42 Mutual Fund And ETF Asset Manager Blog Feeds For Your Reading Pleasure

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Every time an asset manager launches a blog, a team of angels gets its wings. Or something like that.

There’s a lot of prep required to bring a blog to life, never more so than when you have to prove the business case, grease the Compliance wheels, collaborate with IT on a platform and corral highly compensated investment talent to commit/submit to a regular writing schedule.

Loomis Sayles Launches LandScape: A Blog Focused on Research http://t.co/Cq7G4pyqb5pic.twitter.com/1mHeiuCGdM

— Loomis Sayles (@LoomisSayles) September 23, 2014

On the occasion of both the Loomis Sayles’ blog launching this week and the one-year anniversary this month of Vanguard’s Institutional blog (yep, not only do institutional investors “use the Internet”—they read blogs, too), I thought I’d share my list of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) RSS feeds.

As I’ve noted previously and elsewhere, an RSS feed reader is an easy, efficient way to plow through the news. But, subscription numbers available from the leading RSS feed reader, Feedly, suggest that relatively few asset manager blogs are read this way. Not even the most popular Vanguard blog clears 1,000 Feedly subscribers, although that number has doubled in a year. Most investment company blogs have just double- and even single-digit Feedly subscribers. Apparently, the more common way to keep up is via email subscriptions from each firm.

Not all of the feeds are labeled "blogs." Some firms prefer to avoid the expectation that a blog should allow for user comments. This collection doesn’t stand on formality—if a site offers an RSS feed for its content updates, it’s included. (If your firm offers a blog or an RSS feed and needs to be added to the list, just shoot me an email.)

Lots For Marketers And Advisors To Learn From

For marketers, there are plenty of best practices to learn from:

  • Check out how often firms are communicating, mostly with substance.

  • Note what a difference a strong graphic can make when previewing a post through a feed reader. Below is a screenshot of the Guggenheim blog posts as viewed through Feedly on the desktop.

GuggenheimBlog.JPG

  • See that some firms enable the full text to be read within the reader while others offer just an abstract, in the hope that readers will follow the link to the site for the rest of the content. Sometimes they do.

  • Blogs aren’t forever. In reviewing the list prior to publishing it, I noticed a few blogs launched in the last few years have gone to Blog Heaven. They can be a lot of work. When the interest externally or internally isn't there, the smartest decision can be to pull the plug on a blog.

Of course, for financial advisors, investors and others, these updates are a font of relevant, timely information.

Accessing The Feeds

Without any further ado, here's how to access the list.

If you go to this page, you’ll find a list of 42 asset manager blog feeds, including those for the public, those specifically for financial advisors and specifically for institutional investors.

The screenshot below shows an excerpt of the page and where to copy the feed link address from to paste into your own feed reader. Note that the address is not a URL that will take you to the blog. If you prefer to follow the blog via email as opposed to an RSS feed, you’ll have to go to each site to subscribe.

Interested in following all 42? Just download the .OPML file (using the orange download box in the top right of the page) to your computer and then import the file into your feed reader. I like the way you think.

Included among the 42 feeds are:

For The Public

 For Advisors

For Institutional Investors 

Unfortunately, Feedshare.net, the tool I’m using to share these feeds, pulls them in with the file names used by whoever created the feed at your firm. Maddeningly, the list can't be alphabetized or ordered in any other way.

Haven't had enough of asset manager blogs yet? You might also check out Naissance Partners’ Best Blogs of the Week feature on their blog.

How Soon Will Asset Managers Be Texting Advisors?

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If financial advisors are planning to communicate with their clients via text in the next five years—as reported in recent InvestmentNews research—will they also be expecting to text with fund companies?

Here’s the survey data that prompts the question. InvestmentNews also reports that 20% of surveyed investors under the age of 45 expect to be communicating with their advisors via text in five years. 

Note that direct, personal communicating via text is practically swapping places with communicating via U.S. postal mail.

In a May post, BlueLeaf made the argument for the convenience of advisor/client texting:  

“You have a very busy day on the road, but need to contact your client about something quick. You don’t want to call and leave a voicemail in the chance that they won’t listen to it in time (or at all). Email’s no good either, as they could potentially miss important information about your upcoming meeting. You need a tool that will help you to make immediate contact to leave your brief message.”

All of the above could apply to wholesaler-to-financial advisor communicating. Texting provides for a direct, time-sensitive communication that other means don't.

And, I dare say (and the reason for the mention of SMS messaging here), Marketing might well tiptoe into permission-based texting.

But in five years? Five years in this industry is like tomorrow in others. Is it on your firms’ roadmap?

I’m aware of firms that offer text messaging capability related to: 

  • Shareholder accounts (see T. Rowe Price)
  • Retirement accounts (see Vanguard)
  • Retirement account enrollment via text (see The Principal)
  • The availability of market and economic commentary (see Northern Trust)
  • A whole host of commentary and reports and fund event options (see Fidelity) 

This is almost the same list of automated content pushes that I offered in my 2012 blog post on the topic. I haven’t heard a peep yet about firms adding SMS to their call center support, enabling wholesaler-to-advisor texting or organizing for opt-in marketing communications by text.

Not A Regulatory Concern

Evidently, texting does not break new regulatory ground.

“We haven't talked about text messaging in a while,” says Theresa Hamacher, president of NICSA. “It doesn't seem to present any new areas of concern from a regulatory standpoint. My sense is that texts and emails are lumped together and handled similarly. Social media is a much bigger issue, since it's more public and harder to capture.”

How would a regulated enterprise support one-to-one (as opposed to automated) texting? I found this 2011 video about a SalesForce app that will help you visualize how a CRM might enable the communication, in the same way that a CRM supports Sales' emails. This is just for illustration, note. I know nothing about SMS Magic and have no idea whether this developer's storage of the outgoing and incoming text messages would meet FINRA recordkeeping requirements.

For Wholesalers' Best Clients

In fact, wholesalers today are using text but “only for their best clients with whom they have a relationship,” according to Rob Shore, founder of Wholesaler Masterminds.

"The great wholesaler understands the various methods of effectively communicating with their advisors and, today, texting is one of those options. That said, if wholesalers launch into a texting dialogue without knowing that this form of outreach is welcomed by the advisor it will backfire. Spam texts are more invasive than spam emails," Shore says.

True that, Rob.

(I appreciated being able to create the images above on iPhoneTextGenerator.com, but future asset manager texting will almost certainly take place on 4G-plus devices.)  

Cross-Functional And Complex

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers are well aware of 1)the high reliance of advisors and investors on their phones and 2)the immediacy and impact that text messages have. In fact, these SMS messaging stats have been cited so frequently that the date and the source have long since been shed: Reportedly, 98% of text messages are read and responded to within 1.5 minutes versus 2.5 days for email.

Texting offers the potential to improve the relevance, timeliness and even usefulness of what's being communicated. At the same time, preparations for texting will need to be cross-functional and will be complex. My assumption is that these are in the works at least a few firms.

Do you work for the rare firm that has established an SMS capability already? If so, please let us all know below. Others' thoughts are welcome, too.

A Few Ways To ‘Listen’ To Advisors

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© Eric Isselée - Fotolia.com

© Eric Isselée - Fotolia.com

Listening is one of the easiest things a marketer can do. And, the concept behind it is rock-solid, uncontestable—taking a break from your own messaging to pay attention to what your clients have to say can sharpen your ability to communicate relevantly.

But how do you actually do it? That’s not been so easy or obvious, at least prior to the availability of social platforms where some people participate and all can listen.

The prospect of listening has been intriguing to me for several years. Before Web 2.0, I made a habit of checking the Registered Rep message boards (anybody?) and the now departed FundAlarm.com. Listening was the idea behind my 2009 development of AdvisorTweets.com, a Website that existed solely to publish the tweets of financial advisors (sold in July 2011 to Smarsh).

I’m still following lots of advisors and I manage to glean insights from what they’re saying. It’s a squishy undertaking, I’ll admit, and I’m always looking for more systematic ways to improve upon it.

Two Lists Do The Vetting

Good news: There have been two lists published in the last several weeks that make listening to advisors more easy and straightforward. Both lists are powered by BrightScope, whose business includes providing the first comprehensive and publicly available directory of financial advisors.

The list of the Top 100 Most Social Financial Advisors in the U.S. (2013), published on the BrightScope blog, is based on the BrightScope Social Influence Rank. The rank considers several individually weighted data points around an advisor’s Twitter profile and blog, such as followers, tweet activity, Moz Page authority, and more. BrightScope components also make up a small portion of the overall rank.

You’ll find a second list, the Top 50 Advisor Blogs And Bloggers, on Michael Kitces’ Nerd’s Eye View blog. Inclusion on this list is determined using Website metrics measured by Moz Analytics, including page authority, external links to the blog and total links.

I don’t get hung up on which individual ranked where; I’m just happy to see this surfacing of advisors. Their engagement numbers suggest that the advisors are posting updates that resonate with others, which makes them worth following for what they’re saying.

Now what? Here’s what I suggest.

Subscribe To The Blogs

Subscribe to the blogs. Follow the links to each blog named on Nerd’s Eye View, pick up the RSS feed, add it to Feedly and you now have a routine for monitoring what influential advisors are commenting about. The closer you pay attention, the better you’ll understand.

Two notes:

  • If you’re not an RSS feed reader user, you might be interested in this explainer post I wrote for RIABiz recently.
  • Yes, you could assign the subscription process to a minion but I wouldn’t. Invest the extra time to visit each advisor’s site yourself to take in the full context of the firm's business. It won’t kill you. Think of all the time you saved earlier by not listening.

Follow A Twitter List

Both lists also provide each advisor’s Twitter account name. We’re going to use those to create a third list, a Twitter list that will give you real-time monitoring capability. To make up for the snarky comment I made above about you not listening previously, I’ve made the Twitter list for you. It’s a compilation of all Twitter accounts on both lists.

A few observations on the Twitter accounts of these influential advisors:

  • Don’t expect to see a high number of tweets or followers or even Twitter best practices across the board. At least one account on the BrightScope list still uses the default Twitter egg as his avatar.
  • The tweets are not purely focused on what you’re going to care about. One of the accounts is @LinkedInNinja, influential for her LinkedIn advice to advisors but perhaps her content won’t be as valuable to you.
  • Not all advisors are working as such, as in the case of SEI’s John Anderson (@SEIJohnA).

If you want to prune some names from the Twitter list I’ve created, use Tweetbe.at to copy my Twitter list and edit it.

In the 24-hour period between Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, the influentials produced 436 tweets. They have a lot to say, which means that the tweets will scroll through your Twitter client at a fairly good clip.

An Aggregated View

As someone who regularly sends tweets that don't get the support of even one retweet, I know from experience that there can be gold in the orphan tweet. But as a listener, you can get ahead of the game even if you pay attention to just the content that advisors are swarming around.

That's why I was happy to get this compilation of names to finally be able to produce an aggregated view of the top content that influential advisors are sharing.

For this, we can use Tame. It will show you the top links shared by those on the Twitter list, the accounts that are being mentioned and—really important for those of you who are doing some mad improvising with your hashtags—hashtags that advisors actually use.

Above is a screenshot from yesterday, showing the highlights of those 436 tweets. If you expand the individual links, you can see what was said about the content in the underlying tweets. Using Tame your monitoring can be sporadic and yet you won't miss the highlights.

There must be hundreds of tools for industrial strength monitoring, but these lists give us a tuned look at what influential advisors, as vetted by the social data, are up to. If you don't already have a listening system in place, the combination of these lists and the capabilities of Tame is an easy-to-set-up and non-taxing way to start.

Email, Banner Ads, Webinars And A New Kind Of Hangout For Independent Advisors

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Advisor Perspectives, the Website that no asset management marketer can ignore if he or she is interested in better understanding independent financial advisors/RIAs, is making news this week with two items of interest.

Online Marketing Campaigns

First are a few results from Advisor Perspectives’ recent survey of advisors on their response to fund company email, banner ads and Webinars. This follows a comparable survey last year, the results of which were reported on in a whitepaper and blog post, and I offered my take on them, too. This year, Director of Marketing Jeff Briskin says the plan is to distribute the insights in an ongoing campaign throughout the year.        

Independent advisors are no pushovers, as most mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers already know. But, the first of the survey results, made available in a two-page whitepaper emailed this week, confirm that.

Less than one-third of advisors will respond to a Webinar invitation, according to the survey. And, those who do say that a marquee name (speaker or sponsor) is the top way to entice them. Product-focused content? It's the least interesting Webinar "hook" you can offer. 

Banner advertising has limited appeal. The fund company name or reputation matters most to one-quarter of survey respondents (the largest percentage of those responding to banner ad questions!).

But even if you work for a little known firm and don’t have the wherewithal to book a big-time Webinar speaker, there’s hope for you in the survey results about what it takes to get an email opened. Investment whitepapers/research and other thought leadership deliverables sit at the top of the chart and offer the greatest potential as a gateway to show advisors a little bit more about your firm and what you know.

In fact, most investment firm marketers make the assumption that “marketing” to independent advisors/RIAs requires just fresh, solid ideas versus bright, shiny other stuff.

A Forum Of Insights: APViewpoint

To facilitate the exchange of ideas between advisors—something that doesn’t take place on AdvisorPerspectives.com—the mothership tomorrow is launching a new site: APViewpoint. Update: Advisor Perspectives tells me that they've delayed the launch, it should be sometime in May.

There are LinkedIn groups and other advisor communities online, but this site is different in a few ways, according to Briskin. There's nothing unique about the structure or its capabilities, the design isn't flashy. Instead, Advisor Perspectives is hoping that the depth of participation and debate will distinguish the forum.

Thirty thought leaders, including Bob Veres, Harold Evensky and Michael Kitces, have committed to take part. Registration is being monitored to assure that only advisors sign up. To date, 500 advisors have been admitted during the beta process. An email invitation goes out to Advisor Perspectives’ list of 400,000 names starting next week.

“The biggest selling point is that this will be a community of elite advisors,” Briskin says. "These are advisors who are the cream of the crop, people who interested in learning." Advisor Perspectives readers tend to be "more sophisticated" and have higher AUMs, he says.

This video provides additional detail on the forum. 

Briskin gave me guest access and, sure enough, there is a lot of substantive debate and exchange going on in APViewpoint. Responses to the conversations I scanned were longish, reasoned, almost academic.

As of yesterday afternoon, the most commented on post was about using bond ladders for retirement income. A post seeking feedback on some retirement research published by GMO was the most viewed. In the course of one conversation, an advisor commented on the “packaging and marketing attributes” of the "JP Morgan Dynamic Retirement Income Withdrawal Strategy/Breaking the 4% Rule" executive summary. He'd liked it and uploaded the Adobe Acrobat file.

You can see how this could develop into a fascinating way to follow hot buttons and track what’s resonating with advisors.

Fund Companies Will Have To Wait

...Except that for now participation by fund company employees won’t be allowed. Here’s where the conversation with Briskin turned awkward.

“We want the site to live and breathe and blossom,” Briskin says. Advisor Perspectives intends to provide a "haven" for advisors who want to be free to criticize fund companies (and I did spot at least one post drilling into a firm’s performance) and not need to navigate their way through product pitches.

If you’ve spent any time in standard-issue LinkedIn groups, you know what Briskin means. In its early state, the forum is refreshingly free of self-promotional posts masquerading as engagement.

Hope you don’t mind me using space in this blog to describe a community that would not have you as a member. The restriction will lift soon enough.

As advertisers and Webinar sponsors, asset managers are a significant source of Advisor Perspectives revenue. Briskin says the firm's early plans to monetize APViewpoint envision giving firms some kind of access. At some point, he says, Advisor Perspectives may bundle up comments and sell them as market intelligence. Or, firms may have the opportunity to pay to feature a portfolio manager's presence on the site for a week.  

Whatever, the offer will have to work for both sides.

The business of reaching financial advisors online was fragmented when I wrote about it four years ago and it’s even more so now. APViewpoint has a long road ahead not just to build up its registrations but to drive good word-of-mouth among members and repeat visits. Social media will go only so far in raising visibility—promotional posts will link to a registration page. And, search can’t help a site whose content is behind a wall.

The more active users (defined by vibrant, helpful conversations, subsequent log-ins, posting, following, etc.) the more appealing this will be as a forum to get in front of, on a paid basis, or even—assuming fund companies and their Sales staff can promise to behave—in read-only mode. 

I wish Advisor Perspectives team success with this. By the way, the Advisor Perspectives newsletter will start to include excerpts of what’s being discussed in APViewpoint. For the time being, that will be one way to keep an eye on what’s going on in there. It has a brand new Twitter account to follow, too: @APViewpoint.

5 Early Wins For Mutual Fund, ETF Companies Using Social Media

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I couldn’t get enough of the coverage this week of the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, celebrated yesterday.

Originally, this post was going to be about what the Web has done for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) communicating, with a few reminiscences.

For example, I smiled when I read this line from the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on a Google post Tuesday.

Thanks to the Web, Berners-Lee wrote, “You can link to any piece of information. You don’t need to ask for permission.”

Right, I’d forgotten! In the late 1990s, wirehouse account people actually asked for permission to link (their Intranets) to mutual fund company Websites. Ah, the innocence of those early days.

Instead for today, I’ve gravitated toward something fresher and, at this point, evolving more dramatically: The effect that participation in social media is having on how fund companies communicate with their many stakeholders. Let’s date the start of this to four years ago, right about when FINRA released its Regulatory Notice 10-06 in January 2010. I can think of five early wins.

1. Communicating at a higher level than product

As an example, access to Twitter came at just the right time for asset managers willing to provide a steady stream of information about municipal bond markets.

Starting in 2010 with Northern Trust’s @Fixedology account (since renamed @NTInvest) and followed by municipal-focused @RochesterFunds, @MainStayMunis and other broader asset manager accounts, 140 characters have proved sufficient space for pithy updates about markets, issue sizes, demand, etc. all clustered around the #muni hashtag or derivations.

In the last four years, what's going on with municipal bonds has been a topic that many others, and most notably the media, vitally cared about. Twitter provided asset managers an easy entrée into a conversation they could contribute to.

The notion that muni communicators could use a different communication channel to call attention to in-house insights or even just facts was new. Until 2008 or so, it was the equity funds, their stories and their management teams that typically dominated the marketing and public relations resources. And, regardless of the asset class or the timeliness of the comment, there would have been a limit imposed on the number of communications PR would have been willing to initiate—as in, "We can't reach out to a reporter on the same topic too often."

But, a Twitter account can. I’m convinced that steady, consistent communicating served the tweeting firms in good stead when, late in 2010, Meredith Whitney predicted a municipal bond "day of reckoning."

A crisis was avoided but the accounts tweet on, as shown in this random collection of information-packed Rochester Funds tweets. Note that many #muni tweets simply impart information, don't even require the reader to click a link.

Net revenue collections for FY ’14, July – Feb, in Puerto Rico are 10.2% higher than last year. Higher revenues = positive for bondholders.

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) March 5, 2014

Meeting today with some Puerto Rico creditors in NYC. We were not invited, nor will we attend. PR wasn’t invited either.

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) January 16, 2014

We agree with @Muni_Mkt_Advisor's Robert Donahue: "Puerto Rico's leaders are showing considerable courage” h/t @TheBondBuyer

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) December 26, 2013

Look for more of this social media-enabled content leadership, as the industry educates on alternative investing in particular.

2. Better customer intelligence

Some firms have a much better understanding of the financial advisors who use their mutual funds or ETFs than they did five years ago.

Because of the benefits to them of participating on social networks, advisors have been creating profiles and sharing information—all of which savvy asset managers recognize as valuable customer intelligence. (See this 2009 post for an early perspective on the opportunity.)

When third-party data providers (like Meridian-IQ to name a current-day example) first made advisors’ AUM and production data available, that was the first step in asset managers growing their customer databases with more than just the uneven data input by the wholesaling staff. APIs available from LinkedIn and other social platforms today and CRM integrations available provide real-time, qualitative information that salespeople know how to use to advance offline conversations.

At the 1:14 mark of the following Nimble video, you'll see an example of how social account information is being added to CRMs.  

Nimble Grid View and Smart Summary of Contacts from Nimble Marketing on Vimeo.

It is the rare investment company that is mining this data today. However, many firms are doing something, even if in a low-tech way, or by just adding social CRM to their roadmaps. This will provide a competitive advantage. 

3. Better visibility for initiatives

It can be a thrill to work for a firm with millions of shareholders or investors. However, communicating with them in print usually takes too much time and is cost-prohibitive, two challenges somewhat addressed by the advent of Websites and email. But there, too, there are reasons to take a measured approach. A firm can’t communicate “too often” for fear of fatiguing its lists, and no single initiative can consume too much of the enterprise's communication resources.

Enter Facebook, an extremely accommodating environment to discuss corporate responsibility and community initiatives and to foster engagement. Check out the John Hancock Boston Marathon posts for one timely example. 

Or, consider the single-focus opportunity that a blog affords, as Putnam demonstrates with its five blogs on five niche topics: perspectives, wealth management, advisor technology tips, retirement and absolute return.  

Putnam is also giving a master class on how to use social media to extend the value and life of research findings.

Do you remember the social media research Putnam released last October? Previously, a firm might have conducted research, prepared a whitepaper, launched a microsite, issued a press release and then its news would fade from the news cycle in about a week. Because the research was right on-point for its Advisor Tech Tips blog, Putnam continues to post additional survey-based insights, which in turn prompts sharing and new attention for the research.

4. More natural exchanges

When you talk to people only periodically, there’s a tendency to be more formal and need to say more. Four times a year-reporting means that there's always going to be a lot to have to catch people up on. Updating via social media, though, can be more conversational, even natural.

For its plain-spokenness and word economy, this @Vanguard_Group tweet (which was as a Rock The Boat Marketing 2012 content highlight) continues to be one of my all-time favorite asset manager communications.

Our Advisors app for iPad product comparison tool was too slow. We fixed it. Try it now. http://t.co/Ltoduy5r

— Vanguard | Advisors (@Vanguard_FA) November 17, 2012

We all know how this would have been approached in every other medium—a lot of background information, a mumbo-jumbo quote and a description of the app’s new capabilities. It’s hard to imagine a Web page with just these three sentences on it. The best fund companies on Twitter are keeping it real. (Also, see 2013: Time To Show Some Personality (And All That Implies).)

Theoretically, there’s no better way to project naturalness than to sit in front of a video camera and talk. Except that over the years, investment professionals and the perfectionist marketers who work with them have developed a lot of good habits that could use some relaxing to truly succeed on YouTube.

Here again, the Vanguard channel is blazing a trail toward less stilted presentations. Check out their first Google Hangout from December. There are a few rough spots but the fresh, uncanned approach has a contemporary appeal.

Vanguard, one of the first whose blogs allowed comments, is also one of the first money managers to allow Discussion on YouTube. It's inevitable: Through its interactions on Facebook, Twitter and in comments elsewhere, this business will get the knack of responding to investors and others in public.

5. Developing a fuller sense of the ecosystem

In pre-social media days, the enlightened asset managers acknowledged that their business was influenced by people not defined by AUM and sales. Hence, the gatekeeper-type field in a CRM.

But paying attention to social media conversations and interactions surfaces others—industry leaders, investment bloggers and service providers and vendors, also with no production data next to their names. These are influencers that those of us in marketing would have had no awareness of 10 years ago.

CateLongKredScore.png

Let’s take the example of Cate Long on Twitter, writer of Reuters’ Muniland blog and very influential on the #munis subject with journalists among her top followers. She regularly tweets asset manager (and others') #munis tweets. Of course, she’s in PR’s Contact list, but marketers watching the #munis hashtag know about her, too.

This awareness should be institutionalized—if Long were to sign up for an email newsletter or call in on the 800-number, she should be recognized as someone other than a "non-advisor" in the enterprise CRM.

See where this is going? It’s silo-busting and calls for added collaboration across functions.

A systematic understanding of social networks, as some early adopting firms are starting to develop today, can lead to a fuller sense of the thinking influencing the users of investment products, and result in proactive communicating and marketing.

In what other ways do you see the business being changed by social media? Please add your thoughts below.