iTunes, Amazon Kindle Ready And Willing to Distribute Your Investment Insights

/

Here’s the problem we have with placing a registration process in front of your best content. The value exchange is skewed in favor of you, not the financial advisor, your customer or prospect.

Who has the power in a relationship? The movie “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” is taking this issue on right now in movie theaters across the country. The debate centers on whether the person with the power is the one who cares the most or the one who cares the least. Matthew McConaughey’s character is going to have to figure this out himself for his love life (no spoilers here).

But for the purposes of requiring registration on financial advisor sites, we respectfully ask you to look at your registration trends and password-only site traffic. Who cares more that your content be consumed or that your company builds its brand awareness? You care more, the advisor cares less. It’s the advisor who has the power in this relationship, isn’t it?

Rock The Boat Marketing’s eBook "Who Says You Can't?" [The eBook has been removed from the site, pending an update], provides content syndication best practices among mutual fund, ETF and other investment management companies. But in a few months those might be considered baby steps, given how two recent announcements accelerate the trend toward the broad distribution of content.

First, from Morningstar via iTunes comes a free iPhone/iPod Touch application providing access to research, investing ideas, real-time quotes, ratings, company profiles, a customizable watch list, ticker look-up and search and financial news. A Blackberry application is planned for this summer. Premium (paid-for) content is in the works, too.

Read More

A Compromise For All You Social Media Skeptics

/

“You can’t possibly believe that all advisors are going to be tweeting and friending people?”

Such was one response to the eBook we published last week (Who Says You Can’t? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media) [The eBook has been removed from the site, pending an update]. We present it as a snapshot of social media adoption by financial advisors and of the current best practices and possibilities for mutual fund and ETF marketing.

We believe that there’s a communications channel opened up here being used by many of the very people (independent financial advisors, largely) that money managers want to get to know better. Some people liked the eBook.

Here’s how I answered my provocateur. No, we don’t think it’s a matter of time before all financial advisors have active Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. accounts. For the foreseeable future, we know that the majority of investment management communications will continue to be through wholesalers. Marketers will continue to fly the flag at a few conferences every year, and printing and mailing will continue. We don’t believe that the “blast emails” will stop anytime soon.

Read More

3 Questions About Your Digital Strategy

/

If you’re responsible for the digital strategy of a mutual fund company, exchange-traded fund (ETF) provider or other investment manager, you’ll want to know about some important work that’s been released in the last week or so. Below I’ve extracted just a few germane findings to stimulate thinking about your digital priorities. Naturally, you’re encouraged to follow the links to the complete reports.

NielsenOnlineImage
Video, Social Networks Drive Engagement
Online engagement by Internet users is deepening, according to The Global Online Media Landscape released by Nielsen Online. The increased engagement, according to the report, “is in part a result of a shift toward video content and social networking as popular online subcategories.”

Specifically, according to Nielsen:

Read More

Strike Up The Barry Manilow: We’re Talking About Feelings And Your Web Site

/

While checking my RSS feeds this morning I came across an article that I reacted to with mixed emotions.

That right there should have been a tip-off: I approach the morning feed-reading like a transfusion—gotta catch up, gotta find out what’s been going on since the last time I checked in. No time for emotional responses to HTML.

But this article—How Does Your Web Site Make Visitors Feel?—slowed me down. I was intrigued and really wanted to spend some time thinking about it.

These lines, for example, took me to a place I don’t ordinarily go at 6-ish on a Friday morning:
“You have before you a computer of some type or perhaps a cell phone. It’s equipment that contains the energy forces that made it (with all their fancy scientific names). Some scientists are exploring whether objects contain the consciousness of those who built it. This is similar to organ “memory” where an organ transplant patient has the memories and physical habits of their donor.”

The author of the article (which I recommend to you) is Kim Krause Berg, a highly regarded Usability Consultant with UsabilityEffect.com. She explains that she’s been “exploring and researching the relationship between computers and people.” She describes herself as fascinated by Web sites and how and whether decisions made by Web site designers and bloggers, for example, affect us “emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually.”

Read More

The Corner Office Advisor Is Live And Well Online

/

This morning on Twitter was just like every other weekday morning—lots of tweets offering links to valuable fresh content. At 8 a.m.CDT it was obvious that Russ Thornton, a former Merrill Lynch financial consultant and now fee-only financial advisor, had produced something my tribe of financial advisors had seen, liked and were now recommending in the form of retweets to their followers.

Russ often writes his own posts but this morning he created a post “What Should Investors Do Now?” and wrote a single paragraph introducing a video from Dimensional Fund Advisors. Little more than one hour later, that was the post being passed around the Twitter community of advisors.

And, that was a big win for Dimensional.

The 14th largest fund group in assets under management, Dimensional markets at a much lower volume than most large fund complexes. But this isn’t about marketing via television or billboards or email. This is a case study of content marketing using a delivery medium that consistently proves its viral quality.

Russ watched the 20-minute video on DFA’s site, noticed that it was approved for client use and chose to download it so he could upload it to Viddler.com, a video sharing site, to offer it from his blog. Even though the video has a date of first use of March 13, it was posted last night and may have benefited from some outbound marketing support from Dimensional. But a message from the company itself will not attract the same attention as an endorsement (a tweet, in this case) from Russ.

Read More