Web Sites

Site Update: Best Practices Are Out, Resources & Insights In

Pat — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0600

We’ve published some changes to the Web site today that we’d like you to know about.

The Best Practices Page RIP

Not every Web site can win awards or rank on a top Web site list. The Best Practices page, part of RockTheBoatMarketing.com since its launch, was our way of acknowledging our readers’ flashes of brilliance or functionality on the investment Web sites they direct. We imagined we’d build out the page as we continued to spot best practices. Well, we did a sorry job of refreshing the content and for the last year we’ve considered the Best Practices page the shame of the site.

Are You 'Spying' On Your Web Site Users?

Pat — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:56:11 -0500

You may have left work Friday thinking that you knew what this workweek would bring. But our guess is that a Saturday report by The Wall Street Journal will reset priorities for Web marketing teams at many companies, including some mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms.

“Marketers are spying on Internet users,” said the Journal in an extensive report on its investigation of Internet tracking technology used by the 50 most popular U.S. Web sites plus WSJ.com.

Two financial sites—Chase.com and BankofAmerica.com—were included among the 50 reviewed. According to the Journal’s “exposure index,” users of Chase’s Web site have medium exposure and Bank of America low exposure to tracking technologies such as cookies, beacons and other trackers.

“The exposure index,” the Journal explained, “gives each site a score based on eight criteria in an analysis by Privacy Choice LLC: whether the site belongs to an industry self-regulating group; whether it lets users opt out of receiving cookies; whether it is part of an advertising or tracking network; whether it shares data it collects with others; whether it promises to keep user data anonymous; how long it retains user data; and how it handles sensitive data such as financial or health information.” Read more in the Journal's explanation of its methodology.

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.

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:

Evolving Away From Site Tours And Toward ‘Likeable Objects’

Pat — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:18:25 -0500

What are you doing to prepare for changes taking place online today that affect Web content?

Despite the fact that content is the value underlying much of the social media phenomenon, the discussion about social media has largely dealt with other issues—the practices, the practitioners, the policies, the enabling technologies. Content is my first love and I’m guilty, too, for having given it short-shrift in recent posts.

The sharing of Web content has sweeping implications for the development, delivery and analytic resources you invest in your firm’s content portfolio—Marketing and non-Marketing text, images and especially charts and graphs, video, audio. And it has direct bearing on how you build out your Web site, especially those of you who are working on redesigns.

Here’s a quote from a Beyond Analytics podcast with Justin Kistner, Sr. Manager Social Media Marketing at Webtrends, that will quickly take you into future mode: "One day I'll explain to my kids about how I used to have a whole Web site to myself. And they'll say, ‘What are you talking about, Dad? You mean somebody would come to a page and it would be all you and they'd look at pages that were all you?'

“I think we're going to see a much more mashed-up form of the Web, not necessarily that we'll think about going to social sites but just that the pages we go to are mash-ups of a lot of linked data from different data sources."

We like Kistner's setup but he's not alone in saying that the future is content that's distributed, piece by piece. The future is not a perpetuation of the last 15 years and how asset managers have grown accustomed to publishing content on their Web sites. Are you factoring that in your plans?

The Fragmented Business Of Reaching Financial Advisors Online

Pat — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:24:43 -0500

Life has gotten more complicated for asset management marketers interested in reaching financial advisors online.

In the simplest scenario, financial advisors—current producers and prospects—would regularly visit asset managers’ password-protected Web sites, and marketers would be able to meaningfully interact with them there. But, this is a pipedream—as defined: "a fantastic but vain hope."

A financial advisor communications plan that puts your site at the center ignores at least two market realities:
• An increasing number of Web sites are using frequently refreshing content, peer networking and other functionality to draw the attention of advisors.
• The amount of time financial advisors spend online will not increase along with the increase in relevant content. The time they can afford to spend online is finite.

Oh and here’s a third consideration: As financial advisors step up their own content production and online marketing efforts, some do-it-yourselfers are broadening the scope of their work-related online information-gathering to include search engine optimization and other Web marketing topics. That cuts into the time they have for the asset manager’s site, too.

Asset Manager Web Sites Lose Their Flash On iPad

Pat — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:33:14 -0500

The eagerly anticipated Apple iPad just may force a rethinking of asset managers’ reliance on Adobe Flash Player as a means of delivering some much-needed life and vitality to their Web sites.

In an industry not known for its innovation online, Flash-based presentations on a home page or on a financial advisor home page have been the go-to site enhancement on mutual fund sites. Given their young age, almost all exchange-traded fund (ETF) sites employ Flash in some way.

If your site uses Flash, you're not going to be happy with how your pages display through Apple's Safari browser on the iPad.

Apple’s lack of support for Flash and other Web plug-ins on the iPad is consistent with its lack of support for Flash on the iPhone. According to Apple’s guidelines for preparing content for the iPad, only HTML5 tags can be used to deliver audio and video content in Safari. The stated purpose of HTML5, the next generation markup language for the Web and not Apple-specific, is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-ins like the Flash player from Adobe.

Below we show examples from DWS Investments and WisdomTree, but the problems prevail across industry sites viewed on the iPad.

Putnam Social Media Strategy Rooted In Content Syndication

Pat — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:13:27 -0500

Lots of interesting insights were shared in a "Social Media: Can You Afford to Miss It?" BrightTALK Webcast this morning featuring Mark McKenna, Marketing Director of Communications for Putnam Investments, and Lee S. Kowarski, kasina Principal. We encourage you to sit through it all when the replay is available, promised within 48 hours.

Below are some of the notes we took and a few observations.

McKenna credits Putnam CEO Robert L. Reynolds for being the social media “evangelist” who asked his staff to explore the possibilities. The strategy that resulted seeks to distribute Putnam content across multiple platforms away from what McKenna calls Putnam’s “dotcom site.” The social platforms include SlideShare, Scribd, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress blogs. (These links go to Putnam’s content to make it easier for you to check them out.)

Putnam believes in making content available to where people want to consume it, McKenna said. (For an elaboration on why this makes great sense, see our related post.) And it is to Putnam’s advantage because, as stated in the slide below, the goal is to “Identify influencers (bloggers, pundits, etc.) in our market and engage them with exclusive content and cross-posting.”