The Challenge Of Making Remarkable Content

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Five, maybe six, years ago, many asset management marketing communications teams were fairly satisfied with their approach to their work.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms had corralled the words and numbers that populated their run-rate communications, mapped the review and approval processes, and implemented systems designed to assure consistency, timely automated output and even cost-efficiencies. Comparisons to donut-making were not far off.

All of the hard work invested to get to that place was by no means wasted, and enables a significant communication effort today. In the years between 2008-ish and now, a content factory-like approach has also been put in place to support the heightened demand for firms' thought leadership content pieces.  

But, our work is never done. In 2013, the marketplace’s expectations of content have advanced. Increasingly, the requirement is to create content that’s “remarkable.”

What’s required to create remarkable content is too new to be scripted, let alone engineered. Unlike the routine production of largely text-heavy communications for physical and virtual literature shelves, it's exception-based. The pursuit of remarkable content typically extends time to market (except when market conditions require accelerating it!), taps random groups and individuals not typically part of the communications creation chain, invariably increases costs and yields inconsistent results. 

If most other communications are donuts, think of remarkable content as souffles. But oh, the rush (and rewards) when a piece of content satisfies!

The Formula

There is no prescribing a formula for what makes content remarkable today. It’s likely to be visual, more likely to be non-text than text, may tell a story and may strive to move the content consumer, whether in laughter, empathy or sympathy. It’s often ambitious and in that ambition runs a very real risk of falling flat.

Sorry, this doesn’t help much, does it? If you’re like most people, you know remarkable content when you see it—whether you find it yourself or receive an endorsement of it from someone you know. In that spirit, here are three examples of non-industry content that I (along with many, many others) have LOVED or otherwise found remarkable lately, along with some comments for you. 

Help Us Experience Something

Horse races can be thrilling, but watching them on television or even in person is not a wholly satisfying experience.

Two days after this year’s Kentucky Derby, the digital sports information company Trackus published this video of the winning horse’s path from an over-the-shoulder perspective behind the jockey. It’s exhilarating to view, especially for those who watched the race and saw the jockey making his move right around the 1:17 mark. More important, it adds to the spectator's understanding of how thoroughbred races are run.

Simulating the experience of an investor is tough stuff, which is partly why this industry for so long defaulted to photos of silver-haired seniors on sailboats. In form and substance they're anachronisms and fall short of the kinds of communicating that's called for today.

Starting with Web-based portfolio tools and calculators, the industry has been trying to help investors visualize. Last year Merrill Lynch produced its Face Retirement Tool, which enables people to age a photo of themselves. And, Vanguard’s My Life Ticker campaign, released this March, aims to help investors focus on why they invest and the key factors in their investment success.

There is still lots of room for your firm to offer its own take.

Share Data That Only You Have

I challenge you to bounce off the YouTube Trends Map—you can’t, you won’t! Google’s sharing of the most popular YouTube videos right now, as filtered by location, gender, age group will keep you riveted well longer than five seconds. And then you might bookmark the URL or email/social share to others. It is remark-able.

We see limited data sharing in this space. Every quarter Fidelity produces an analysis of its 401(k) accounts as sort of a time and temperature report on workers’ readiness for retirement. PowerShares shares its ETF inflow data as well as its most viewed Website pages for the week.

I’d be surprised if there’s much LOLing at the asset management content being published today, but smiles and chuckles? It's still slim pickings when trying to find content that’s created to amuse. A few examples include the efforts made in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds' Daily Advantage e-newsletter, SEI’s sharing of photos in its annual ugly sweater contest or the occasional asset manager (namely, @AdvisorShares and First Trust’s @Wesbury) tweets. 

Humor is essential to relationship-building. It’s not just other industries that are incorporating humor into their online communications, it’s financial advisors and firms that serve financial advisors, too. Check out this video from Bob Veres, editor/publisher of Inside Information.

For how much longer can we avoid humor, even while striving to produce more natural investment communications? The introduction of levity is a next frontier for asset managers seeking to optimize and humanize the reach of what they have to say. 

As a matter of fact, just in case this post didn't evoke any emotion on your part, I will close now with an amateur video that I am certain will endear itself to you as something remarkable. In your content planning, don't be too quick to rule out turning to animal videos. Just don't dwell on the words in this one.

Bonus update: Compelling content was the focus of a May 30 Webinar I participated in, along with Morningstar’s Leslie Marshall and financial advisor marketing consultant Kristen Luke. The discussion “Social Media Content Beyond 140 Characters,” as moderated by Blane Warrene of RegEd, covered a lot of ground, as you'll hear in the replay embedded below. 

What Happens When The Conversation Hits Too Close To Home

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The concept of “joining the conversation” can seem a bit artificial. Few online “conversations” are in progress for any length of time and they’re not that easy to pick up on. Besides, most of the time we hit the Web with our own ideas (conversation-starters, if you will) that we hope someone else will get behind and help distribute.

But on April 23, PBS’ Frontline aired a documentary that has prompted an ongoing online conversation about retirement funding and the expense of retirement plans. As tipped off by the title, The Retirement Gamble, the content was provocative. Its position: That fund fees are eroding retirement savings while fund companies and financial advisors in the 401(k) and retirement planning business profit. In the event that you missed it, here’s the link.

The documentary stimulated lots of debate. Most if not all of the online publications that cover finance or retirement issues took note of it, as did all of the leading advisor publications and a few advisor blogs. I’ve added some links at the bottom of this post for you to read a sampling of reactions.  

For another measure of the response to this one-hour television program, see the amount of commenting and social sharing happening on the sites that reported on the documentary. The 12,000 Facebook Recommends, 1,800 tweets and 448 Google+ shares on the PBS site are just the start.

Search interest in the term “retirement gamble” and the related “frontline retirement gamble” search merited a break-out appearance on Google Trends.


Some commentators thought the coverage was fair, others thought it was biased. I’m not going to weigh in on any of that. My interest was in how fund companies would react. Years ago, there would have been no response. But the industry has developed a contemporaneous communications competency, aided by the availability of digital channels and tools. I thought that firms would chime in, on their own sites and maybe in comments on others’.

The Industry's Response

Mindful that the “crafting,” routing and review of a communication on this topic could take a few weeks at some firms, I waited to do a sweep of who said what. But even though I track mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) content fairly closely, I hadn’t seen word one. So, I did what anybody else might do (indeed, lots of searchers have already done, as the Google Trends graph shows) and went to Google.

I reviewed all the Google search results for “retirement gamble” and “retirement PBS” looking for an asset manager-authored commentary. The closest I came was an endorsement on JohnCBogle.com, whose footer has a standing disclaimer: “The opinions presented do not necessarily represent those of Vanguard's current management.” 

So, then I searched the asset manager blogs. (This is the kind of topic that blogs are made for!) While I found a few posts about proprietary retirement research (representing conversations that firms wanted to start themselves), my on-site “retirement gamble” and “PBS” searches showed up nothing.

As a final check, I turned to Ignites.com, the subscription-only news site for the mutual fund industry and yes, there were a few articles about the industry’s response to the show.

The first bore the headline, “Industry Blasts PBS Documentary on Retirement,” while “Documentary Damaged Industry's Rep: Poll” headlined the second. According to a poll taken of Ignites readership, “although 38% do not perceive The Retirement Gamble as having inflicted reputational damage, most expressing that view do not perceive the industry as being unscathed either.”

It was from the second article that I learned that at least two firms—Vanguard and Buckingham Asset Management—had commented on The Retirement Gamble on their sites. Vanguard was critical while Buckingham called it a must-watch.

The Ignites article left room for the possibility that other firms are also addressing the documentary in their own way. That made sense. It would be almost impossible to believe that public television could have aired an investigative report on a $10 trillion industry and the industry would have barely made a peep. Surely, talking points were created, media availabilities were distributed to the press, customer service people were prepped with scripts.

A Sustainable Strategy?

But, what about online and in public where much of the debate is happening?

Ignites quoted marketing consultant April Rudin as suggesting (but not necessarily agreeing with) that some firms would be choosing not to refer to the documentary by name to keep from giving it any more attention.

Seriously? The industry’s response is symptomatic of thinking that predates a time before today. A time when there was a lopsided relationship between brands and consumers. When brands, which had the resources to control messaging and communication platforms, effectively dictated who gets attention and who doesn’t.            

While asset managers can refuse to dignify the documentary with a public response, they can’t impose silence on others. As shown in their comments and social shares, empowered clients (investors and advisors) are taking to the Web to react, to compare notes with others and to wonder about whether their 401(k) plan providers’ interests are aligned with theirs.

Ignoring a controversy central to the fund industry’s business won’t make it go away. And, it will endear the industry no further to its clients.

Preparing a response without acknowledging PBS or The Retirement Gamble by name advances nothing. It simply raises the likelihood that a firm's statement will be overlooked in the online debate, some of which is driven by keyword-specific searches.  

Vanguard is one of this industry’s communications leaders but it wasn’t one of the firm’s finest moments when they published an April 29 blog post that studiously avoids the documentary’s name. I count more than 30 comments, including comments made to other commenters, on the post. The first comment was to the point: “Thanks for the article. What is the name of the documentary?” It was another commenter on the post who provided the title and a link.

This is the world we live in. Others can be expected to initiate and conduct conversations that are not flattering to us or that we would prefer to avoid. The conversation on retirement funding and affordability, specifically, is one that can benefit from more discourse by more informed entities. There is a lot of confusion out there, revealed not created by The Retirement Gamble.  

From the luxury of my perch outside your four walls, this looks like a communications opportunity for asset managers that are willing to step up, to address issues head-on, to listen and to show themselves to be accountable in public even when on the defense.     

Or, maybe you disagree. If you do or if I have somehow missed something, I hope you’ll say so below.

Also see (included in part for their mix of reader comments):

  • 401(k) Documentary Ruffles Feathers
  • Advisors Stung By Frontline Attack
  • The Dull Task of Decoding 401(k) Fees Matters
  • The Retirement Gamble
  • Winning The Retirement Gamble: Step 1 Adjust Your Mindset

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    Inside The iShares Social Media Strategy

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    Update: After being marked private for a few weeks, an edited version (representing about one-third of what was presented) of the video mentioned below is now public.

    Here’s a rare treat for you. Yesterday, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions released a series of videos from its FinanceConnect:13 conference held in New York last week. Included among them was the presentation by iShares’ Eileen Loustau, Global Head of Social Media Marketing. It’s a 55-minute inside-asset-management-social media talk from one of the industry’s leaders in social media, responsible for both the iShares and the BlackRock social presence.

    You’ll hear how iShares defines its target audience as sophisticated investors—“we’ve decided to allow the competition to go ahead and talk to people who know nothing,” Loustau says at 11:27.

    At the same time, listen to how iShares has rethought what Loustau calls investment communicators' previously deferential relationship with financial advisors. “We were shocked…financial advisors just want you to tell them what to do,” she says. Her explanation of that perspective starts at 6:09.

    Loustau acknowledges that her team of 10 and the broader “content machine” is blessed by the availability of three dedicated Compliance resources, at least one of whom she insists work right next to her. Blog post review takes less than two hours and tweets about 5 minutes, she says at 53:28. (Is it just my imagination or can I hear the collective sighs of everyone else out there with a less dreamy Compliance relationship?)

    And then there’s the money part. Loustau can make the case that iShares social media participation is worth as much as $18 million in earned media, a number that has climbed steadily since the launch of its @iSharesETFs Twitter account, blog and other work in late 2010. Listen starting at 45:15.

    Thanks to Loustau for sharing her team’s reasoned approach and to LinkedIn for both streaming the conference live and then posting this video and others from the conference.

    Affirmed: Social Media Now Part Of Advisors', Professional Investors' Workdays

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    I actually remember where I was when the results of the first American Century survey of financial professionals’ use of social media were released four years ago.

    I’d been following financial advisors on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and their blogs as just another one of my unstructured online diversions. I didn't know where it was going. To me the publication of the survey was a profound development: By going so far as to commission a study, an asset manager was acknowledging social media as a relevant activity for advisors.

    In that 2010 survey, only 26% of respondents ranked social media as having value to their business. Nearly one-fourth said they didn’t want to receive information via social media. Of those who used social media for business purposes, almost one-fifth (19%) did so daily, but 49% said they used social media less than once per week.

    Fast forward four years, and an Ignites reporter and I were chuckling yesterday as we were reviewing American Century’s fourth annual survey results.

    Uh, what’s the news in the latest findings?

    In the years between American Century’s first and fourth survey—to the probable relief of both financial advisors and asset managers—things have stabilized sufficiently that there is no obvious, dramatic news. Nine out of 10 advisors now have a social media account and the evidence is mounting that they find value in social activities. Twitter usage has climbed since the last survey. Oh and Instagram makes its first appearance in the results.

    This year’s study documents what has been a gradual embrace and now reliance on the content that can be found on social networks.

    Reliance? That’s how I interpret the increase in advisors using social media more than once a week—61% report using social media at least once a week, 39% several times a week and 10% multiple times a day (a datapoint that’s down from 16% in 2012). 

    This suggests that there is consistent value in the content that’s being exchanged. Mining social networks for content worth reading and worth sharing has become part of many advisors’ workday routines. It’s a win-win-win, for the advisors, for the content creator (including participating asset managers who recognize the opportunity) and for the networks themselves.

    A Direct Channel To Professional Investors

    News last week produced another concrete example of why it’s good to share via Twitter, specifically. Bloomberg announced that it would incorporate a curated list of Twitter accounts into its data service. 

    From the press release: “Bloomberg Professional service subscribers can now monitor and analyze real-time Twitter updates issued by corporations, executives, government officials, economists, commentators, media outlets and other voices that can influence the financial markets. By incorporating live Twitter feeds directly into its financial information platform, Bloomberg integrates social media content with users’ existing investment workflow so market participants avoid the disruption caused by monitoring separate systems for different types of market-moving information.”

    Bloomberg isn’t releasing the list of people and companies that they make available on the terminals, but some subscribers have uploaded some names. When I didn’t see any investment managers on the lists of names being published, I emailed Bloomberg and attached the @RockTheBoatMKTG Twitter list of Investment managers to see if they would comment about whether any investment managers were on the list of "voices that can influence the financial markets." 

    After a little email back and forth, here was the response:  “Yes, Bloomberg follows select companies, including investment managers.” 

    For those of you with Twitter accounts, this integration represents a new channel. How else would your communications regularly stream to Bloomberg terminals? Never before have you had such access to professional investors. 

    (Do you have a work buddy with access to a Bloomberg terminal? You might want to confirm your firm’s inclusion. Subscribers can go to {TWTR<GO>} and select option 8 "People" to query people whose tweets can be followed or searched.) 

    Again, back to the official statement: “Bloomberg classifies tweets by company, asset class, person and topic, making it easy for institutional investors, traders, corporate executives and government agencies to track updates related to a specific industry or market, their portfolio holdings or an online personality.” 

    This Is What's New

    Taken together, the 2013 American Century research and the Bloomberg integration are proof that Twitter content (and content shared on other networks in the case of advisors) has become a part of systematic information-gathering. This is what’s being affirmed in 2013.

    Decision-makers that you and your firm care about are showing that they're serious about what can be learned via social media. If you’ve approached your social posts in a half-hearted way (come on, we can do better than tweeting the availability of updated fund profiles) and/or posted on an occasional schedule, or if you have yet to “join the conversation,” it's time for you to get serious, too.

    Minutes after I published this post Tuesday morning, I came across (via Twitter, naturally) two related posts that I recommend to you: 

    Questions Raised By Cogent's Social Media Research

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    On Friday Cogent Research released high-level findings of its recent research about social media and affluent investors. I tweeted about the research and posted a LinkedIn status update about it, but I couldn’t quite shake some questions it raised for me.

    The work has me thinking about social media measurement, the role that social media participation plays in an overall communications mix and the impact to date of social media in the investment industry.

    Read More