Looking For Love? Bundle The Best Of Your Brand In An App

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The week is starting with two app-related news items—Vanguard's release of an iPhone app for advisors and the news that financial services firms are the enterprises most likely to adopt iPads. We cheer both announcements, as you'll read below in a post that first appeared on the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) Blend site on September 23. The MENG Blend is a blogging initiative featuring bloggers from multiple marketing disciplines and industries. I blog on online marketing and social media.

If we were friends sitting across the table from one another, I’d test your patience by showing you “just one more” application on my iPad.

If we were digital marketing colleagues, we might talk about mobile platforms and analytics.
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Old Way/Social Way: Advisor Log-ins Vs. Web Authentication

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As inspired by our dear departed Yahoo Internet Life’s Old Way/Net Way feature years ago, we last month teed up the idea of contrasting some Old Way/Social Way examples. This is the second in an occasional series. 

Old Way: Advisor Log-ins

Nearly every mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web site has a financial advisor area that requires registration. The old old way (still practiced on some sites today) is to present all unregistered or un-logged-in advisors with a roadblock—a page with nothing on it but a form to use to register or to log in. More progressive sites (see Wells Fargo Advantage Funds and Lord Abbett) start communicating even as they’re asking advisors to register for more.

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Many Fund Companies Exhibited At Schwab's IMPACT2010— These 3 Had The Twitter Hashtag To Themselves

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Asked to provide public examples of where social media participation has paid off for asset managers, we’ve got nothing…yet.

The best public argument we can offer in favor of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm participation in social media right now is this: Asset managers visible on social networks are most likely raising awareness. As cognizant as we are of the work that precedes a regulated firm’s debut on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, the first reason to do it is to see and be seen.
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The Social Way Forces A Rethinking Of Old, Controlling Ways

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When something is new, a little scary and yet ubiquitous, it may be human nature to want to limit what you absolutely need to know about it. Jersey Shore, for example, is something I’ve decided that I don’t need to follow.

In the case of investment company Web sites, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers early on realized that their sites wouldn’t be e-commerce sites. That freed them (us as I was on the inside at that point) from thinking about transaction funnels, search engine optimization and other best practices that e-commerce sites need to master in order to survive.
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Investments Are Researched, Reviewed On Mobile Phones

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Adobe yesterday released survey results that we just have to call your attention to, despite the fact that we commented on mobile phone apps in a post two weeks ago.

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project’s The Rise of Apps Culture had reported on interest in finance apps. But this data from the Adobe Mobile Experience Survey: What Users Want from Media, Finance, Travel & Shopping, October 2010, zeroes in specifically on interest in mutual funds and securities (including ETFs) via both mobile phones' browsers and applications.
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