Social Media

A Social Network For Financial Services Professionals: SocialTurns

Pat — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:46:32 -0500

A social network for financial services professionals? With today’s launch of a membership community called SocialTurns, such an idea goes from preposterous to promising.

SocialTurns’ target members are financial services marketing, compliance, technology and sales professionals who don’t get out much. As you know, employees of regulated companies are discouraged or banned from the kinds of social interaction that most other industries are experiencing and experimenting with today.

Enter Socialware, the Austin, Texas-based social middleware technology provider that has been doing an awesome job in providing whitepapers, Webinars and other information designed to educate the industry on social media. CEO Chad Bockius takes the effort up a notch with his formation of a SocialTurns community made up of what have been social media wallflowers.

Meet 3 Wired Advisors Who Are Mastering Social Media

Pat — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:13:03 -0500

How many opportunities do mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers have to meet financial advisors? Years ago, marketers and advisors mixed at top producer events or due diligence meetings, both today largely gone by the wayside. Traveling with the wholesaler, to the extent that it continues, may be the closest you get to a few advisors.

Online, of course, there have never been more opportunities to see advisors in action. That's the value proposition of our sister site AdvisorTweets.com, where we're aggregating financial advisors' tweets 24/7. But nothing beats listening to advisors talk in complete, connected sentences minus hashtags and shortened URLs.

This week Stephanie Sammons of WiredAdvisor.com moderated a Webcast that featured three of the most wired advisors we're aware of. They provided a close-up look at independent advisors who have mastered blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MailChimp, Google Analytics, etc. in just the last two years—and point to business successes they've enjoyed as a result.

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.

And Now For A Splash Of Cold Water About Venturing Onto Other Domains

Pat — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:37:20 -0500

We consistently urge you to consider sharing your content and even limited functionality on other domains, primarily but not exclusively social networking sites. We’ve seen the effectiveness of content syndication and we stand by the recommendation.

But now seems like a good time to call your attention to the range of possibilities when venturing onto other domains. If you print and mail marketing pieces, if you advertise, if you send emails—heck, if you count on wholesalers to support a marketing campaign, you’re already familiar with the surprises/disappointments that can happen when you rely on others to deliver your message.

Always we believe that marketers should find the courage to imagine and seek to innovate. Um, but we offer the notes below—which we’re not representing to be either comprehensive or the final word—to encourage you to “hedge” your bets, for your firm and your team’s sake, when making social media plans and establishing expectations. Your message may not be sent on schedule, scale may not be possible, related data may not be yours.

When you make a plan that includes use of a site that’s out of your control, be aware of what you’re getting into. You’re affiliating with that site, in the same way that you affiliate your brand with a publication you advertise in or an email provider that you choose. In exchange for the opportunity to get in front of a larger or more engaged audience, you’re subject to your partner site’s rules and limitations.

Must-Read eBook For Investment Marketers

Pat — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:53:57 -0500

The in-box this morning delivered a link to an ebook that you must read if you’re marketing investment products. Tradestreaming and the Future of Investing is a 23-page compilation of multiple commentators’ view on “what’s happening online for investors and how investors stand to benefit.”

The ebook was put together by Zack Miller, who we know as the author of the newrulesofinvesting.com blog but who also is the managing director of a boutique investment firm. His official biography says he "embodies the nexus between asset management, equity research, and new Internet distribution technologies."

We “met” Zack on Twitter and are honored to have our few paragraphs include among commentaries from individuals representing businesses that are changing the work you do and its effectiveness.

You need to read what kaChing, SeekingAlpha, wikinvest and the others have to say and what it means for your business. We suspect that Zack’s selection of contributors and the perspectives they provide will push you and your firm to think more broadly about this ongoing online finance revolution.

How Are Asset Managers Using Twitter? This Might Help

Pat — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:44:03 -0500

One of the most common questions we get from mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers is, “What are the other firms tweeting about?” Our response has been, “That's easy—just go to the Rock The Boat Marketing Twitter list of Investment Managers and read their tweets.”

But…if you’re new to Twitter and you haven’t learned how to read the lingo, all the @s, #s and bit.lys can be off-putting.

We created an @AssetMgrs Twitter account to experiment with two ways to track asset managers' use of Twitter.

1. The Twitter Times is a Website that produces a page that's a mix of the Twitter account's tweets, links to content and links to content forwarded by friends of the account. Here's the @AssetMgrs page. The Times' introduction of the non-asset manager content from friends of friends diminishes its usefulness for our purposes here.

2. We’ve also created a paper.li account that organizes the links and #tags that are being used in tweets sent by the accounts followed by @AssetMgrs.

How Prudential Is Laying The Social Media Groundwork

Pat — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:17:13 -0500

Debbi Corej, a vice president of Compliance at Prudential and one of the members of the FINRA Social Networking Task Force, was a guest speaker at a Socialware Webinar Tuesday moderated by Chad Bockius, Socialware CEO. It was an interesting hour.

Social media is everything that doesn’t come naturally to the investment industry—that is, it’s conversational, transparent, improvisational, experimental.

In order to force the square peg into the round hole, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done behind the scenes, as Corej comments show. What follows are excerpts from our notes but not a summary of all that was said. We encourage you to listen to a replay of the entire presentation.

Corej explained Prudential’s interest in social networking and the leadership role that Compliance is taking in setting the ground rules. Her comments were about what Prudential is doing at the enterprise level as well as at the broker-dealer level. At the broker-dealer level, social media is “on hold,” she said, pending resolution of how the regulatory requirements will be complied with.

“What we are trying to do is find a way to say yes,” said Corej.

Is 'Openness' Inevitable For Asset Managers, Too?

Pat — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:25:09 -0500

For the last two weeks I’ve been toting around a copy of Charlene Li’s Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform The Way You Lead. This is a book I received an advance review copy of but would have happily paid for because I admire Li.

She’s the co-author of the 2008 book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Her firm Altimeter Group provides high-value thought leadership on digital strategies, including some research we refer to in our Rock The Boat Marketing workshops.

I was certain that I was going to love Li’s book. But I read it with the asset management industry in mind and, well, it's made me agitated about the work to be done.

Li believes that “opening up” is inevitable. “In the past, organizational leaders had the luxury of remaining ensconced in their executive suites, opening up only when they felt the need to. Today there is information leakage everywhere, with company miscues and missteps spreading all over the Internet in seconds. And all involved—from employees and customers to business partners—feel entitled to give their opinions and get upset when their ideas are not implemented…The fundamental rules that govern how relationships work are being re-written, because of easy, no cost-information sharing.”

Google's Top 1,000 List Includes 5 Investing Sites—And Why You Might Care

Pat — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:43:44 -0500

I trust that you will let me know if this blog starts sounding like a broken record. But some data became available this week that might give you added inspiration to plan for syndicating your content and exploring off your own asset manager domain.

I was checking my RSS feeds this morning when I came across the announcement that Google will now publish a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the Web by unique users as measured by Google’s AdPlanner. Huge, which is what I tweeted. Whether you’re buying online media or not, this is just interesting.

Then I thought I’d take a look at where sites in Google’s “investing” category ranked on the first list published, for the month of April 2010.

Asset Managers And Social Media—Now Via Video From ICI

Pat — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:50:34 -0500

Here's a companion to our longest blog post ever, which was coverage of the May 7 Investment Company Institute panel on social media that I was privileged to moderate plus some notes from other sessions.

This morning the ICI made a video available and now you're able to listen directly to the panel featuring: