LinkedIn Game-Changer: Putnam Empowers Sales Team To Interact

Putnam Investments has taken the lead in changing the way that asset managers use the LinkedIn platform.

At a time when most other American businesses and their employees have seized upon the unique connection and networking opportunities afforded by LinkedIn’s massive database, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms have been holding back.

In the extreme, firms have prohibited even their most senior employees from identifying their place of work, as shown in a screenshot taken this week of a slice of an asset management executive's LinkedIn profile. This is not an exception—I count at least five firms that maintain a no-specifics policy related to securities licensed staff. In addition to requiring their employees to go incognito, many firms block workplace access to LinkedIn.com itself.

It’s common, however, for firms to allow limited participation—employees are permitted to create profiles that include specifics on the name of the company they work for and they're allowed to connect with others. And, many firms use LinkedIn Company Pages as another means of distributing content and posting job openings.

The significant missing piece has been the authority to interact within the LinkedIn environment, a capability that sales professionals instinctively want to leverage. This is what Putnam believes that they're making asset management social media history with. (I think they're first, too, but if you know different, please use the Comments space below to advise.) 

Pre-approved Or Wholesaler-Authored

Having conducted a successful 10-week pilot in the beginning of the year, Putnam recently empowered its 100-plus Sales team (including wholesalers, internals, national account and key marketing leaders) to post updates to LinkedIn. Individuals can choose to post pre-approved content from a library or write their own and submit it to a custom portal for Compliance approval. Responses to reactions made to the updates also flow through the same system.

Here’s a screenshot of an excerpt of the profile page belonging to Jerry Boucher, a Putnam internal wholesaler whose recent update was liked by six people. 

OK, if you’re a digital marketer working at an asset management firm, your head is exploding right about now, right? You know that this is the most powerful use of LinkedIn. No doubt you’ve been advocating for this at your own firm. 

A Channel To Themselves

Below are some details on how Putnam got there first, generously provided by Putnam Social Media Director Jayme Lacour and Marc Quintavalle, social media and brand marketing strategist. But here’s what I believe is the primary advantage that Putnam wholesalers have today over every other firm.

Like most social platforms, LinkedIn is best used one-on-one. LinkedIn’s marketing group has been aggressive especially lately in packaging awareness opportunities for companies and thought leaders. (It looks as if BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink had a successful debut with his first Influencer post on Tuesday, for example.)

But what do individual users—and especially financial advisors for whom LinkedIn is the #1 platform—most value? Information about their networks. Network updates are rich with customer and business acquisition opportunities for advisors. 

Advisors can see the network updates on the home pages of their LinkedIn profiles but the fact that updates are available via RSS feeds means that they can be monitored—and are—via a multitude of desktop, iPad and smartphone tools. By contrast, company updates are not part of the same stream, are no longer made available as RSS feeds and can be read only from within LinkedIn.

In other words, Putnam’s Sales updates are a natural part of the update stream that financial advisors most care about. Putnam today is the lone asset manager using a channel capable of commanding more advisor attention than the email blast, the wholesaler visit or the timely tweet.

By the way, from my perspective, the industry could do worse than follow a trail being blazed by Putnam. It's not likely to abuse its access, coaching its wholesalers to post no more than a few times a week. The updates are written in an authentic, non-corporate voice. They're relevant and appropriate for the platform. 

As Lacour says, "We understand the kind of content that works on a social level. It can be very difficult to go from very broad themes to the very specific, in terms of what will work as a LinkedIn update. You have to think about what kinds of interesting bits can be pulled out."

The IT And Compliance Resource Toll

Lacour says the initiative came together quickly, while noting that the foundation has been built over the last few years. Putnam social media, which is delivered via Putnam’s broker-dealer organization, includes the outstanding AdvisorTech Tips blog that features demonstration videos by wholesalers, and four other blogs on which Putnam has cut its content production chops. At the same time, wholesalers have been building up their LinkedIn networks and via on-site visits encouraging advisors to do the same.

“They’ve been talking the talk for a long time, and now they can walk the walk,” says Lacour.

Lacour says the largest challenge was the technology required to support a dispersed sales team while meeting both the business’ content and Compliance archiving, recordkeeping and supervisory requirements. Putnam declines to identify the firm it partnered with to build the technology solution.

Make no mistake: An undertaking like this has the potential to represent a significant additional burden on Compliance and IT resources, which traditionally provide sporadic versus continuous support to individual wholesalers. To date, Lacour estimates, less than 10% of the Sales team is creating their own updates to Compliance to review. Turnaround has not been an issue.

"Our Compliance team is 24/7, just like the rest of us," he says.

The more common scenario is that a wholesaler will have an idea or some color or context they want to provide in an update. They might tell Lacour, ‘Hey, this piece of content that you’re ignoring is important to us in the field,’ and we’ll make an adjustment” to the content in the pre-approved library.

Endgame: Lead Capture

The immediate desired effect of 100 Putnam employees posting updates to their networks is amplification. The content provided by a Putnam wholesaler produces an average of 3,500 impressions, 10 clicks on content and one interaction—a like or a comment. Such exposure benefits the individual wholesaler.

In the six weeks since the program has been up and running, the enterprise has benefited from a doubling in Putnam site traffic referred by LinkedIn. “I did not expect that to happen for a long time,” Lacour says.

But, the endgame is lead capture and not exposure, as Lacour confirms. When a LinkedIn member likes, comments or shares a piece of content provided by a wholesaler, the middleware provider captures the act using the LinkedIn API. If the reactor is qualified, the name is added to a CRM lead source funnel for the wholesaler.

The person who clicks on a link to Putnam Website content is tracked, as well. This can be especially useful in the case of an advisor who comes from an identifiable LinkedIn account, accesses the cookied Putnam Website and runs a fund comparison using Putnam’s registration-required FundVisualizer tool. Ding ding ding. All suggest bona fide engagement worthy of a follow-up.

What's next on Putnam's roadmap? Twitter empowerment for the Sales team.

When I learned that Putnam delivered on an initiative that other firms are also known to be working on, I reached out to Blane Warrene, whose social media archiving business was acquired by RegEd last September. Now RegEd senior vice president of customer communications, Blane is my go-to source on archiving-related issues, and I had some questions regarding the technology hurdles as well as advisors’ use of LinkedIn. He responded with so much data and insight on advisor use of social media platforms that I’ll be devoting a separate blog post to it next week. Think of it as a Part 2 to this post.

Using Social Media To Get The Marketing Job Done

Wow. I had an interaction at the recent Morningstar conference that was reminiscent of something I used to experience all the time back in the day.

“Um, what’s this?” I innocently asked, picking up an asset manager-branded—well, there’s no sugarcoating it—parasol.

“Oh, you know...Marketing,” said the Sales guy manning the booth and rolling his eyes at the same time.

Right. I remember those days when Marketing Communications' ability to contribute was so limited that we brainstormed giveaways, fretted over the size of the logo on the tchotchkes and then worried about their safe and timely passage from wherever they were manufactured overseas. It was a kind of work, we were doing what we could and yet I think we all knew that the results were lame. That kind of marketing didn’t mean much to Sales or to the business.

Benefit #1: Marketing Plays A Relevant Role

Nowadays my Sales interactions typically involve Sales and account teams eagerly collaborating with Marketing. Digital distribution enables us to communicate quickly, not in real-time but getting there. Far beyond the (still required) quarterly retrospectives, these new communications typically involve shedding light on something that financial advisors care about going forward, and need to understand now.

And, social media is increasingly being employed to amplify. Thanks to the heightened relevance of the content and broader visibility of it, asset managers' perspectives and visuals are making their way into online discussions (here's just one example) like never before.

The powerful combination of content marketing and social media is significantly elevating the return on firms' investment in marketing and its marketers. 

Displaying the generosity that often accompanies a good year, Sales has been super-complimentary to Marketing for “getting the word out.” Ah, it feels good to be pulling your own weight, doesn’t it? It’s something the parasol producer has yet to experience but, I’m optimistic, will.

That's my personal view of how mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) businesses have benefited by adopting contemporary communication methods. (And, your thoughts are always welcomed!)

But check out the infographic below for a snapshot of the top benefits of social media marketing achieved in 2013, as described by 3,000 marketers from all industries. The infographic was created by Wishpond based on the must-read 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, the fifth annual published by the Social Media Examiner.

More exposure, better marketplace intelligence, higher search engine rankings and Sales’ respect and affection—what’s not to love about how social media can help business?

How To Track The Content That's Shared Via Email

If you had to guess, where do you think most sharing of asset management-created content takes place—on social networks or via email and other non-social means?

My guess (and yours, too, I’ll bet): Our enthusiasm for social media notwithstanding, most of your content is shared via email, instant messages and message boards, etc. Email, in particular, is the most widely used communication channel and one where the sender can control both context and, to some extent, audience. 

The sharing that takes place via non-public (and believed to be un-measureable) exchanges was dubbed “Dark Social” by Atlantic Senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal last fall (an idea so interesting that it was one of my “20 Content Highlights To Remember From 2012.")

It’s especially germane to this business where, like fund company products, the vast majority of mutual fund and ETF content is distributed not directly by fund companies but by intermediaries. Wouldn’t you like to know the percentage of your site traffic that comes from individuals sharing links in emails? Or even the site content that's being called out in emails from financial advisors to their clients and prospects, for example? 

There is a way to get a handle on this, as identified by a few blog posts I’ve been reading lately, the highlights of which I want to share with you.

Direct Traffic Unbundled

When a financial advisor (or somebody else) includes a link to a page on your site in an email and the receiver of the email clicks on the link, that traffic is today being counted by your Web analytics. But in all likelihood, it’s being reported as direct traffic, and that’s what needs to be more closely examined.

For insights into the content that’s being shared—with sharing serving as a measure of the value of the content that you’re creating—you need to dig a little deeper into what's being attributed as direct traffic.

The classic definition of direct traffic is traffic that comes directly to your site. The assumption is that the visitor typed the URL into the browser or used a previously set bookmark. But, take a look at the specific pages for which direct traffic is reported as the referrer to your site.

Is it realistic to expect that someone arrived at your site by typing every character of those long, hairy URLs that many fund companies are unfortunately burdened with?

Example: https://performance.yourdomain.com/web/yourfundcompany/products-performance/mutual-fund-details/details/19765J624/mutual+funds/Intermediate+Municipal+Bond+Fund+A/Class+A

Probably not. The link to this page was either copied and pasted into an email or other communication (more likely) or bookmarked (less likely).

While it will be far from exact, it’s relatively easy to identify Website traffic that is sourced by email and other Dark Social sources. You just need to segregate the traffic that went straight to your home page—that’s probably the true direct traffic—from the traffic that went to pages deep in your site.

This can be done with any Web analytics package.

Segment Using Google Analytics

Here are two options for doing it with Google Analytics.

If you want to assume that all traffic that came directly to pages other than the home page was referred by Dark Social sources, click on this link while signed into Google Analytics.

You’ll see a page with the image below. Choose your profile (if you have access to more than one) and then select Create.

You’ll then be taken into Google Analytics, where you’ll see the image below. Save the segment and you’ll be able to view Dark Social as one of your available custom segments.

For a more narrow approach, click on this link as provided by the Gravity Search Marketing blog. It filters the home page and any subfolder with four characters in it. (This uses regular expressions—if you're not familiar, see the primer ebook I came across in March.) 

As noted in the post, if you promote marketing URLs with subfolders (such as www.yourdomain.com/micrositename), then you’ll want to refine this by excluding those from the Dark Social segment, too. You might also want to further refine by excluding product pages or by including only types of content (e.g., investment commentary or blog posts.)

This analysis is worth doing. Based on what I’m seeing in the analytics profiles I am privy to, your Dark Social traffic could represent anywhere from 10% to 30% of your overall traffic. It’s an overall, if crude, measure of the resonance of your content and will give you some perspective on which specific product and content pages are being shared. 

The Challenge Of Making Remarkable Content

Five, maybe six, years ago, many asset management marketing communications teams were fairly satisfied with their approach to their work.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms had corralled the words and numbers that populated their run-rate communications, mapped the review and approval processes, and implemented systems designed to assure consistency, timely automated output and even cost-efficiencies. Comparisons to donut-making were not far off.

All of the hard work invested to get to that place was by no means wasted, and enables a significant communication effort today. In the years between 2008-ish and now, a content factory-like approach has also been put in place to support the heightened demand for firms' thought leadership content pieces.  

But, our work is never done. In 2013, the marketplace’s expectations of content have advanced. Increasingly, the requirement is to create content that’s “remarkable.”

What’s required to create remarkable content is too new to be scripted, let alone engineered. Unlike the routine production of largely text-heavy communications for physical and virtual literature shelves, it's exception-based. The pursuit of remarkable content typically extends time to market (except when market conditions require accelerating it!), taps random groups and individuals not typically part of the communications creation chain, invariably increases costs and yields inconsistent results. 

If most other communications are donuts, think of remarkable content as souffles. But oh, the rush (and rewards) when a piece of content satisfies!

The Formula

There is no prescribing a formula for what makes content remarkable today. It’s likely to be visual, more likely to be non-text than text, may tell a story and may strive to move the content consumer, whether in laughter, empathy or sympathy. It’s often ambitious and in that ambition runs a very real risk of falling flat.

Sorry, this doesn’t help much, does it? If you’re like most people, you know remarkable content when you see it—whether you find it yourself or receive an endorsement of it from someone you know. In that spirit, here are three examples of non-industry content that I (along with many, many others) have LOVED or otherwise found remarkable lately, along with some comments for you. 

Help Us Experience Something

Horse races can be thrilling, but watching them on television or even in person is not a wholly satisfying experience.

Two days after this year’s Kentucky Derby, the digital sports information company Trackus published this video of the winning horse’s path from an over-the-shoulder perspective behind the jockey. It’s exhilarating to view, especially for those who watched the race and saw the jockey making his move right around the 1:17 mark. More important, it adds to the spectator's understanding of how thoroughbred races are run.

Simulating the experience of an investor is tough stuff, which is partly why this industry for so long defaulted to photos of silver-haired seniors on sailboats. In form and substance they're anachronisms and fall short of the kinds of communicating that's called for today.

Starting with Web-based portfolio tools and calculators, the industry has been trying to help investors visualize. Last year Merrill Lynch produced its Face Retirement Tool, which enables people to age a photo of themselves. And, Vanguard’s My Life Ticker campaign, released this March, aims to help investors focus on why they invest and the key factors in their investment success.

There is still lots of room for your firm to offer its own take.

Share Data That Only You Have

I challenge you to bounce off the YouTube Trends Map—you can’t, you won’t! Google’s sharing of the most popular YouTube videos right now, as filtered by location, gender, age group will keep you riveted well longer than five seconds. And then you might bookmark the URL or email/social share to others. It is remark-able.

We see limited data sharing in this space. Every quarter Fidelity produces an analysis of its 401(k) accounts as sort of a time and temperature report on workers’ readiness for retirement. PowerShares shares its ETF inflow data as well as its most viewed Website pages for the week.

$SPLV was the PowerShares #ETF with highest net inflows in April. View more in the Connection: http://t.co/W3pbnmlzXV

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 22, 2013

Most viewed funds on http://t.co/gJmY65osZy this week: $QQQ $PKW $BKLN $SPLV $DBC

— PowerShares (@PowerShares) May 24, 2013

I’d be surprised if there’s much LOLing at the asset management content being published today, but smiles and chuckles? It's still slim pickings when trying to find content that’s created to amuse. A few examples include the efforts made in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' Daily Advantage e-newsletter, SEI’s sharing of photos in its annual ugly sweater contest or the occasional asset manager (namely, @AdvisorShares and First Trust’s @Wesbury) tweets. 

Humor is essential to relationship-building. It’s not just other industries that are incorporating humor into their online communications, it’s financial advisors and firms that serve financial advisors, too. Check out this video from Bob Veres, editor/publisher of Inside Information.

For how much longer can we avoid humor, even while striving to produce more natural investment communications? The introduction of levity is a next frontier for asset managers seeking to optimize and humanize the reach of what they have to say. 

As a matter of fact, just in case this post didn't evoke any emotion on your part, I will close now with an amateur video that I am certain will endear itself to you as something remarkable. In your content planning, don't be too quick to rule out turning to animal videos. Just don't dwell on the words in this one.

Bonus update: Compelling content was the focus of a May 30 Webinar I participated in, along with Morningstar’s Leslie Marshall and financial advisor marketing consultant Kristen Luke. The discussion “Social Media Content Beyond 140 Characters,” as moderated by Blane Warrene of RegEd, covered a lot of ground, as you'll hear in the replay embedded below. 

What Happens When The Conversation Hits Too Close To Home

The concept of “joining the conversation” can seem a bit artificial. Few online “conversations” are in progress for any length of time and they’re not that easy to pick up on. Besides, most of the time we hit the Web with our own ideas (conversation-starters, if you will) that we hope someone else will get behind and help distribute.

But on April 23, PBS’ Frontline aired a documentary that has prompted an ongoing online conversation about retirement funding and the expense of retirement plans. As tipped off by the title, The Retirement Gamble, the content was provocative. Its position: That fund fees are eroding retirement savings while fund companies and financial advisors in the 401(k) and retirement planning business profit. In the event that you missed it, here’s the link.

The documentary stimulated lots of debate. Most if not all of the online publications that cover finance or retirement issues took note of it, as did all of the leading advisor publications and a few advisor blogs. I’ve added some links at the bottom of this post for you to read a sampling of reactions.  

For another measure of the response to this one-hour television program, see the amount of commenting and social sharing happening on the sites that reported on the documentary. The 12,000 Facebook Recommends, 1,800 tweets and 448 Google+ shares on the PBS site are just the start.

Search interest in the term “retirement gamble” and the related “frontline retirement gamble” search merited a break-out appearance on Google Trends.

Some commentators thought the coverage was fair, others thought it was biased. I’m not going to weigh in on any of that. My interest was in how fund companies would react. Years ago, there would have been no response. But the industry has developed a contemporaneous communications competency, aided by the availability of digital channels and tools. I thought that firms would chime in, on their own sites and maybe in comments on others’.

The Industry's Response

Mindful that the “crafting,” routing and review of a communication on this topic could take a few weeks at some firms, I waited to do a sweep of who said what. But even though I track mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) content fairly closely, I hadn’t seen word one. So, I did what anybody else might do (indeed, lots of searchers have already done, as the Google Trends graph shows) and went to Google.

I reviewed all the Google search results for “retirement gamble” and “retirement PBS” looking for an asset manager-authored commentary. The closest I came was an endorsement on JohnCBogle.com, whose footer has a standing disclaimer: “The opinions presented do not necessarily represent those of Vanguard's current management.” 

So, then I searched the asset manager blogs. (This is the kind of topic that blogs are made for!) While I found a few posts about proprietary retirement research (representing conversations that firms wanted to start themselves), my on-site “retirement gamble” and “PBS” searches showed up nothing.

As a final check, I turned to Ignites.com, the subscription-only news site for the mutual fund industry and yes, there were a few articles about the industry’s response to the show.

The first bore the headline, “Industry Blasts PBS Documentary on Retirement,” while “Documentary Damaged Industry's Rep: Poll” headlined the second. According to a poll taken of Ignites readership, “although 38% do not perceive The Retirement Gamble as having inflicted reputational damage, most expressing that view do not perceive the industry as being unscathed either.”

It was from the second article that I learned that at least two firms—Vanguard and Buckingham Asset Management—had commented on The Retirement Gamble on their sites. Vanguard was critical while Buckingham called it a must-watch.

The Ignites article left room for the possibility that other firms are also addressing the documentary in their own way. That made sense. It would be almost impossible to believe that public television could have aired an investigative report on a $10 trillion industry and the industry would have barely made a peep. Surely, talking points were created, media availabilities were distributed to the press, customer service people were prepped with scripts.

A Sustainable Strategy?

But, what about online and in public where much of the debate is happening?

Ignites quoted marketing consultant April Rudin as suggesting (but not necessarily agreeing with) that some firms would be choosing not to refer to the documentary by name to keep from giving it any more attention.

Seriously? The industry’s response is symptomatic of thinking that predates a time before today. A time when there was a lopsided relationship between brands and consumers. When brands, which had the resources to control messaging and communication platforms, effectively dictated who gets attention and who doesn’t.            

While asset managers can refuse to dignify the documentary with a public response, they can’t impose silence on others. As shown in their comments and social shares, empowered clients (investors and advisors) are taking to the Web to react, to compare notes with others and to wonder about whether their 401(k) plan providers’ interests are aligned with theirs.

Ignoring a controversy central to the fund industry’s business won’t make it go away. And, it will endear the industry no further to its clients.

Preparing a response without acknowledging PBS or The Retirement Gamble by name advances nothing. It simply raises the likelihood that a firm's statement will be overlooked in the online debate, some of which is driven by keyword-specific searches.  

Vanguard is one of this industry’s communications leaders but it wasn’t one of the firm’s finest moments when they published an April 29 blog post that studiously avoids the documentary’s name. I count more than 30 comments, including comments made to other commenters, on the post. The first comment was to the point: “Thanks for the article. What is the name of the documentary?” It was another commenter on the post who provided the title and a link.

This is the world we live in. Others can be expected to initiate and conduct conversations that are not flattering to us or that we would prefer to avoid. The conversation on retirement funding and affordability, specifically, is one that can benefit from more discourse by more informed entities. There is a lot of confusion out there, revealed not created by The Retirement Gamble.  

From the luxury of my perch outside your four walls, this looks like a communications opportunity for asset managers that are willing to step up, to address issues head-on, to listen and to show themselves to be accountable in public even when on the defense.     

Or, maybe you disagree. If you do or if I have somehow missed something, I hope you’ll say so below.

Also see (included in part for their mix of reader comments):

401(k) Documentary Ruffles Feathers

Advisors Stung By Frontline Attack

The Dull Task of Decoding 401(k) Fees Matters

The Retirement Gamble

Winning The Retirement Gamble: Step 1 Adjust Your Mindset