Rock The Boat Marketing last week relocated from our suburban Chicago location to the Mercantile Exchange Center, 30 S. Wacker Drive, in the heart of Chicago's financial district. After having been toiling in the suburbs for the last few years, it feels great to be back in the swing of things.
If you want to talk digital strategy for financial services and you're heading to Chicago, let's meet!
Elsewhere the big news this past week was the death and burial of Michael Jackson, the king of pop. In our corner of the world, the big news was what some consider relatively small developments.
In the space of 24 hours, I'd sent three tweets:
#1 linking to a kasina blog post about Robert Reynolds, CEO of Putnam Investments, joining Twitter (@robertlreynolds).
#2 pointing to the launch of Putnam's PutnamToday Twitter account.
#3 linking to an Investment News article explaining that Putnam's Twitter accounts were related to an upcoming ad campaign.
Not so long ago, an overworked Marketing Communications writer would record the CNBC appearances of her portfolio managers, watch them at home that night and write summaries to be routed and eventually published on the Web later that week.
OK, that’s not going to work anymore.
The rest of the world is going real-time, and mutual fund, ETF and other investment communicators are going to have to hustle even more than they already do to catch up.
Exhibit 1 is from the world of entertainment. As the Tony Awards were underway a few Sundays ago, the media was reporting the results as they were happening, and bloggers were at it, too. But even the show content at the end of the show was fluid enough to reflect what happened earlier in the show. This video of host Neil Patrick Harris can say it better than I just did.
This morning, just as we were adding 50 more names to our Social Media directory of financial advisors using Twitter, we read a bylined article on Ignites.com (subscription required but a free trial is available) that concluded: “Unless investment advisors can figure out ways to present compelling yet balanced advertisements in 140 characters or fewer, the prospects for Twitter as a marketing tool appear dim at best.”
The article by Joshua Broaded, CFA, a principal consultant at ACA Compliance Group, points out significant compliance risks posed by Facebook and LinkedIn users who clearly have not been trained in the limits of what they can say. Having been responsible for marketing communications at a few asset management companies, I’ve also winced at quite a few out-of-bounds statements that I see being made online by advisors and asset management employees. These betray a lack of training and supervision. My suspicion is that the offenders are rookies.
This is another side of the transparency that comes with communicating today—if your systems and people aren’t current, the vulnerabilities may be inadvertently revealed by people using the newer communications channels. For example, I’ve seen tweets by job candidates heading toward or leaving job interviews. Vendors, too, are commenting on business strategies.
The social networking sites serve as a means of publishing some of what shouldn’t be said in the first place. Let’s not blame social media for training or policy inadequacies that need to be addressed within a company.
Today we're publishing the start of a social media directory for the asset management industry. We've aggregated what we can and now we turn to you for your contributions.
As described in our recent eBook "Who Says You Can't? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media," (published in May 2009 but removed from the site pending an update) social media is a mixed bag for those involved in the manufacture, packaging and distribution of investment products. It's trendy and seems like fun but for some, it's too new, too transparent, too unstructured. Overall, social media is too much for many highly regulated investment companies to be comfortable with yet.
