What Could Your Firm Learn From Listening?

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"Is now a good time for us to take a look at what people are saying about you when you're not around?"

That's how we tee up one of our favorite parts of the Rock The Boat Marketing Introduction to Social Media for Asset Managers workshop. We usually get to it right around the time energy is ebbing—a condition we attempt to reverse with our collection of tweets that we've seen about our client and other asset managers. Not all are as complimentary or as playful as the one we show here.
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Whether you're ready to participate on Twitter or other social networks or not, your company is being talked about. Of course, you care about what's being said.

As important as listening has always been, it's essential now. Your company can't opt out. Customers, prospects, partners all are active on the social Web. (The expected benefits of listening to Twitter-using financial advisors is what drove us to develop and operate AdvisorTweets.com.) 

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American Century’s Use Of Social Media: A Work In Progress

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American Century Investments will tell you that they’re “just experimenting” with social media. Currently, they’re adding two posts a week to their Facebook page and one to three tweets a day on Twitter.

These are not volumes that will turn the heads of anyone outside the asset management industry. But within this space, theirs is a story of pushing ahead, slowly and in lockstep with their approachable Legal and Compliance partners, even as they’re figuring things out.

Twitter and Facebook is just a start, explains Jennifer Sussman, director of eBusiness.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to learn what’s being said out there about us and how we can influence that. If you don’t know what’s being said, you can’t act on it. We want to make sure we really understand what the needs of our clients and prospects are, to ultimately get the chance to engage clients and prospects so we can have a stronger relationship with them,” she says.

“You can’t look at what’s happening in the industry and not recognize the power of being in the environment and having these conversations. We need a new kind of dialogue,” says Sussman.

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Twitter Lists Trump Social Media Directory; Introducing Investment Managers Twitter List

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There’s a certain poetry to what we’re doing today.
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Six months ago we created a social media directory to track the adoption by the asset management industry (including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds [ETFs], broker-dealers, financial advisors and investment media) of social media.

Since that time, two of the listings—mutual funds and ETFs using Twitter and financial advisors using Twitter—drew significant traffic from search engines, a welcome boost for this barely one-year-old site. (Notwithstanding our post last week and all other things being equal, we’d prefer to see site traffic climb, too.)

But today we’re redirecting that traffic to other sites where we think the searchers will be better served. Because this is a digital strategy site, we thought our readers might be interested in some of the details. And maybe our rationale will give you some ideas.

Let’s take the listing of mutual funds and ETFs on Twitter first. The following investment managers have Twitter accounts (others are out there but we know these to be bona fide):

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Up Close And Personal On This Social Networking Stuff

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This was one of those rare weeks when I had a blog post all queued up and ready to publish today. But I'm letting two tweets this morning trump my previously scheduled rant (it's about content development—check back next week for it?).

The resistance I see when I'm talking to people about Twitter is not what I used to see when talking about the Internet or Web-based applications. It's not a fear of technology or an ability to work it. It's more of a suspicion or a bias about a communications channel that has developed a reputation for being self-indulgent and/or narcissistic.

Maintain that position, if you will, but I fear that it could stand in the way of your understanding how people are connecting today. And of your planning for your company to take part.

To demonstrate, I've decided to review 30 minutes of my morning with you. OK, I know that sounds narcissistic. I wish you knew me well enough to know that I'm a private person and, truthfully, my tweets are pretty cut-and-dried. Not a whole lot of personal Pat. But I'm offering this walk down near-term memory lane with me to describe how Twitter connects people.

Here we go.

When the schedule allows, I extend my daily updating routine from reading the newspapers to reading my feed reader and my @RockTheBoatMKTG and @AdvisorTweets accounts via a Twitter application that sits on top of my browser. Yes, I have to limit myself time-wise or I'd be following tweets and links to content within the links all day. (This job requires me to keep current. I couldn't afford to invest this time during the workday when I was a corporate employee, either. Hmm, what's wrong with those last two sentences?)

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Facebook: Don't Expect A Lot Of Warm And Fuzzy

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We admired Vanguard on Tuesday for raising a "yellow flag" on how far the markets have come and specifically for commenting on the year-to-date returns of four of its funds.

"It is important to note that Vanguard is not making a call that these funds or any particular market segment are headed for decline," the Web site article said. "Experience tells us, however, that 'hot' markets eventually cool, and thus we encourage investors to have realistic expectations for both risk and reward going forward."

It's the kind of move that inspires brand fandom, and in fact 23 users gave the article an aggregate of four stars on the Vanguard site. Nice.

But then we checked out Vanguard's Facebook page, where the $1.24 trillion investment management company has 3,500 fans. (That's off the charts for the few investment management companies that have a Facebook page but ridiculously low for a top brand.)

Nope. There was no reference to Tuesday's article, and that makes sense since Facebook isn't where an investment manager would comment on its products. Maybe it was a lot to expect comments on Vanguard's warning. Even though the statement was reported on in The Wall Street Journal.

But what we saw instead is what we'd recommend any asset management company review prior to launching a Facebook page with comments.

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