Behind The Scenes Of BlackRock's New Advisor Insight Center

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It’s been a while since a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) company hosted something new and different.

The trend of the last several years has been to package up content contributions and ship them over piecemeal to digital get-togethers on other sites with more—and more consistent—traffic from financial advisors. Asset managers pay to sponsor Webinars on trade publications’ sites, host LinkedIn discussion groups and use Twitter to share pithy insights and content links.

Taken together, these tactics can be an effective if disjointed means of regularly calling attention to thought leadership. The hope is that at least a few advisors will follow the content trail back to the mutual fund and ETF provider sites, where there will be a continued opportunity to educate about products and capabilities.

Launched five weeks ago, the BlackRock Insight Center appears to be bucking the trend, and a conversation with Rob Nestor, Managing Director and Head of iShares Product Strategy, is a reminder of the benefits of bringing people together on a site you control. BlackRock has built a thought leadership hub where they can control the registrations, keep the focus (it’s all BlackRock/iShares all the time) and gain insights to what’s resonating.


As you can see in the screenshot above, the imagery used on the site suggests that a virtual event is in progress, and note that the first content area is called Featured Sessions. In fact, the insight center is the evolution of a one-day virtual conference BlackRock sponsored for the last two years.

While BlackRock’s advisor site (Advisor Center) contains product information and tools, the center’s focus is on thought leadership, Nestor said.

“Our views on retirement, regulation, the move to fee-based advisory are frequently sought. While advisors told us that they appreciate the virtual conferences and Webinars we offer, they said they want to consume our content on their own time…This is a platform we can use to communicate interactively and personally, at scale,” Nestor explained.

BlackRock’s interest in "getting out there with a clear view about how to use active and passive investing in portfolios" was also a primary driver.

To date, 2,000 advisors have registered, according to Nestor. Of those, 80% have returned for at least one session. Advisors are spending an average of 30 minutes on the site, with 60% of the traffic occurring during the business day (10 a.m. EST and 3 p.m. EST).

While there were no formal projections of usage in the center’s first month, suffice it to say that BlackRock is pleased.

According to Nestor, advisors are remaining engaged with 15-minute and longer videos. Most popular has been the nearly 20-minute video, “The Price of Advice: Where The Industry Is Headed,” watched by one-third of the center’s visitors.

The center supports repeat visits by offering a Briefcase function for the saving of content and a My Personal Map to keep track of visited locations.

Building An Advisor Community

What’s most unique to me is the center’s suggestion of—and enabling of—community. There’s no other firm-sponsored and firm-hosted site that I’m aware of that 1)enables a search of members 2)enables contact saving and message-sending and 3)enables networking in real-time.  

“We wanted to create a community that’s not reliant upon BlackRock being at the center,” said Nestor, which sounded like a bit of an oxymoron on an all-BlackRock site. He went on to explain that BlackRock can’t see which advisors are talking to who or what’s being said. Only aggregate user data is being collected and analyzed.

Although the center has already seen some networking, Nestor soft-pedaled what he called the “modest” networking opportunities. To date, most of the registered advisors have chosen not to make their profiles public (and therefore accessible to others). Nestor said some advisors just want to protect their privacy. I wonder whether some firms' Compliance policies also might be inhibiting participation.

The growth of the community aspect of the site bears watching. What firm wouldn’t like its own forum where it could engage advisors with its own offerings and have exclusive access to what they have to say, for a competitive, including product, advantage? This has been the dream of sponsors of advisor-only sites since back in the day.

Also, if it catches on, this could raise advisors' expectations when they log in to other firms' sites.

Breakneck Launch

Planning for the Insight Center began in late April and the site launched in August.

Just four months for a site like this? That’s breakneck speed at any asset management firm—even at the industry’s largest, I would guess.

Content development is one thing to have to coordinate. In fact, videos with some of the firm’s heaviest hitters were created just for the center.

Technology-wise, what made the launch possible is that the center is hosted on the same platform the firm used for its virtual conferences.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing the development of an ongoing Web asset to a provider using its own proprietary platform.

A key advantage, according to Nestor, was the superior quality of the video and the underlying technology.

But it’s not an integrated experience. The URL clearly goes to a non-BlackRock domain: https://engage.vevent.com/index.jsp?eid=3787&seid=15&code=ishml Content searches are limited to what’s on the Insight Center, not what’s available from all of BlackRock.com. Some of the terminology (referring to registered community members as “visitors,” for example) is more suited to events. The attendee guide goes to a 2012 generic document about virtual environments.

Accessing from Apple devices prompts the download of an app from a publisher called Virtual Environments (BlackRock isn’t mentioned anywhere on the download page), and the Android app itself is devoid of all of the BlackRock branding.


Some of this would be a showstopper at other firms, and certainly BlackRock is no slouch in the branding department.

Yet, sometimes in the tension between “do you want it fast or do you want it perfect?”, fast wins with digital communicating—and it ought to. The fine points that marketers sweat out just don’t matter to most users, certainly not at launch. BlackRock wanted a way this year to showcase what it has to say, and it prioritized fast.

Given that most of the visitors are arriving during the workday, three-quarters are visiting via desktop (the best user experience), with 18% via their smartphones and 9% via a tablet, according to data BlackRock provided.

“It was a debate internally,” Nestor confirmed. “Could we/should we build it just as fast? But we felt [the platform] was best of breed.” And, he added, BlackRock IT is “looking at replicating the center internally.”

Support for live events is one of the platform’s advantages. It’s possible that BlackRock will use the new center to deliver its 2015 outlook live later this year, for example.

“Live events will be more the exception than the rule,” Nestor said. “They can be a little risky, everything has to go right at the same time.”

Promotion of the Insight Center has been via mostly digital means. I first heard of it from the BlackRock Twitter account but it's been mentioned in the firm's email, Facebook and LinkedIn activities. Limited targeted advertising is planned.

Bandwagon Schmandwagon—Hooray For The Asset Manager Ice Bucket Challenge Videos

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The Ice Bucket Challenge videos in support of donations to the ALS Association have been circulating all summer, and plenty of observers have copped a sort of bored-with-it-all attitude.

But I’ve gotten excited about things much less fun and engaging. I’m not going to restrain myself on this, not on the occasion of the investment management industry arriving (if characteristically late) to the ALS challenge to raise money to find a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and help fund care for those suffering with the disease.

I am a sucker for humans stepping out from behind company logos, taking part in what’s important to others—and on others’ timelines—and specifically supporting worthy causes. Although the challenge was originally presented as an alternative to donating money, I would think that donations accompanying the drenchings would be de rigueur from participants in this industry. 

Over the weekend, I came across a Boston Globe report that tracked mentions of Ice Bucket Challenges on Facebook and Twitter, including the accounts responsible for driving the most attention. It’s quite a comprehensive analysis, but I wish someone would plot the spread from industry to industry.

(If the videos were being posted to LinkedIn, this kind of a network map would be a cinch. LinkedIn is too serious for hijinks, unfortunately.)

As shown to the right, Wikipedia organizes its list of Ice Bucket Challenge participants by industries, but Financial Services let alone Investments have yet to make it on the list.  

The phenomenon, which the Boston Globe traces to starting in earnest in June on Facebook, seems to have been picking up speed in this industry in the last few weeks of August.

The first investment-related challenge video I remember seeing was from LPL CEO Mark Casady on August 8, just a few days prior to the start of the LPL Focus conference. Click through the tweet to see how much people liked it. 

Videos from several advisors, mostly from the LPL conference, followed. Yesterday, Suzanne Siracuse, the publisher of InvestmentNews, published her bucket challenge video.

Are You Listening For Challenges?

Starting on Friday, I spotted the challenges spreading in all directions, just like you’d expect of something, well, viral. With this post, I'm giving in to an urge to try to aggregate the videos created by mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms. Together they present a view of you that the rest of us rarely get to see.

First are the people-to-people challenges.

In their videos, MarketWatch’s Chuck Jaffe challenged Vanguard’s John Bogle, and ETF Trends’ Tom Lydon challenged BlackRock’s Sue Thompson (see her response below) and Jim Ross from State Street. On Friday, Morningstar CEO Joe Mansueto challenged Ariel Funds' CEO John Rogers, among others.

(Picking up social challenges is just another reason to have a social listening routine in place.)

In addition, a search of the investment manager Twitter accounts I follow (see this post for how to do an advanced search) and scan of the mutual fund and ETF Facebook and YouTube accounts surfaced videos from firms themselves.

When you publish yours (or if you already have and I missed it), shoot me an email and I’ll add it to this page. I should note that even Wikipedia is trying to manage expectations—it starts its list with this line: "This is an incomplete list that may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness." That goes for this list, too.

What's Strategic About This?

“Pat, what are you getting all worked up about? What’s strategic about this?” an exasperated friend asked me yesterday.

OK, that’s a fair question and I don’t have an on-point answer. Just a few thoughts follow.

  • Earlier I took a shot about asset managers being late to the phenomenon. But look at the Boston Globe charts. The tweeting and Facebook posting peaked on August 4 and today is August 25. The firm that’s able to rush through all the approvals, clearances and production issues to get this done is virtually showing off a capability and temperament that not all firms have. Oh and strictly speaking, if your firm or executive is issued a challenge, you have 24 hours to respond.

Related: Producing a fun video suggests that everything else is under control in your domain. If your second quarter factsheets aren’t out yet, you’re not going to make this a priority.

I’m a little late with this post, incidentally, because I’ve been waiting for State Street to post its video, which it did Friday afternoon. Check out how State Street gave early notice—starting on Tuesday that a video response from CEO Joseph Hooley was imminent. When you need to buy time, these kinds of tweets work, don't they? 

  • If your firm’s style is to be buttoned up in its presentation and robotic in its communications, people will like seeing you this way. Unpredictability can be a good thing in a relationship. As a call to action, “donate” is a refreshing break from “download.”
  • When interests align over a piece of online content, sharing usually follows. Investment company videos might expect to see their fair share of sharing from those who spot an investment executive getting drenched online and recognize this kind of activity is against type. It's impossible to resist watching no less than Mario Gabelli taking multiple buckets of water. Already, the sharing of the videos is off to a strong start.
  • Activating one’s employees to amplify the brand messaging has been a focus for many brands for most of 2014. In this space, firms continue to work on developing the policies and procedures to enable key people to create LinkedIn profiles and share firm content, for example.

When it comes to social media and regulation, the fewer words used the easier it is to share—I’d look for a sharing bump from the loved ones and business partners of all the unnamed armies standing behind the speakers in these videos.

  • These videos also give us a peek at investment personalities and brands interacting with one another or other brands. Two years ago, in my Content Highlights of 2012 post, I commented on the playful trash-talking that was taking place between the Oreo and AMC Theater Twitter accounts. At the time, I couldn’t envision how this kind of thing would take place in this industry.

Well…investment firm employees and firms have all kinds of business relationships, and it’s likely that these videos will be created in the context of those. For example, last week's DST video was created in response to a challenge from H&R Block. Again, it’s going to be near-impossible to map but it's fascinating to see the challenges materialize and from where.

Without further ado, here’s who’s throwing ice buckets at themselves as of the morning of August 25.

BlackRock, Sue Thompson (video posted on ETF Trends' YouTube page)

Mario Gabelli, Gabelli Funds 

Legg Mason Dragon Boat Team (video posted on Legg Mason Facebook page—click on image)

Pinebridge Investments 

Schooner Investment Group

With a pledge to donate $100 in the name of an advisor or the advisor’s firm if 1)they pledge to do the challenge 2)have already done the challenge or 3)will make a donation to ALS. The firm is committed to donate up to $10,000. For more see, the MFWire story. Click on the image below to go to the video.

State Street

Voya Investment Management

 

The Gladys Kravitz Guide To Snooping On Your Neighbors

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Gladys Kravitz, the Bewitched character who felt it was her duty to keep tabs on her neighbors—I’m hoping you’re familiar with this 1960s sitcom via Nick At Nite or maybe the half-hearted movie—was simply ahead of her time. Today, she might be Director of Competitive Intelligence and Strategic Benchmarking Insights for an asset management firm.

Something was going on over there, Gladys was right, and she was relying on only her keen powers of observation.

If you are equally as passionate about your neighbors/competitors online, today you have many more tools at your disposal. I’ve written previously about SharedCount, SimilarWeb, App Annie and SpyFu, among others. Here’s a quick look at four more that you can use to snoop with.

How Do They Do That?

If you’re wondering how a competitor is working its own brand magic, just use BuiltWith.com to check under the lid.

Information on the enabling technologies running a Website can be valuable to technology solutions salespeople (BuildWith’s target audience) and the pricing packages reflect the value and power available, including SalesForce and LinkedIn integrations.

My needs (e.g., which firms are using WordPress as their blogging platforms?) are simple, and yours may be too. For us, the Chrome extension provides more than enough intelligence on the content management, Web analytics and marketing automation solutions powering mutual fund and exchange-traded (ETF) fund sites.

For example, here’s an excerpt of the American Funds technology profile, showing the analytics and tracking technologies employed.

Banner Bonanza

Are you in need of inspiration for an upcoming digital campaign? Well, you could make a nuisance of yourself on the trade media sites, reloading and reloading hoping to catch different creative. Or you could head on over to Moat.com, where you can search by advertiser and find multiple ad units. Clicking on one of the ads will reveal some information about where it last ran.

Media planners would do much more with this site, and brand analytics are what Moat sells. Here again, I'm appreciating what Moat gives away.  

The screenshot below shows the detail provided on one of 765 Vanguard ads Moat has logged.


Watch This

YouTube success requires standing out from the crowd, because the crowd is adding 100 hours of video each minute of every day.

If you’re not familiar with optimizing for YouTube or if you’re unhappy with your results, VidIQ Vision is a terrific tool that enables you to learn from how others do it. Just add this Chrome extension to your browser and you’ll see detailed publishing information about every video you review on YouTube.

While you could limit your research to just mutual fund and ETF firms, why not learn from what the top brands on YouTube are doing? The screenshot below shows the optimization supporting a GoPro video published a week ago, which now has almost 2 million views. Note that strong social support and a large follower base helped drive views, too.

What’s Working?

As I blogged about last week, content marketers need to focus on what’s working and produce more of that while producing less of what isn’t working. Simple.

Your analytics on your content are central to that analysis, of course. But—since your competitors are also writing for the same audiences—there’s something to be learned from the content that’s taking off on others’ sites.

Use Buzzsumo for this.

Let’s look at the BlackRock blog, which is not just the most prolific but probably the most socially shared. Check out the Total Shares column at the far right. Quality, frequency and social appeal can be a powerful combination.

You could spend hours on this site. Note the advanced filtering and exporting capability. It produces results for Web pages as well as for blog posts. Buzzsumo sells solutions for influencer analysis but you can see a lot with a trial account.

Now let’s go out there and make Gladys proud.

Managing A Content Portfolio Based On Response

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Some journalists today are compensated in part based on Website clicks, pageviews, unique visitors, social shares, comments and/or the amount of time readers spend with the content they create.

That wouldn’t work for asset management content marketers, I’m pretty sure. But the more I learn about how publications evaluate the effectiveness of discrete pieces written by the journalists, I think there’s something to take away from the measurement rigor and accountability the approach implies.

I have to laugh every time I hear a marketer say, “It was a great _______[campaign, whitepaper, blog post]. Everyone thought so. But it didn’t work so well.”

If it didn’t produce a response, then it wasn’t so great. Agree?

Response must be the measure against which content is evaluated. Content that produces a response has to be assumed to be more successful than content that doesn’t.

And yet in the absence of a thoroughly considered framework for tracking what’s working and how, we get these cray cray conclusions that lead to more "great, but zero response" content.

Below are some thoughts, as I bounce between what’s different and what’s similar in journalists’ and marketers’ content creation and analysis. 

Content Creation Can Be Hard Enough

Pay-per-click journalism is controversial and not commonplace. As a 21-year-old J-school grad, I would have opposed it. I would have said that journalists should be covering the news and what’s important. Thankfully, many still do.

While I have plenty of reservations about paying per click, the approach compensates journalists (and other writers) for identifying what people most care about, as suggested by the attention and engagement their content drives.

One of its most outspoken defenders is Gawker founder Nick Denton. Gawker is not a site that one would ordinarily benchmark a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) site against. The photo on its home page today helps make this point. :)

Denton reportedly displays analytics on the wall of the Gawker newsroom showing data for the whole Gawker network and individual writers.

“We find that numbers keep a writer conscious of an audience; and managers alert to the motivation of the writer,” HubSpot quotes Denton as saying.

While pay-per-click writers are motivated to find subjects or approaches that stimulate response, that’s not where marketers start. Marketers need to work with whatever their firms have to offer, and the business' priorities, and then try to figure out how to communicate in a way that people will respond.

Another difference: The work of most journalists benefits from the trust and authority earned by their publications over the years. Content marketers need to build both trust and attention. With Compliance riding shotgun, asset management marketers in particular need to be relevant, avoid any hint of the self-promotion that will repel followers all the while incrementally growing their brand.

Content marketing is an art, and when the art has been created there’s the tendency to sit back and admire. OK, take five. But not six.  

Too much talent, time and money is being invested in the creation and distribution of mutual fund and ETF content for us not to improve on our measurement of its effectiveness. 

Insisting On An Identifiable Quality Standard

On the Web, there’s no limit to the number of pieces that a publication can publish. Journalists can have at it.

This is not true for marketing communications, even those positioned as content pieces that discuss topics at levels above the products and services offered by the brand.

Your audiences—whether you reach them using your own means or whether you access them via a partner—have a limited capacity for what it wants to hear from you in a given period of time.

Too much too often runs the risk of alienating, unfollowing or your communications being tuned out on.  

Marketers have effectively stated the case for limiting the number of emails sent from their own domains. Now there’s also a reason to serve as gatekeeper on all communications including blog posts and social updates.

To preserve the prospect of your next high-quality communication commanding the attention it deserves, you need to impose a content quality standard. This is a new expectation and will require Marketing to assert itself in a different way. It involves added accountability for the content originated by Marketing but also for those elsewhere in the firm who contribute content.

In its traditional role, Marketing can be counted on to make sure that the content is going to look good. And, it’s going to have been proofread. Marketing typically oversees the content distribution.

The job of measuring and communicating the effectiveness of the content is the new job that falls to Marketing.

A Portfolio Approach

Journalists submit pieces to be published on Websites or apps maintained by publications with established brands.

Those who manage the metrics for journalists know exactly which topics produce the greatest response, and by referral source. They maintain rankings of writers, organized by any number of available variables: clicks, shares, pageviews, unique visitors, repeat visitors, etc. It’s the publishers' business, their focus must be on the performance of the content.   

Marketing’s digital content creation is much different. Its scope is broader (Your domain? Your lists? Others’ domains? Others’ lists?). There’s a wider range of content formats to consider (Text? Images? Presentations? Video? Apps?). Content creators may include staff, outsourced help, the firm’s investment strategists, product people, index providers, etc.

It’s your business, too, and it all adds up to the need to take a portfolio management approach to that content that's being created and distributed.

Content marketing’s aggregate return on investment will be the result of the strongest performing, average performing and underperforming pieces. What are yours? Who are your top contributors? What are your can’t-miss topics and which are the no-goes? What type of content is best at driving subscriptions? What do people most like to share? What converts best?

Data tabulation is an obvious important part of managing a content portfolio, but it can't stop there. If there’s a significant difference between the performance of your strongest and weakest performing content—on a multiple author blog, for example—I wouldn’t be so nonchalant. Use the data to step in and have whatever difficult conversation might be indicated.

To preserve and grow your audience, to optimize all organic and paid communications and to manage relationships with its content providers, Marketing needs a view of the content portfolio at least as comprehensive as what publishers maintain.

Response From Whom?

A click is a click to most publications. Gawker is the exception in that it's attempting to assign values to its readers based on their propensity to share. By and large, most publishers' compensation schemes don't distinguish between whether the traffic generated by a content piece is the "right" kind of traffic.

What’s different for Marketing is that you do care what’s working with what types of audiences.

It matters whether your LinkedIn likes and shares are coming from financial advisors or from job-seekers and vendors, for example.

Response by audience is a dimension to be documented, and learned from.

Paying For Performance

Unlike most pieces written by journalists, content that’s created by mutual fund and ETF firms is an ensemble effort. It wouldn’t be fair to either incent or ding an individual based on response measures.

Still, wouldn't it help to have a view into which staffers are writing the top-performing email subject lines? Who’s writing the headlines that are producing the most search traffic?

Such data may not (or may) ever make it into the performance evaluations of an individual or team. But understanding individuals’ strengths and weaknesses is also part of optimizing a content effort.

What are your thoughts? Your insights are welcome below.

Beach Reading For The Mutual Fund, ETF Marketer

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Who cares if the pages get a little soggy? 

Life is good for the mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) digital marketer who finally gets some time on the beach this summer (or on a gently rocking boat) to catch up on the latest ebooks. For your reading pleasure, here’s a guide to the best of what I’ve been downloading lately.

Go Mobile Or Stand Still

While the take-no-prisoners tone of We Are Social’s Social Brands: The Future of Marketing amuses throughout, this ebook is especially strong and relevant on the subject of mobile. 

It elaborates on five suggestions for “better mobile marketing:” 

  1. Deliver value: utility, entertainment, or social interaction.
  2. Harness mobile context: tailor experiences to the different situations in which people engage.
  3. Streamline the experience: adapt content for a range of different devices and connection speeds.
  4. Make it portable: enable people to continue their experience across devices, especially when sharing things.
  5. Offer varying depths of immersion: e.g., for people with a 30-second work break or with a 30-minute commute. 

Yes, there's a lot more to be done for mobile users by brands, including by asset management firms.

Heavily illustrated, these 127 pages are a fast, provocative read.

Hey Now, No Need To Choke Any Throats

The Marketer: “The site is too slow.”

The IT Guy: “It’s not that the site is slow...but we do have a performance issue.”

Grrr.

If you as a marketer are stumped about what to say next when the conversation heads in this direction, then Limelight Networks’ 103-page “Optimizing The Digital Experience” is for you.

The ebook itself says it’s written for IT staff and leaders, of whom expectations have evolved as more of business has become digital. While IT’s previous job may have consisted of building, managing and integrating content and Web tools, IT is increasingly expected to focus on user experience, this paper says.

“Because digital is becoming such an important part of the business, IT managers are required to think about the end user experience like never before. So when it breaks, you fix it," according to the ebook.

"But is being a firefighter putting focus on performance? Is fixing things when they break a strategy?”

Spoiler alert: No, the break/fix model is not a strategy for managing a technology ecosystem with both external-facing (e.g., Websites) and internal-facing (CRM) digital elements.

While some of the ebook will be of greater value to your IT partners, a chunk of it is a must-read for the digital marketer who realizes he or she needs to be more conversant. You will get a lot out of the first three chapters, which describe the elements of digital performance and the importance of establishing key performance indicators (KPIs). Check out the list of performance testing tools on page 47.

Bored At Work? You Won't Be For Long

KMPG’s Investing in the Future is a sweeping forecast of how the whole of the asset management industry will transform by 2030.

You can see the implications for marketers in just this statement alone: “The industry will have to capture new customers far earlier and keep them longer, by offering products tailored to a younger, less affluent and potentially less financially literate market.”

Oh and then there’s this line, too: “The industry will need to radically change its value proposition to remain relevant in 2030.”

Demographics, technology, environmental consciousness and social values, behavior and ethics all will conspire to shake things up in the coming years, according to KMPG. It takes 80 pages to make its case, and concludes with the top 10 questions for firms to consider.

A beverage with an umbrella might help the medicine go down.

Sales & Marketing 2014

Unlike some of the other ebooks, revenue + associates’ Modern Sales and Marketing Best Practices isn’t going to dazzle you with its layout and graphics. It takes an editorial approach to presenting 10 conversations with leaders including people you likely recognize: HubSpot’s Mike Volpe, MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley and ion interactive’s Scott Brinker.

It’s all relevant and useful, thanks to good questions from Louis Gudema, revenue + associates’ president.

This ebook is freshest on the subject of Sales, specifically social selling, in the interviews with Zorian Rotenberg, Jill Rowley and Nigel Edelshain. They get into some interesting detail.

How To Succeed On LinkedIn

The LinkedIn ebook factory has produced quite a few documents this year. Here are two that you don’t want to miss.

1. The 2014 Professional Content Consumption Report, which LinkedIn bills as “a deep dive into the top content-consuming members on LinkedIn and how marketers can connect with them.” Production of this piece comes at a time when LinkedIn is pedal to the metal on building out its content publishing platform. 

One factoid to bear in mind as you’re preparing your LinkedIn company page updates: The content needs to be mobile-friendly. In Q1 2014, an average of 43% of unique visiting LinkedIn members came through mobile.

2. Way back in March, LinkedIn presented the idea of a content marketing score as a means of providing companies insight into the impact of content shared or otherwise interacted with on LinkedIn. A ranking of trending content also was introduced, and the content marketing score + trending content became the inspiration for The Dynamic Duo ebook.

As is strangely worded in the video above at 0:11, LinkedIn recognizes that “there may be questions about your content marketing. Questions surrounding your content marketing and how to make it most effective could be causing shadows over your strategy...”

The two enhancements should help brand marketers tune their efforts—or, as the video says, "eradicate uncertainty."

I’d be more enthusiastic if these analytics were made available to every company that took the time to contribute content that enriches LinkedIn’s platform. Unfortunately, both resources are available for customers with a LinkedIn account representative (advertisers with at least $25,000 to spend per quarter, in other words).

Have you downloaded any ebooks you recommend? Before you head to the beach or boat, please suggest them below.