. Rydex is changing the game for investment product marketers by animating our tried-and-true charts and adding audio explanations. They are showing what these data-heavy charts mean.

The marquee infographic is the Modern Markets Scorecard, which of course includes alternative investments as well as the standard asset classes. This ought to be powerful linkbait for the site—given that, I’d find a way to offer links to the rest of the good stuff on GetAlts.com.

My second favorite is the Alternative Portfolio Hypotheticals. The Efficient Frontier by Decade works far better than a flat chart but even with the audio explanation, it’s still not for beginners. Beginners can take a look at the The Historical Performance and Trends of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. All are excellent, I’d add a counter to the videos to let the viewer know how much more.

Well done, Rydex, for bringing meaning to what can be dense topics. We’ve been tracking the use of visualizations for a while now and are so pleased to see an investment company add some to the mix.

Will GetAlts produce business? It’s too soon to say but Marketing has done what it can by creating something worthwhile that will generate attention. Of course, the work is far from done. Now comes the rest of what Marketing does: measurement, the correlation of attention to leads and leads to sales, the ongoing site maintenance and refreshing, promotion, etc.

After Opening Night, comes the next performance and the next…there’s no business like show business.
 

The third week after the close of the quarter? Hey, that means there might be new commentary on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web sites.

(In fact, not all sites have been updated yet, have they? But you know who you are and you know better than me what your "bottlenecks" are.)

As a speed-reading approach to reviewing what appears to be predominantly positive outlooks, I turned to Wordle.net for the visualizations below of what T. Rowe Price, First Trust Portfolios, OppenheimerFunds, BlackRock and Fidelity Investments expect in the second half of the year. Interested in others'? You can create your own in a snap.

T. Rowe Price U.S. Stock Market Quarterly Market Wrap-up

First Trust Portfolios' July 20 Monday Morning Outlook

OppenheimerFunds' Commentary

BlackRock Outlook

Fidelity Investments' Commentary

Little more than one month after our post about highlights on mutual fund and ETF Web sites (see 5 Random Highlights of Mutual Fund, ETF Sites)  we’re back with another installment, this time all about ETFs.

Exchange-traded funds offer the advantage of lower expenses. That’s a blanket statement that’s made when comparing mutual funds to ETFs. But, how does the cost of using ETFs compare to the cost of using no-load funds? This Rydex Investments trading expenses calculator considers all the variables and gets into the particulars.

Understanding the volatility of an investment is always important, but you might say that it’s critical for an investor considering leveraged index funds. To that end, Direxion Funds offers a volatility tool for 10-, 30-, 90- and 180-day rolling periods. To fully appreciate this, you have to see the graphic reset as the periods change. Note that the user can customize this list by selecting a subset of funds.

When added to an investment portfolio, an ETF typically has a specific job to do. Other sites have correlation calculators but we like PowerShares’, which licenses Smart Money functionality (in fact, it looks as if you’d have to pay for the correlation tracker on SmartMoney.com.)

We know from experience the work that goes into the development and testing of calculators on investment sites. Somebody must think they’re important to have, and we agree, maybe for a different reason. If you’re hosting a special calculator, it has the potential to serve as link bait to draw attention to your company or site.

But too often, Marketing teams err in thinking that the work is done when the site tool is launched. No. The next step is to execute on a promotion plan. A press release at launch, followed by periodic promotions/reminders and enlisting national account and Sales teams to include mentions in every capability presentation. Maybe tack on a Compliance-approved promo in the signature of all outgoing emails.

We urge you to do this for at least three reasons:

• To produce a return on the company’s investment. What opportunities were missed out on because getting the tool out the door was the top priority? Usage will justify the resource call.
• A promotion plan will build in metrics—it will guarantee that Marketing is focused on measuring the reception of this tool. You’ll want to tie promotions to milestones for usage and other analytics. If the promotion is succeeding in driving traffic to the tool and visitors are bouncing, that’s valuable information that may prompt you to pull the promotion and go back in the lab. At least you’ll know. Ultimately, you’ll want to base subsequent development of the tool and other tools on usage and feedback you're collecting and considering.
• If you thought that it was important for your site visitors to have the tool, why risk them using the site without knowing about it? I repeatedly find gems on investment management sites with no apparent Marketing or even on-site support—no press release, no callout on the sitemap, no cross-mentions on other pages. You market the work of other areas in the company, don't be shy about marketing what Marketing had a hand in creating.

Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?

It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That's why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!

A question to the managers of these sites: Are you leveraging them as the link bait you should in order to draw visitors to your site, first to that page and maybe to explore the rest of your value proposition?

1. Fidelity Investments’ Historical Yield Curve
Of all the gorgeous, exciting visualizations of data to be found on the Web today, this isn’t one of them. But it’s a true gem, very, very cool. A site visitor could spend minutes on this page learning. Marketing managers, when it’s time to hire again and you have a green marketing communications staffer, park them in front this.

2. Legg Mason’s Timeline
For a showier production (although less interactive), Legg Mason’s Learning the Lessons of Time timeline provides some perspective on the markets over time (“The Dates May Change But the Headlines Stay the Same”), as illustrated with Time magazine covers. There's also an accompanying brochure available in .pdf form.

3. Janus Funds’ Interactive Newsletter
Anybody and everybody can post the Adobe Acrobat file of an investor newsletter that was originally produced for print distribution. This newsletter takes advantage of the medium it’s delivered on—and notice the Web exclusives.

4. Russell Investments' The Economic Recovery Dashboard
Throughout the financial markets crisis, Russell Investments has been acknowledged by the media and financial advisors for the depth of its communications. The dashboard is the interactive part of its Helping Advisors microsite. This was launched at a time when others were just getting their analyses of the financial crisis out the door, making Russell’s focus on recovery look even more timely. We bet the producers wish, as we do, that its data refresh could be more frequent.

5. Barclays' iShares Exploring ETFs Video
In case we miss an opportunity to say so after Barclays sells its iShares unit, can we just say now how much we have admired Barclay iShares? From our vantage point, Barclay’s innovative marketing support of ETFs has played a significant part in the next-generation investment product vibe that ETFs have today. Check out this interactive and entertaining video. It will keep you waiting because it doesn’t load quickly but bravo on the look and the messaging. Also note that the heavily branded yet ETF educational video can be downloaded.

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

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

And now, here’s a picture of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quarterly performance communications are an ensemble production. And yet for all the quick but careful contributions made by players across an organization, the work is largely unsung. “It’s time to make the donuts”–former colleagues of mine used to invoke the old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial when referring to the tedium of periodically updating the data.

Even less satisfying is the work involved in trying to communicate relative performance-in print, the story is reduced to lots of numbers with not much impact. So, here’s a shoutout to the collaborative effort at Vanguard Voyager Services that has figured out an interactive way to tell the story every quarter.

The screenshot from a page on Vanguard’s Web site dated August 5, 2008, is pasted here to illustrate to mutual fund marketers–investors need to go to Vanguard.com for information on the products.