Visualizations

A Photo Album To Showcase Mutual Fund/ETF Adoption Of Social Media

Pat — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:03:53 -0500

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, this post sincerely flatters Kevin Dugan, a digital marketing and public relations professional whose accomplishments include the Bad Pitch blog.

I happened to hear in Monday’s For Immediate Release podcast that Dugan had created a Flickr group to track Signs of Social Media. The group’s purpose, according to the description of Dugan’s Flickr set, is to “show how retail, food and other brands are reaching out to consumers and asking them to follow on Facebook, Twitter and the like.”

Hmm… Given the pace of social media adoption in this industry, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers don’t yet need to focus on making sure that their physical presence supports their online social presence. But a Flickr group could serve a need that Rock The Boat Marketing has been wrestling with lately. In our continuous surveillance of investment companies on the Web, we often see examples we’d like to share with you but don’t have enough to say to devote a blog post to.

Flickr is the perfect site to showcase the examples in a much better way than we could do in a blog post (or on our Best Practices page, which we’ll be sunsetting. Details on that at a later date.) Oh and we use Facebook favorites and YouTube subscriptions to track firms on those two mega social sites.

Rydex Infographics Change the Game for Investment Marketing

Pat — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:58:38 -0500

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.

A Look At How Asset Managers See The Second-Half

Pat — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:39:17 -0500

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

These 3 Web Site Tools Advance the Understanding of ETFs

Pat — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:52:50 -0500

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.

5 Random Highlights of Mutual Fund, ETF Web Sites

Pat — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:13:13 -0500

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.

And Now for Your Next Heroic Act: Visualizations

Pat — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:36:05 -0600

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.

Fresh Ways to Explain the Financial Crisis

Pat — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:22:39 -0600

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.

Interactive Graph Simplifies A Complicated Competitive Message

Pat — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 23:00:00 -0500

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.