Big News, Multiple Platforms: How PIMCO Addressed The Un-taper

Most of the time, exhortations to create asset management "newsrooms" are about content throughput and planning, overlaid on a commitment to communicate more frequently.

But make no mistake—to succeed in content marketing aimed at relevant, timely communicating, your team also needs to understand that some events require dropping everything. When the alarm sounds, you need the agility, the energy and the relationships in place to clear the decks and make the most of the opportunity.

This morning I'm admiring how PIMCO got the word out after the Fed's decision yesterday to delay tapering off on billions of dollars of bond buying.

Admittedly, it may be a lay-up to get Bill Gross on CNBC the day of a Fed announcement. And if the announcement had gone as planned, PIMCO's syndicating of commentary might have been less impressive. The firm already has significant content distribution relationships in place.

One Strategist, 2 Platforms, 2 Commentaries

Still, there must have been some hustling that went into the publication of two different Mohamed El-Erian pieces on two very different platforms—Financial Times and LinkedIn—on the day the news was made. Note the social sharing totals, which are the payoff for being on the spot when people are wondering what the heck just happened here.

In the meantime, guess what didn't get updated? PIMCO.com, which as of 10 a.m. Central had no fresh commentary related to the taper. Also and despite Gross's typical use of Twitter to make news (and he's doing that with tweets on Janet Yellen's prospects), the @PIMCO Twitter account has been used primarily for navigation, pointing followers to where the expanded PIMCO insights are.

I'd like to see the Website reflect the other-site content activity, or at least an embed of the Twitter stream. Also, the firm is missing an opportunity on LinkedIn. I wish the PIMCO company page, which has one-tenth of the followers that El-Erian has, would link to the El-Erian updates. As is, people going to the PIMCO site or LinkedIn company page (brand loyalists, ostensibly) are missing out.