Participation, engagement, community—asset manager Web sites have a long way to go to foster these. Ultimately, in all likelihood, most companies will cede community-hosting to Facebook or other social networking sites.

But don’t be too quick to assume that you can’t deliver community-like value for your Web site visitors. Two unconnected news items took place last week that might trigger some ideas.

Example 1: It was an impressive accomplishment Thursday when the 10 billionth song was sold in the iTunes store, but it was a long time coming. And ultimately that story was about Apple’s innovation.

Concurrently, Apple released a list of the top 25 most-downloaded songs. To us, this was the more interesting announcement. Each of us knows what we bought from iTunes, but Apple aggregated all of those 99-cent (mostly) purchases and told us the rank order of what we all bought.

Example 2: Earlier in the week we were intrigued by the basis of an InvestmentNews.com article. “The ETFs financial advisers can't get enough of” wasn’t based on sales, performance or even survey data.

Rather, it was a list of the top 10 ETFs advisors researched most in 2009 using the Morningstar Advisor Workstation (and provided by Morningstar). Morningstar, Investment News and ETFTrends.com (which provided an expanded analysis of each ETF on its site) all saw the information value in advisor searches. (Are the searches predictive? We wished one of the media sites compared the top-searched to top-selling.)

Here again, users of the Advisor Workstation knew what they were looking for last year. But Morningstar was in a unique position to rank and share what all financial advisors were looking for.

By now you’re getting the idea, right? What insights could you share, externally and internally, about your customers’ use of your Web site and other digital products? Most viewed, most downloaded, most emailed, most ordered, most searched content all are possibilities for you to consider publishing.

Common on many sites today, most popular or trending lists are few and far between on asset manager sites. We’ve seen them on Vanguard’s site (list shown at left) and behind the password on BlackRock’s financial professionals site. If you’re aware of others, please fill us in by commenting below.

Adding such lists to your site will provide a few benefits. You’ll see that many users use them as navigation, more so than your “What’s New” listings.

By definition, “What’s New” is driven by your firm’s timetable. With their views, your users are pointing to valuable content for others who follow them (and if you haven't been paying attention to your Web analytics, there may be some surprises for you). Publishing a list of “Most Popular” content is as close as your FINRA-regulated site may get to users’ endorsements.

But don’t stop at just publishing the lists online. You can create content based on your users’ content consumption trends and preferences, the more segmented the more valuable.

As unformed as it may be, there is a community of users on your site daily. What would it take for you to begin representing their collective interests to one another and to your firm?

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

App Turns Phone Into An ATM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mint.com Bases Cross-Selling On Potential Savings

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

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

Social Media Stimulates Trading

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

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

“That wouldn’t apply to us because… [wait for it] we’re in a regulated industry.”

There’s an underlying current in asset management marketing that trends that affect other industries don’t apply here. It’s an illusion that is almost never true online—what’s affecting other Web sites is probably affecting your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) site, too.

We’ve written about how Facebook and other social networking sites are gaining at the expense of asset manager and other destination Web sites.

But there was a report this week about Facebook’s influence in driving Web site traffic that merits attention. Compete.com data cited by the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday suggests that Facebook is now a more important traffic driver than Google.

“Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites,” the Chronicle reported.

Other types of sites even including investment manager sites? Yes, according to Compete.

Here’s what we found when we took a look at the Compete referrer data for the top 30 (based on assets under management) mutual fund and ETF sites for January 2010. Facebook.com appears on Compete’s lists of the top five traffic referrers to five investment company sites: AmericanFunds.com, DavisFunds.com, Dimensional Fund Advisors (Dfaus.com), Fidelity.com and GMO.com.

 Facebook Ranks Among Top Referrers to 5 Investment Company Sites (January 2010)

Source: Compete.com

The sites experience very different total traffic levels. Given the Davis Funds' site relatively low traffic and few (24) sites referring traffic to it, Facebook's appearance as a top referrer in a given month might be easy to understand.

But Fidelity and American Funds are industry behemoths and, try as we might to produce alternative explanations, there’s no denying Facebook’s breakthrough as a top referrer. Fidelity.com is the 157th largest site, according to Compete. More than 12,000 sites refer traffic to it and yet Facebook catapulted over those to rank as the fifth top referrer in January? Fidelity's self-directed investors could help explain the popularity and influence of Facebook. But a heavy retail bias doesn't help explain Facebook traffic to American Funds, sold exclusively through financial advisors.

The implications of Facebook supplanting Google as a top traffic driver is being contemplated across all industries this week. We invite you to provide your own interpretation and comments below. Here are a few of our thoughts:

Your Referrer Data

The San Francisco Chronicle report was based on a single month's data (December 2009), and this post is based on one month, as well. One month is what Compete makes available at no charge. In fact, if you follow the links included in the table above to the Compete profiles after the January 2010 data rolls off, you may see a different result.

It's possible that other fund companies are getting more Facebook traffic in absolute numbers but, because their other referrers are more dominant, Facebook is lower on their list of referrers.

Site traffic is reported using multiple measurement methods. Compete reports clickstream data based on a 2 million-member panel of U.S. Internet users. It’s common for Compete, comScore and Experian Hitwise and Quantcast data to be at odds.

Bottomline: The availability of the Compete data makes this comparative analysis possible. If you’re responsible for digital strategy at your firm, you need to dig into your own Web analytics to better understand where your Facebook traffic is coming from, where it’s going and its quality.

Facebook Links To Investment Sites

Of the five firms, Fidelity has a Facebook page with little more than 1,000 fans, and American Funds has a page for members of its Web group only. We couldn’t determine whether advertising links from Facebook count as referred traffic by Compete. Even if it is, our guess is that only Fidelity would be a likely aggressive Facebook advertiser of these five.

In the absence of robust Facebook pages or ads, that must mean that the Facebook traffic is coming from links posted in the Notes areas. Amazing, almost incredible. Congratulations to these companies for producing content that others think enough to link to. To get a sense of it, do a dfaus site:facebook.com search on Google and see the links from Facebook pages of advisory firms. Institutional firms that have thought that social media is just for retail investors might want to think again.

Forget Search To Focus on Facebook Optimization?

Some have interpreted the ascent of Facebook as a traffic driver, often accompanied by a decline in Google-referred traffic, to mean that people are no longer searching and increasingly prefer to discover content socially. Such a shift in Web user behavior would have significant implications for search engine optimization (SEO) and search marketing. That’s true in particular for digital strategy planning in this business, where much SEO remains to be done.

We agree with this post on Search Engine Land that aims to put the Facebook findings in context. The work involved in thinking about how searchers frame their information requests and the measurement and analysis of the effectiveness of various keyword phrases can result in deeper customer and prospect understanding. Please don’t think that you can skip the work now that Facebook users are recommending investment site content—especially if these recommendations are not as a result of a deliberate strategy of yours.

Facebook—and its 400 million users—is awesome. But maintaining a Facebook presence requires a well-considered strategy and ongoing resources. In an October 2009 post, Facebook: Don’t Expect A Lot of Warm And Fuzzy, we noted a certain crankiness toward investment companies by Facebook commenters. (We saw the same early this month in the early reactions to Fidelity’s Be The Green Line YouTube contest.)

But while your Facebook page may be on a backburner pending strategy, policy and resources, we suggest you take this January 2010 referrer data as inspiration to learn more about Facebook. Your firm doesn’t need a fan page in order for you to explore more about how investors are interacting with your content and how they may want to interact with you. 

Have your repeated requests to speed up your Web site been falling on deaf ears? There’s a change in the works that might give you the argument you need for IT to move site optimization up to the top of the priority list.

Watch this video from Google on the global benefits of a faster Web and then let’s consider how their advocacy on this could affect the success of your firm’s digital marketing strategy.

You’ve figured it out already, right? Of course, if Google wants the Web to be faster, the search engine is going to reward fast sites and slow sites can expect to sink in search engine rankings.

This isn't an arbitrary position on Google's part. Faster sites drive visitor satisfaction and conversions—they’re a win-win for site provider and user.

To get a rough idea of how your site will fare as search engine attention is directed to site speed, go to WebPageTest.org and run a test.

Below is a video of the test we ran. But first here’s some background. In a blog post a little more than a year ago, we used Google Trends to note slowly building interest in the search term "IRAs" toward the end of each year. But search interest was off toward the end of 2008, prompting us to suggest a compressed opportunity in the first four months of 2009 leading up to April 15.

That turned out to be true, as you can see in the graph below.

It’s essential to be discoverable by searchers when they’re looking, especially when the search term is important to your business. To illustrate the importance of winning speed races on key search terms, we're using an updated search term ("rollover IRA") and comparing the site speed results of three pages that currently rank on Page 1 of Google’s results.

They are pages on rollover IRAs from WellsFargo.com, Schwab.com and SmartMoney.com. To round out the quartet, we added a landing page from T. Rowe Price.com, a pay-per-click advertiser on the term.

We'll tell you what you're about to see and then watch for it in the video.

The results:

1. Wells Fargo (bottom right quadrant in the video) was on top of our Search results and fastest to load at 4.5 seconds.
2. T. Rowe Price (upper left), the pay-per-click advertiser, comes in second. Page speed is already a factor in Google AdWords quality score. We expected T. Rowe to do well and, in fact, it loads in 6.5 seconds.
3. Loading at a slow 9.5 seconds is Schwab (bottom left).
4. SmartMoney, which we included because publishers’ content-rich sites are among your toughest search competition, takes 14.5 seconds to fully load.

Is your site as fast as it needs to be to win rankings on Google? Our recommendation: Get with your IT partners and make sure they're aware of what's happening. (Maybe do a few competitor comparisons of your own.) To quickly bring them up to speed, refer them to WebPageTest.org. Also, Google maintains an excellent site on Web performance resources. Oh and better hurry!

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

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

Broad Marketing Trends

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

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

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

Email And Contact Strategy

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

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

Source: 2010 Marketing Trends Survey, StrongMail

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

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

Brand

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

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

Online Creative

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

Social Media

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

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

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

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

There’s a certain poetry to what we’re doing today.

Six months ago we created a social media directory to track the adoption by the asset management industry (including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds [ETFs], broker-dealers, financial advisors and investment media) of social media.

Since that time, two of the listings—mutual funds and ETFs using Twitter and financial advisors using Twitter—drew significant traffic from search engines, a welcome boost for this barely one-year-old site. (Notwithstanding our post last week and all other things being equal, we’d prefer to see site traffic climb, too.)

But today we’re redirecting that traffic to other sites where we think the searchers will be better served. Because this is a digital strategy site, we thought our readers might be interested in some of the details. And maybe our rationale will give you some ideas.

Let’s take the listing of mutual funds and ETFs on Twitter first. The following investment managers have Twitter accounts (others are out there but we know these to be bona fide):

• AdvisorShares
• American Century Investments
• Black Rock Funds
• Calvert Investments
• Fidelity Investments
• MFS
• Nuveen Investments
• Pimco, whose two accounts include one from a talent scout with a Pimco email address
• Putnam Investments, whose two accounts include one for Putnam CEO Robert L. Reynolds (see a related post)
• RidgeWorth Funds
• RoyceFunds
• Russell Investments
• TIAA-CREF
• Virtus Investment

So, it’s not as if maintaining this list was fatiguing, but the list did nothing more than link to each Twitter account page. If you were interested in hearing about new accounts, you’d have to remind yourself to check back here. That's not very social media-ish.

The Twitter list capability announced last month improves on that experience. If you're not familiar, here's a video that explains how Twitter lists work. Could they support something you're doing—even if the lists you create need to be private for now?

We’ve added all of the mutual fund and ETF Twitter accounts to a RockTheBoatMKTG (the name of our Twitter account) Investment Managers Twitter list.  Review the tweets, follow all on the list or follow some. Most important, as we discover new accounts, we’ll update the list and, if you’re following it, you’ll be updated too—no need to check back.

What won’t show are the two accounts—BlackRock and RidgeWorth—that are protecting their updates. But overall, Twitter lists provide a better experience.

Rock The Boat Marketing loses about 5% of its search engine traffic on keywords related to this topic as well as the opportunity to further engage what would be relevant traffic for the site. But we believe that if we love you (and we do) we must let you go—to maybe return to us forever? Oh and we stand to gain in awareness as owner of the Twitter list.

A much larger chunk of search engine traffic to this site (22%) has come from keyword searches of random financial advisor names plus Twitter. Clicking on the result and coming to RTB can’t have been a good experience for the searcher if they were looking for a financial advisor. There’s nothing for those searchers to see on this site except for the name that drew them here. In fact, those searches were the largest single source of our single-page views and inflated our bounce rate.

Starting today, we’re redirecting those searches to a better place: AdvisorTweets.com, our sister site (read all about it here). As we reported on its blog earlier this week, the average visit on AdvisorTweets lasts 6:30 minutes. People seem to be finding the tweet aggregation (trending themes, tags, shared links), search (of tweets, links and profiles) and history of value.

At the same time we’ve created three Twitter lists:

• All AdvisorTweets accounts
• Certified Financial Planner (CFP) accounts only
• Registered Investment Advisors (RIA) accounts only

AdvisorTweets and Twitter lists provide two different experiences, both of which we’d like to support better than a search that lands on Rock The Boat Marketing.com. It’s all good.

Together, these moves essentially gut our social media directory. What’s left:

• Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Social Media This is a wide open category with unlimited possibilities and, of course, we’re still interested. To date there’s a handful of investment managers that have presence on even the largest social media sites. Looks like this will be a slow-building page.
• Financial Advisors Using Social Media Financial advisor/investor matching sites are doing a comprehensive job of aggregating advisor blogs, Facebook pages, etc. now—see FinanceAnswers.com, for one example. We won’t continue to maintain this page, re-directing instead to AdvisorTweets.
• Broker-Dealers Using Social Media Again, we’re still interested but nobody here but us crickets.
• Investment Media Using Twitter A November 7 update: Upon further reflection, we're re-directing this page, too. This RockTheBoatMKTG Investment Media Twitter List includes the accounts on our previous page, as well as a few more.

To make a long story short, we’re leaving the remaining social media directory pages out there but without fanfare. In place of the Social Media Directory promotion on our home page, we’ve added a short plug about our Introduction to Social Media for Asset Managers workshop.

What will we do to replace the lost traffic to the site? We are in the RTB Content Labs as we speak. We'll think of something...

If you're responsible for developing or marketing a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web site, you may have been in a predicament for at least the last year.

You're aware of the Web-wide trend toward user participation. People want to talk (the basis for social media) and not just on sites created for the purpose of fostering community and networking. They want to talk to one another, and in context with what brands are saying. An obvious example is CNN's sharing its TV screen with people commenting using Twitter.

The challenge for you, of course, has been how to address your audience's yearning to participate. Social bookmarking tools and forward-to-a-friend features are becoming commonplace on some of the industry's progressive Web sites. But to date, commenting has represented an unacceptable risk for, I'm estimating here, 99.2% of asset management companies. Vanguard and Navellier blogs are exceptions that we're aware of.

Should your site invite commenting? What's the upside versus the known downside? While that promised to be a debate that could rage on for years within investment companies, Google short-circuited it last week with its launch of Google Sidewiki.

Google Sidewiki is a feature of Google Toolbar, available now for Firefox and Internet Explorer users with plans underway for Google Chrome. Essentially, those who download the Google toolbar can now comment on your site, and those comments show up as a browser sidebar. 

Ready or not, you are now publishing a site with comments riding alongside.

This is yet another illustration that brands cannot control what's being said about them. Not what and not where and not even asset manager brands.

Several commenters are up in arms about the Sidewiki. Bloggers are upset by Google's hijacking comments that might otherwise be made on their blog posts. Brands have the same issues your company will.

We think you have three near-term moves to make:
1. If you haven't already, go to Google Webmaster Tools and claim your site. Once you go through the process to be verified as the manager of the site, the Google tools will help you understand how Google is indexing the site.

Specifically for the purposes of Sidewiki, you'll be able to claim the top spot on the Comments sidebar for a short welcome message. Whatever you say will have to be Compliance-approved, naturally, but we recommend fast-tracking that.

2. You're going to want to tell others about this. If your company is just vaguely aware that there's "chatter" on the Web, it's your role to show executive management, Compliance and whoever else that social media has come to your front door (i.e., home page and all other pages) and will be squatting there. It's time to get serious and organized about listening and, ideally, engaging.

3. Much less straightforward and not at all automated is the monitoring of the Sidewiki comments. If there are comments on your page, the icons in the upper left-hand corner (assuming that you've enabled the Google toolbar) will show. In the screenshot below, the arrow and balloon icons indicate that there is at least one comment on our home page.

An excellent MarketingProfs Daily Fix review of Sidewiki drew several passionate comments, including this one from Ike Pigott, who wrote, "The single WORST sin here is that those Sidewiki comments are not RSS-enabled. There is NO way to monitor without physically refreshing the page, and even then with the comments moving up or down based on voting, how do you know you've read everything? [For information about the algorithms Google uses to order the comments, see this article.] 

"This is a fiasco," Pigott concludes, "and I feel sorry for the first big business that gets hammered by Sidewiki in a crisis. It's too flat, too wild, and not able to be monitored."

Will there be wholesale adoption of Sidewiki? In fact, the ideal scenario might be that all Web site annotation would be done with this single application, enabling you and others to focus on it. What's likelier is the opposite scenario: Sidewiki will be matched by the introduction of multiple similar solutions for posting and distributing comments.

Think of all that can be learned and acted upon once you have some real-live dialogue happening with customers, prospects and the general public. Your work is getting even more interesting! ...And a lot more complicated.
 

Our Twitter account @AdvisorTweets is back, and AdvisorTweets.com, launched last week, is back up and running.

The private part of me was arguing hard in favor of announcing @AdvisorTweets’ return and leaving it at that, no explanation required. The case of the launch, mysterious disappearance and return of a Twitter account feeding a proof-of-concept Web site is hardly worth bothering anyone about. (For background, see my sad Saturday post.)

“But if you, a small business, can’t explain what went wrong and why, how can you advocate transparency to your large, global clients?” asked the part of me that tries not to be a hypocrite.

In fact, there are quite a few insights from the weekend’s experience. Below are five that might be of some value to you.

1. Password management
Twitter Monday confirmed that the account was deleted “but by somebody on your end.” Deep thanks to my Twitter buddy who then instantly restored it but…ouch!

What we did wrong:
I can say categorically that I did not delete the account. If I’d said that about my @RockTheBoatMKTG account that would be the end of the story because I’m the only one with the password. @AdvisorTweets, though, was a group project involving many parties. And, last Friday a surge of traffic to the new site required an immediate server shift. In the heat of that I emailed the password to a support queue at the company that hosts the site. I know, I know.

Who deleted the password? When the answer is, “It could have been anybody,” you know you need to better safeguard your password. (And whoever deleted it, did it accidentally, I do believe.)

2. Dependency
Before we knew we were responsible for the problem, we ran through a list of reasons Twitter could have eliminated us. Maybe we were hitting Twitter with both servers during the server transition, something that would have exceeded Twitter’s allowable limits and aroused suspicion. Were we too aggressive in our following of advisor accounts? Despite assurances to the contrary, was it feasible that Twitter didn’t like our aggregation model?

No matter which way we looked at it, there was one cold, hard, inescapable fact: That we were fully invested in a Web site on which Twitter could flip the off switch.

Insight: You may not be thinking of developing a Twitter application, but remember this cautionary if you find yourself drawn to a technology solution or vendor who has no direct competition. In the event of whatever, having a Plan B, C and D can keep you operating.

3. Redundancy
When your Twitter account is gone, your list of followers, your direct messages, your tweets are all gone. If you archive your tweets, as many in financial services are required to do, your archive will minimize the loss.

What we did right: We’d been compiling our list of Twitter-using financial advisors for the last several months by following them with our @RockTheBoatMKTG account so we had a redundant list. Also, we saved all Twitter email confirmations of @AdvisorTweets followers.

What more could have been done: The value of your list of followers you've amassed over time can’t be overestimated. One way to protect the value is to ask your Twitter followers to connect with you on LinkedIn. Christopher Penn of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast recommends periodically sending a tweet: “Are we connected on LinkedIn?” LinkedIn connections, including their email addresses, can be exported to your database. That way they're yours.

4. Communication
What we did right: When we discovered that the Twitter account was gone Saturday morning, we knew we needed to communicate about it. Even though we’d lost the ability to tweet to the @AdvisorTweets followers, we still were able to update the blog. Later in the day, the blog was emailed to our handful of subscribers. We also published the post on RockTheBoatMarketing.com and sent out a @RockTheBoatMKTG tweet.

As the day wore on, visitors to the site first saw stale tweets and then nothing in the center of the page. We could have redirected traffic heading to Advisortweets.com to the blog but we decided not to. We wanted the site to be available in case Twitter would in fact be researching what we were up to. Yes, we sacrificed the user experience for a Twitter review. That was a decision we planned to review Monday.

What we did wrong: We posted virtually the same content on both blogs. Search engines don’t like and don’t trust duplicate content. We’re posting this on just the Rock The Boat blog, reasoning that visitors to this site are likely to be more interested in the gory details than users of AdvisorTweets.

5. Promotion
What we did right: We know better than to promote a new Web site too soon. In order to populate AdvisorTweets, though, we needed to start following advisors and wanted to take that opportunity to introduce them to AdvisorTweets. So, we published a post on this site, sent out a single tweet on the post and mentioned it on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Late in the evening, to spare @RockTheBoatMKTG followers from having to see personal messages, we notified individual advisors that we were publishing their tweets on AdvisorTweets.com

Insight: By definition, social media promotions enlist others in spreading your marketing message. Our early traffic to Advisor Tweets was driven largely by the forwarding of the original tweet and by others who jumped on board and wrote their own endorsements. That’s a powerful adrenaline rush when everything’s working. It’s a source of added mortification when it’s not. Nobody wants to embarrass their social network.

More? Yes, there are a few more steps we’re rethinking in the wake of this debacle. But we believe we’re in a good place now and hope to have delivered a Web site that you can count on being available more often than not.

That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—that’s from the Polyanna part of me.

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.
 

Are you trying to reach financial advisors? Search and financial news sites are the most frequently used media channels by independent financial advisors, according to a study done by the Financial Planners Association (FPA) and Google.

“This is where you are going to reach not only the widest number of advisors but you’re also going to be able to reach them repetitively and with a frequency of exposure,” says Becca King, Research Manager, in a fascinating 18-minute video Google Business posted on YouTube this week.

Mutual fund, exchange-traded fund (ETF) and other marketers have long wondered where advisors spend their business time online and what works when marketing to them. Advisors are known to rely on quantitative screening when selecting investment products; this work sheds light on the qualitative research they do.

An interesting side comment is the report that corporate Web sites are more helpful to the small percentage of financial advisors who use them. But, the 518 advisors surveyed said it’s the search and financial news sites that attract them, and they find the sites plenty helpful.

(Maybe it's because we agree that we don't take particular offense to the conclusion of this Google-co-sponsored study: “Financial advisors are prompted to action by advertising.”)

More is said in the audio than is presented in the slides shown. For example, Jack Krawczyk, Google Industry Marketing Manager, listed the following five considerations for advisors when first being introduced via advertising to a product:
• Getting information presented in an attention-getting manner
• Brand or product image
• Believability of the messaging and product claim
• Technical information
• Application or strategy of the product

When making a final product decision, these are the four most important criteria, according to the study:
• Investment philosophy and process
• Company image and reputation
• Research and white papers
• Value and service

You might not agree with some of the recommendations regarding strategies to take advantage of the research—e.g., does technical information belong in advertising messages and if it did, wouldn’t it come with too much disclosure? Also, far be it from us to debate the FPA but we find the comments about financial advisors being technologically challenged at least three years out of date.

Overall, the video and work are definitely worth a look.

For more on asset management companies’ use of paid search, see our post Fidelity, iShares, T. Rowe Price Most Aggressive In Paid Search