Reaching Advisors Via Gmail? Read This

The end may/may not be near.

Retailers and other heavy email users are reporting reduced engagement afterGoogle’s recent change to how it categorizes Gmail. Some are quite upset, going so far as to suggest that Gmail is "killing" email marketing.

In this industry, email is by far the most effective marketing communication, a point reinforced as recently as this table from the July 2013 Cogent Research*: Advisor Touchpoints™. Even so, my sense is that this industry is closer to the "The End Is Not Near" part of the spectrum. But, it is possible that your firm's email effectiveness will be diminished to some extent, thanks to the Gmail changes.

Are you using media lists to distribute marketing messages? This has bearing for them, too.

For Collecting 'Marketing' Emails

For background: Gmail is #8 among email clients. As part of the Google Apps suite, it has particular appeal to RIAs who have warmed to the idea of keeping their data in the cloud.

But, advisors of all stripes long ago decided that there are benefits to maintaining an email address for the purposes of collecting “marketing” (translation, sorry to say: non-essential) messages. Over the years, many gravitated from Yahoo! and Hotmail to Gmail as their preferred free email service. More often than not, it's a Gmail address that's used as a second address when advisors sign up today for asset management communications, among other online offers.

In other words, advisors have already siloed asset management communications from their primary email account's Inbox.

I was worried three years ago when Google introduced a Priority Inbox feature based on the Gmail user’s reading patterns. But now (starting in late May and continuing on a rolling basis that is believed to be complete now), Google is automatically categorizing email as it arrives.

Here’s the upbeat video that Google created when the tabs were announced.

This is a broadbrush treatment, and Google has yet to reveal the basis (algorithm) on which the emails are categorized. We're not likely to ever know.

It's A Tossup Where Mutual Fund/ETF Emails Go

Most asset management communications are sent on an opt-in basis. More to the point, few are promotional in nature. Global investment perspectives and half-price mani pedi offers don't have much in common. Unfortunately, Google is ruling otherwise.

Over the last few days, I’ve used a Gmail address to subscribe to many mutual fund, ETF and investment media newsletters and the early results are not encouraging. The screenshots below illustrate the problem with representative emails received yesterday. 

Most of your work is showing up in the Promotions tab versus the Primary stream. Google's algorithms notwithstanding, to the naked eye there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the categorization.

The most promotional email in the set is the first RIABiz email in the Primary tab, carrying a sponsored message from T. Rowe Price. The content and tone of the emails flagged as Promotions are different in no perceptible way from the emails that made it into the Primary stream. You can't tell from the return address ("economics"), but the last email in the Primary stream, by the way, is from First Trust. Personalized emails show up under both tabs.

By comparison, all of the emails shown above arrived directly in my Outlook account, none was stopped by its industrial strength SPAM filter.

Remain Vigilant

By definition, emails relegated to the Promotions tab will get less attention than email included in the Primary stream. What's an asset manager email team to do? Here are a few suggestions:

• Size the problem.Look into how many Gmail addresses you mail to. Maybe this is not your firm's problem. Another relevant consideration is where the Gmail is being read. The tabbed Inbox is available only in the Gmail webmail client and in official Gmail apps for iOS and Android. One recent study found that only 19% of Gmail opens actually occur in official Gmail.

• Monitor the effect. Create a report that segments only the Gmail recipients on your email list, and track the open and clickthrough rates over time. If you use MailChimp, by the way, you’ll want to read "Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates." Also, ReturnPath offers a Gmail Tabs analysis for brands. Unfortunately, the benchmarking data provided is of limited value given that Banking is the closest it comes to investment companies.

• Be proactive. Prepare and send an email that shows Gmail-using advisors how to move your emails out of the Promotions tab and into the Primary tab. This MailChimp post includes the explanation you’ll need. There's nothing to it. But, be realistic about how many advisors will respond to such a plea. You might think about enlisting your internals in the crusade.

Let's keep an eye on this. 

Where Are Advisors Engaging Today? Where Will They Engage Tomorrow?

If you build it, will they come? And by that I mean to ask: If your asset management firm follows Putnam Investments in building out a capability to empower your Sales team on LinkedIn (see last week’s post), will there be sufficient activity to justify the effort? 

An abundance of research, including a study published by LinkedIn and FTI Consulting last year, suggests that LinkedIn is financial advisors’ favorite social platform for business and especially for "cascading thought leadership." And, where advisors go, asset managers and their wholesalers eventually find a way to follow. The potential to use LinkedIn as a means of calling advisors’ attention to mutual fund and ETF provider content and even messaging has near irresistible appeal. Heck, LinkedIn has promise if only for reaching advisors in listen-only mode. 

But in order for actual interaction—in the form of content reactions and sharing—to occur on LinkedIn (beyond the to-be-expected boost in Website traffic), systems and procedures must be in place. Asset managers’ and financial advisors’ respective Compliance staffs must be certain that communications are happening within allowable and archive-able parameters on a social platform they have no direct control over.

blane warrene

The significant investment (team focus, time and hard dollars) required begs a few questions, which I’ve asked of RegEd Senior Vice President of Customer Communications Blane Warrene. Blane's comments below provide a point-in-time report of the extent of advisor social engagement as of July 2013. As he makes clear, this is a dynamic topic.

Previously, as founder of the social media archiving firm Arkovi, Blane had provided a glimpse of actual advisor social media activity by publishing a few infographics summarizing what its advisors were archiving. 

Arkovi has since been acquired by RegEd and the database is one of many archiving systems out there. But what advisors are archiving to RegEd may be generally representative of overall advisor activity. 

Blane, what does your archiving data tell us about how advisors are using LinkedIn?

Warrene: Part of the "lean toward" LinkedIn suggests an initial comfort level. LinkedIn is viewed as a business and networking tool and, moreover, it was not considered social media before the phrase took new flight in 2008-2009. LinkedIn launched in 2004. So, there is a comfort that LinkedIn is understood and folks who may feel less savvy on other social platforms are confident they "get it" with LinkedIn.

From 2010 to 2012 advisors were making connections and some profile optimizations. In part due to the shifting feature set of LinkedIn and in part to the swell of commentary on the application of LinkedIn for business, in 2013 we see significant upticks in profile updates (embedded files one of those new features, as well as expanded data points, like Projects and Publications among others). 

Status updates have trended up quite a bit as folks are simply using their stream more regularly and sharing or creating content. 

Specific upticks:

• In 2011 LinkedIn accounted for 3% of volume in our archives, in 2012 it was 20% and now YTD in 2013 it’s 25%.

• The number of profile changes has doubled year over year.

• Skills use exploded as soon as the new features emerged (the nudge that LinkedIn provides when visiting certainly encouraged that.)

• Top two other areas of profile changes are Positions (not just job changes but edits to the profiles—i.e., adding new capabilities like slide shows and videos) and Education (extremely helpful for advisors seeking to tap their alumni connections network). 

According to the FTI Consulting/LinkedIn work, half of advisors “would choose LinkedIn over Facebook, Twitter or Google+ to cascade thought leadership if policies were not an obstacle, but only one in ­five has been able to do so.”

What’s the issue here? Are there levels of permissions granted by the broker-dealers, wirehouses, etc.—i.e., is it one thing to create a profile and another thing (more complicated to review and/or archive, hence available to fewer advisors?) to start interacting with LinkedIn updates?

Warrene: There are no issues with advisors seeing updates. Once a LinkedIn profile is approved (easiest) then all is good. Firms just need to monitor and retain the activity such as status updates and profile changes. 

At the wirehouse and broker-dealer level, we do see policy constraints around genuine engagement and content creation and this will stifle legitimacy in the long run (i.e., when a firm enables social and then allows its workforce to use only content the firm creates and distributes, without narrative or editorial freedom).

I understand the business reasons that might be influencing policies governing engagement but are there archiving technology hurdles, as well?

Warrene: LinkedIn does have a more layered approach with their API from a technical perspective—and many data points a financial advisor or a firm would want for discovery, compliance and reporting are quite inaccessible. Connections data is one example where, with more recent moves by LinkedIn, a popular tool [Job Change Notifier, which advisors relied upon to surface 401(k) rollover opportunities] is now shutting down. [See this post for background on new restrictions on LinkedIn's API.]

However, the data needed specifically for compliance is largely present, but an advisor or a firm will need to use a technology solution to get it, which pushes the burden of jumping through hoops for the data to the provider. 

One of the technology challenges of social media activity (and really, any of the modern digital actions that are not driven through a singular channel—i.e., Website or email communications) is that you have to juggle numerous mediums (audio, video, imagery, text et al) and multiple channels (first screen, second screen and now third screen—as in computer, tablet and smartphone.) This all has to be supported, captured and then normalized in a way any daily user can consume and interact with it.

No small effort. I've spent years immersed in the integrations, data and finding ways to keep this as simple as possible—and I keep learning something new daily (seriously). 

The other technical challenge is the pace. We track and adjust our solution weekly and monthly to pace the shifts on social platforms.  

For a forward look, as APIs mature some with large development communities it becomes much easier to resolve the compliance and data management challenges. Contrary to some conventional wisdom, the Twitter API is one of the best to work with. I would set Google as second (including YouTube) and Facebook right after. We get expansive data footprints from those tools. 

What kinds of advisor engagement do you see on the other top social networks?

Warrene: Today we see deeper engagement than on LinkedIn. 

• For Facebook, our latest stats show one-third of Facebook archive data is Facebook Mail—people want to communicate and engage. Likewise, 25% of Facebook archived data is comments, a nice uptick in engagement with our customers. 
• One-quarter of Twitter archive data is Mentions of our users and RTs of their content—a nice engagement ratio off the total.
• With Google+, also an approximate one-quarter of Plus archive data is engagement we track—+1s and Reshares of posts. Now that we've just added support for Business Pages (on July 8) we will see that number tail up. 
• As you might expect, photos continue to surge up on Facebook and now Google+ as it is just too easy to share photos there.

Last question for you, Blane. There’s at least one more barrier keeping this business—asset managers and financial advisors included—from engaging with the full capabilities of LinkedIn: Recommendations and endorsements. Both FINRA and the SEC explicitly prohibit testimonials, which is lamentable given that recommendations are key to most business-to-business connections. Any insights from your archive on those?

Warrene: Endorsements are such a murky territory—a client can endorse an advisor verbally or in writing (of their own accord) without issue. It is how business is done. It is simply the endorsement being visible to a wide, uncontrolled group that converts it into an advertisement. Those are clearly prohibited. 

However, every day I see firms that prohibit or limit social and yet their producers and advisors allow skills endorsements on their LinkedIn profiles. The murky part is that there is not a narrative endorsement—in essence it is a "like" on the advisor, suggesting he or she is good at that skill (i.e., budget planning, financial planning, public speaking...whatever).

Several advisors who are independent RIAs have said to me, “We won't turn ours off until our wirehouse competitor down the street turns theirs off." A reasonable statement. 

We urge folks to disable Recommendations on LinkedIn and for now, without further guidance, to turn off the Skills endorsements. Connections can still endorse—it just does not show who endorsed your skills. That said, we currently have 22,000 recommendations in our archives so not everyone agrees with our guidance. ;-) 

Good Example: Morningstar Experiments With Vine

For an example of digital experimentation in our space by a company you know, check out Morningstar’s “Investing is…” campaign.

Two weeks before its annual conference (which wrapped in Chicago Friday), Morningstar started to promote the use of the relatively new mobile app Vine. Conference attendees and others were encouraged to download the app and then use its 6-second looping video format to complete the line “Investing is…” Finished videos were to be tweeted to @MStarAdvisor.

Embedded below is one of my favorite contributed Vines (un-mute using the control in the upper right-hand corner) and then go here to see more. Be sure to click on the Older link at the bottom of the page, I prefer the homemade videos to those shot at the conference. I’ve also subscribed to the RSS feed.

When I first heard about Vine, I don't remember thinking that the format was particularly obvious or even suited to financial advisor communications. Vine is too new for Morningstar to have established an elaborate business case in support of its adoption. This is just Morningstar taking a flyer.

Brevity Inspires Creativity

According to Twitter, which acquired Vine in January, “it’s the brevity of the video that inspires creativity.”

Markets, investment opportunities and products—mostly that’s what the Morningstar conference is about. The conference makes the assumption, almost never stated and rarely explored, is that the advisors have the requisite relationship and communication skills.

But, in a bit of scheduling magic, creativity was the subject of Thursday’s luncheon speaker. Graffiti artist and corporate thought leader (love the title!) Erik Wahl encouraged attendees to break out of whatever structure that constrains them and to allow themselves to create. He delivered this message while painting no fewer than three paintings as he spoke. The audience loved it.

And, that’s where the call to creativity might have dead-ended, if not for the conference sponsor’s promotion of Vine. Vine enables the kind of creative construction that Wahl would approve of. To make a Vine, all of us windbags (present company included) in this space need to strip down to what’s essential.

Short can sometimes be more meaningful, as tweeting has already demonstrated. This is a message with wide resonance, as suggested by the popularity of Vine. Released for iOS in January, Vine Sunday ranked #4 in the Apple app store. It was introduced for Android devices just on June 3 and, by Sunday, shot to #5 in the Google Play Store.      

A Good Fit

Introducing Vine was a social-savvy thing to do, for these reasons: 

• It aligned with what Morningstar does. Morningstar supported conversations about investing well before social networking platforms and in print pre-Web. Demystifying investing is at the core of the company's value proposition.
• It was an open invitation. All were invited to contribute, not just advisors registered for the conference and not just advisors. A few in the broader ecosystem have already made Vines, but I'd expect others (including asset managers) to make more. 
  
  Similar to the Morningstar conference hashtag that’s used in the flurry of tweets commenting when the program content is underway, this extends Morningstar’s reach beyond the conference venue. Vines have a longer life than conference hashtag tweets, though, which extends the reach of the conference over time.
  
  In fact, I’d wager a guess that last week there was more Vine awareness online than onsite among attendees. Morningstar’s post-conference communications can fix that.
• The “Investing Is…” Vines are being aggregated on a Tumblr blog. Even the Morningstar content machine can benefit from a new source of user-generated and user-promoted content.
• Introducing the Vine campaign demonstrates a nimbleness that not all organizations have. Major legacy (Morningstar was celebrating its 25th year) events seek to shorten not lengthen the list of outstanding items in the final weeks leading up to the event. A last-minute brainchild is not a program planner’s friend. Yet, this idea was announced at the end of May.
  
  The Vines that have been produced thus far are a ragtag collection and probably don't represent the full extent of the creativity we are going to see. Until a few days ago, Vines by Morningstar staffers outnumbered others'. The Vines weren’t as integrated into the conference as they might have been with more time. But, sometimes you just have to go with it, and evidently social media whiz Leslie Marshall (official title: Director – Events, Magazine and Social Media) has that license. Credit for the idea itself goes to Jerry Kerns, Morningstar's editor-in-chief.

I mention all of the above not because I think Vine is transformative or even long lasting. I like this as an example of a quick hit. So many digital projects are War and Peace epics—based on extensive vetting, consensus-building and research, featuring a large cast of characters and years in the making. And yet, the very nature of digital lends itself to fast track, quick hit experiments.

Even while understanding and respecting your communications structure/constraints, I’m still going to ask: What has your digital marketing organization experimented with lately?

A Few More Notes 

• More than #MIC25 8,000 tweets were sent during the Morningstar conference. Yet—and while I don’t have the data to back this up—my sense is that fewer asset managers used the hashtag this year than in previous years. An exception: @Vanguard_FA, which also mixed with tweeps at the tweet-up.
  
  Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms were well represented on the conference program and they were out in force as exhibitors and as advertisers. But I think more could have contributed to the online conversation.
• Morningstar’s Social Media Center was hopping again this year, thanks to the RegEd team headed by Blane Warrene. Blane recorded several podcasts from the conference floor, including with ETF strategist Christian Magoon, Carl Richards of The Behavior Gap, Morningstar team members and me. 
  
• On the occasion of Morningstar's 25th anniversary, Vanguard co-founder John Bogle was scheduled as a general session speaker (in conversation with Don Phillips) to provide a historical perspective. But he's far from pleased with how the industry has evolved, including the marketing of investment products. RIAbiz covered the session, including reactions, one of which is from me. 
• My thanks to Morningstar for the invitation to attend the conference.  

Investors’ Go-To Site: Finra's BrokerCheck

I liken browsing on the Internet to going to the stacks in a university library. You pull one book down, it leads you to another and then to another. Before you know it, there’s been a lot of input but (in my case) zero output.

As much as I try not to surrender to Web-based moseying, I will indulge from time to time. Something did give me pause this week and I thought I’d share the results of my digression here.

There was a quote on the New York Times DealBook blog Monday. “People are starting to use BrokerCheck the way they use TripAdvisor,” DealBook quoted Seth E. Lipner. Lipner is a professor of law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College and he also represents investors in cases.

The post itself was about the heightened interest on the part of those regulated by Finra to pursue every possible means to remove negative information from their records. As investors increasingly rely on Finra’s BrokerCheck to vet advisors, the registered people hope to clean their files up before anybody sees anything.

While I have an interest in that, my real curiosity was in the characterization of BrokerCheck as a go-to site. How do investors even find BrokerCheck online? 

Who's Looking For A Broker Today?

Including “Broker” in the name of the database probably made sense when it was established in 1988. And, obviously, there are still brokerage businesses. But, do people really refer to individual financial advisors as “brokers” anymore, I wondered.

No, they don’t, as confirmed by this Google Trends chart, which plots the plummeting use of “stockbrokers” and derivative terms in the last 10 years. (As an aside, the search volume of financial advisor-related terms has remained relatively stable.)

Hmm, in addition to the traffic that heads directly there, BrokerCheck must get its traffic from links on other sites. I immediately hopped on over to the Majestic Site Explorer, a tool that has just been made free, and confirmed that, in fact, more than 9,000 mostly trustworthy sites (including plenty of .govs and .orgs) link to it. That’s a reflection of the benefits of being a 25-year-old entity sponsored by the well connected (online and offline) Finra. 

I then realized that I’d neglected to check Google Trends to see whether “Finra broker check” as a term had any search volume. Wow, as you can see, it does. Having peaked at 100 on Google’s scale in June 2011, search volume on the term in June 2013 was still a healthy 86 on Google’s scale. Drop Finra from the term and “broker check” searches are at about the same level.

At a time when the advisory business has evolved beyond the business practices of brokers, BrokerCheck as a term enjoys healthy brand awareness. It’s interesting to me that investors know to type in “broker check” when they’re researching someone who in all likelihood has branded himself or herself as something far different from a broker. And, a broker is probably not what they're looking for.

I’d make the argument that “broker check” and other search derivations are branded searches—this isn’t a generic search, investors have likely heard about BrokerCheck.

Since July 2010, search volume also has been up for “financial advisor check,” although interest has been spikier. But that’s not likely how an investor with no awareness of BrokerCheck would word the search, it would probably be a much longer search phrase. 

Google Trends also provides a geographic breakdown of where the BrokerCheck searches are originating from. I’m not sure what the insight is here. Are the searches in line with where the financial assets are concentrated? Are these searches an indicator of intent to initiate advisor relationships or to move money?

New York, Of Course, But In Nebraska Too

Most interesting on Google Trends is to view the change in regional search interest in the term over time. Specifically, you can see the map start to light up in 2008 in New York, California, Texas and Florida. Even though the 2013 search volume is off its 2011 peak, the searches are more widespread this year.

Ultimately, the primary takeaway here is that the name of Finra’s database search does not seem to penalize it in terms of traffic, thanks to high awareness which leads to successful searches, and also to its solid online support. A better name, social media presence and securing the BrokerCheck.com domain would help even more investors directly find it.

Financial services continues to be the least trusted industry globally, according to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer. And, financial advisory is the least trusted among financial services sub-categories. Heightened use of the Web to research advisors is another indicator of post-2008 investor determination to take responsibility for who they entrust with decisions regarding their financial assets.

While there isn't a site comparable to BrokerCheck for checking on asset managers, we can assume that an equal amount of scrutiny is being applied to the product manufacturers whose mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) advisors are recommending. 

Affirmed: Social Media Now Part Of Advisors', Professional Investors' Workdays

I actually remember where I was when the results of the first American Century survey of financial professionals’ use of social media were released four years ago.

I’d been following financial advisors on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and their blogs as just another one of my unstructured online diversions. I didn't know where it was going. To me the publication of the survey was a profound development: By going so far as to commission a study, an asset manager was acknowledging social media as a relevant activity for advisors.

In that 2010 survey, only 26% of respondents ranked social media as having value to their business. Nearly one-fourth said they didn’t want to receive information via social media. Of those who used social media for business purposes, almost one-fifth (19%) did so daily, but 49% said they used social media less than once per week.

Fast forward four years, and an Ignites reporter and I were chuckling yesterday as we were reviewing American Century’s fourth annual survey results.

Uh, what’s the news in the latest findings?

In the years between American Century’s first and fourth survey—to the probable relief of both financial advisors and asset managers—things have stabilized sufficiently that there is no obvious, dramatic news. Nine out of 10 advisors now have a social media account and the evidence is mounting that they find value in social activities. Twitter usage has climbed since the last survey. Oh and Instagram makes its first appearance in the results.

This year’s study documents what has been a gradual embrace and now reliance on the content that can be found on social networks.

Reliance? That’s how I interpret the increase in advisors using social media more than once a week—61% report using social media at least once a week, 39% several times a week and 10% multiple times a day (a datapoint that’s down from 16% in 2012). 

This suggests that there is consistent value in the content that’s being exchanged. Mining social networks for content worth reading and worth sharing has become part of many advisors’ workday routines. It’s a win-win-win, for the advisors, for the content creator (including participating asset managers who recognize the opportunity) and for the networks themselves.

A Direct Channel To Professional Investors

News last week produced another concrete example of why it’s good to share via Twitter, specifically. Bloomberg announced that it would incorporate a curated list of Twitter accounts into its data service. 

From the press release: “Bloomberg Professional service subscribers can now monitor and analyze real-time Twitter updates issued by corporations, executives, government officials, economists, commentators, media outlets and other voices that can influence the financial markets. By incorporating live Twitter feeds directly into its financial information platform, Bloomberg integrates social media content with users’ existing investment workflow so market participants avoid the disruption caused by monitoring separate systems for different types of market-moving information.”

Bloomberg isn’t releasing the list of people and companies that they make available on the terminals, but some subscribers have uploaded some names. When I didn’t see any investment managers on the lists of names being published, I emailed Bloomberg and attached the @RockTheBoatMKTG Twitter list of Investment managers to see if they would comment about whether any investment managers were on the list of "voices that can influence the financial markets." 

After a little email back and forth, here was the response:  “Yes, Bloomberg follows select companies, including investment managers.” 

For those of you with Twitter accounts, this integration represents a new channel. How else would your communications regularly stream to Bloomberg terminals? Never before have you had such access to professional investors. 

(Do you have a work buddy with access to a Bloomberg terminal? You might want to confirm your firm’s inclusion. Subscribers can go to {TWTR<GO>} and select option 8 "People" to query people whose tweets can be followed or searched.) 

Again, back to the official statement: “Bloomberg classifies tweets by company, asset class, person and topic, making it easy for institutional investors, traders, corporate executives and government agencies to track updates related to a specific industry or market, their portfolio holdings or an online personality.” 

This Is What's New

Taken together, the 2013 American Century research and the Bloomberg integration are proof that Twitter content (and content shared on other networks in the case of advisors) has become a part of systematic information-gathering. This is what’s being affirmed in 2013.

Decision-makers that you and your firm care about are showing that they're serious about what can be learned via social media. If you’ve approached your social posts in a half-hearted way (come on, we can do better than tweeting the availability of updated fund profiles) and/or posted on an occasional schedule, or if you have yet to “join the conversation,” it's time for you to get serious, too.

Minutes after I published this post Tuesday morning, I came across (via Twitter, naturally) two related posts that I recommend to you: 

• Bloomberg Eliminates Buy-Side’s Barrier to Twitter is Q4's hands-on look at the Twitter integration.
• New SEC Social Media Policy Makes Twitter The New Center Of Financial News is an overview of the SEC policy change announced last week as well as the Bloomberg announcement. It's written by influential financial planner Michael Kitces.