Behind the scenes of AdvisorTweets.com
Financial Advisors, Are You Using RSS Feeds?
Mar 1st
We’d like to second the question that @AdvPerspectives asked this morning via Twitter. Advisor Perspectives is an online publication whose target audience includes fee-only financial advisors. We’ve been a fan but, because we’re mad RSS-users (and AdvisorTweets is riddled with them), we always wondered why the site didn’t offer RSS feeds.
As of today, they do (subscribe here), which they announced via Twitter. And they ended the tweet with the question we’d like to ask, as well: Is this valuable for you?
We care for a few reasons.
Financial advisors who tweet are managing a firehose of information. RSS can make your work easier and more enjoyable. Those of you who are actively creating content beyond Twitter also have reason to consider RSS for your sites. If you don’t use RSS but are curious, watch this excellent Brainshark tutorial from RidgeWorth Investments.
We believe that the lack of RSS feeds is one of the glaring deficiencies of asset manager sites and we consistently urge our Rock The Boat Marketing clients to add RSS. We specifically cite financial advisors as a key audience who will benefit by using RSS subscriptions as opposed to needing to continually check back on a site.
But if you, the most wired financial advisors (online and tweeting), say that you’re lukewarm on RSS, maybe we need to dial back the urgency of getting RSS added. (We still think it’s a must feature to offer for other content consumers, though.)
Please, we’d love to get your feedback–either comment below, reply via Twitter or send us an email.
Barron’s Top Advisors List The Latest To Demonstrate Broadbrush (Negative) Views of Advisors
Feb 21st
All financial advisors are the same and none deliver the value they claim to.
It’s a recurring theme in comments on online media content about financial advisors. Today’s post is prompted by the Barron’s Top 1,000 Financial Advisors list, an annual feature that attracted zero comments this time last year but has 17 comments so far this weekend. The tone reminded us of the readers’ comments (52) on a New York Times article in October 2009 about financial planners.
In general, commenters are using the broadest of brushes to negatively characterize financial advisors and the services they provide.
And Barron’s is catching some heat, too, for its advisor metrics. One commenter questions: “Why aren’t the average performance of the advisor’s accounts given? Ninety seven per cent retention rate says more about salesmanship than the advisors’ abilities.” And, a few savvy writers note the reprint revenue to be expected from producing such lists.
We contrast the gist of these comments with the content and tone of the individual financial advisors’ tweets we see in the daily AdvisorTweets stream. Twitter—and other forms of social media—affords advisors visibility with which many are building credible personal brands that help set them apart from what “everybody” considers the “typical” financial advisor.
An investor couldn’t select a financial advisor on the basis of the Barron’s list but just might learn something about an advisor whose tweets he or she follows.
Did You Hear The One About The Company That Forced Its Employee…?
Feb 10th
We’ve been watching something develop since yesterday. It’s fascinating in terms of what it demonstrates about social media, the “conversations” social media prompts and the apparently evocative topic of financial advisors and social networking.
Yesterday morning we came across a New Comm Biz blog post headlined “Company Forces Employee To Delete LinkedIn Profile.” It was about an email that blogger Tac Anderson said he received from a friend who cited FINRA’s social media guidance as the reason he was being forced to take down his LinkedIn profile. The friend is not identified as a financial advisor. Anderson, a Digital Consulting Director for the public relations firm Waggener Edstrom, asked another friend for comment and then concluded the post by asking if others were similarly affected.
As of this writing, close to 600 tweets have been distributed about this blog post, helped in large part by a tweet from social media celebrity @Chris Brogan and @BethHarte, MarketingProfs’ community manager. We sent out a tweet, too, although we had misgivings. We understand why Anderson declined to name the firm or his friend. Still, there’s still a little bit of journalist left in us to keep us from getting too worked up about an unattributed story.
Adding to our vague discomfort, although it is probably neither here nor there, was the copy above the link. As opposed to including the blog post headline, it was a promotion for Viagra.
Throughout yesterday, many people–including our followers familiar with FINRA and the issues as well as lots of others–hopped on this unsubstantiated story. Go to this bit.ly page to see how one tweet spread, including internationally. In their broadening of the story and FINRA’s reach, some of the tweets began to take on all the characteristics of the old-fashioned telephone game.
- @susioneill Financial sector tackle social media by trying to delete it-employees must delete Linked-in profiles http://bit.ly/cAzea6 (via@jamiehudson)
- @complianceweek Because of FINRA compliance!!! RT @ConversationAge: Company Forces Employee to Delete LinkedIn Profile http://ow.ly/15JML
- @kyleproctor For all you bankers/finance using SM, good read RT @ConversationAge: Company Forces Employee to Delete LinkedIn Profile http://ow.ly/15JML
We marvel at the reaction that the post has evoked. But we call your attention, too, to the comments, which are a great illustration of how social media mixes it all up. The discussion of registered representatives’ use of social networking sites is not a topic that will be confined to the industry itself or to industry insiders. At another time and off-line, well regarded compliance experts Mark Astarita and Doug Cornelius might not be compelled to get involved in this kind of conversation. Both of them have blogged about FINRA guidance on their own sites. But note how they seek to provide some context in the comments to the post.
By the way, the story is contrary to what we’ve heard from a few firms (nope, we’re not naming them either) since last week’s FINRA Webinar. The few that we’ve spoken to say, as a result of the FINRA guidance issued, that they’re starting to focus on the social networking sites, with LinkedIn as the first frontier.
Don’t Look For Re-tweets From FINRA-Regulated Advisors
Feb 3rd
As it stands today, FINRA considers re-tweeting “adoption”–attributable to the firm and, consequently, probably prohibited. That was one of the few clear surprises in FINRA’s Webinar on Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites held today.
Adoption and entanglement are two concepts “borrowed” from the SEC and applied to third-party posts in FINRA’s Social Media Web Sites Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites. The guidance was released last week and elaborated on in today’s Webinar, which attracted 700 registrants.
Firms are free to develop and define what adoption and entanglement means to them, said Vice President and Director, Advertising Regulation, Thomas A. Pappas, leaving a glimmer of hope that a firm could define adoption less narrowly. Using Facebook’s Like feature is also adoption, confirmed Amy C. Sochard, Director, Programs & Investigations, Advertising Regulation, with no apparent hesitation.
Training, supervision and personal use were focuses of the Webinar, which was a mix of presentation and question-answering. Chad Bockius from SocialWare (@bockius) provided a running account of the Webinar using #FINRASN and we recommend it to you.
Strong interest in social media appears to be driving several FINRA deliverables. A replay of today’s Webinar will be available in a few weeks, and Pappas said a podcast and training offering is in the works. An additional Webinar “Implementing Compliance Procedures for Social Media” has been scheduled for March 17.
FINRA Issues Social Media Guidance: Tweets Do Not Require Prior Approval
Jan 25th
At about mid-day today, FINRA released its 10-page Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites. (A tip of the hat to @BillWinterberg who was first among our tweeps to spot the regulatory notice.)
Others might disagree or read something in between the lines, but to us the guidance seems reasonable. Of course, FINRA will insist on record-keeping and supervision. And specific investment product recommendations are obviously trouble–in fact, FINRA says a prohibition would be a best practice unless the content posted was previously approved by a registered principal.
But we think that the door to the marketing potential of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for financial advisors and firms swings open with FINRA’s distinction between “static content” requiring the prior approval of a registered principal and “non-static content,” which does not require prior approval.
FINRA acknowledges that Twitter and Facebook provide for non-static, real-time communications, such
as interactive posts. “The portion of a social networking site that provides for these interactive communications constitutes an interactive electronic forum, and firms are not required to have a registered principal approve these communications prior to use,” FINRA says.
This could have been the deal-breaker. What FINRA describes as static content on social networking sites–profile, background or wall information–must be approved by a registered principal prior to posting. It’s more work for a Compliance review group but it’s manageable. If, on the other hand, all tweets by everybody needed to be approved prior to posting, social networking would be dead on arrival for FINRA-regulated entities in the investment industry.
Please read FINRA’s press release and the regulatory notice for all of the details.
There will be much more to come on this, including at the February 3 FINRA Webinar. (FINRA announced its rescheduling from March 17 via email this afternoon.)
From our perspective, the topic of social media participation has moved from “FINRA won’t let us” to “How long will it take for Compliance to prepare our policies and procedures?”
This announcement is great timing for tomorrow’s Investment News Webinar on Advisors and LinkedIn. See you there?
And, of course, we’re interested in what you think of the FINRA guidance–as always, we welcome your comments below.
Financial Advisors, Social Networking & FINRA: This Debate Is On
Jan 13th
In the last 12-15 months several Web sites have been developed to enable social networking for “financial professionals.” In a few cases, the term “financial professionals” includes the breadth of a network that a client would turn to for financial planning help, including financial advisors but CPAs, attorneys and insurance salespeople, too. Often the networks’ purpose and revenue model is to bring professional and client together.
We don’t have a dog in this fight (let alone a revenue model!). AdvisorTweets is a labor of love for us and we benefit in meaningful ways from the interaction it affords us. Beyond trying to keep AT up and loading quicker, we’re content just aggregating and reading financial advisor tweets.
So we’re just fascinated with the positioning that’s going on with these networks and what can be learned from the discussion. This is a great time to watch the distribution end of the investment industry put social media on for size.
(And as a quick digression, we see that Raymond James is spending some time on Twitter lately with its @RaymondJames‘ Twitter account created in December and its @RJAdvisorChoice account. We know about Northwestern Mutual’s account [@NM_News] and see imposter accounts but if you know of other broker-dealers on Twitter, please comment below.)
But, back to the debate. Yesterday a blog from Facetime Communications questioned LinkedFA’s very reason for being. LinkedFA, to be launched at some point this month, is marketing itself as the “first and only FINRA-compliant social networking site for financial professionals.”
“Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t comply,” says the video on the LinkedFA site, which doesn’t acknowledge the more targeted social networks that have been created such as Fabeetle and FinanceAnswers.
The LinkedFA compliant claim sounds pretty interesting, right?
But, “Why would financial professionals want a ‘walled-garden’ social media site in the first place? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the objective?” asked FaceTime’s Kailash Ambwani on the FaceForward blog. Facetime’s product line, we should note, includes regulatory compliance solution for financial services customers.
LinkedFA posted its response, and this debate is now off and running.
Yo Sigmund! The Psychological Profile Of AdvisorTweets
Jan 4th
Yes, there are at least one dozen other things we should be doing on the first workday of 2010. But let’s never mind that for now.
Later in the week we’ll be updating our stats on the financial advisors that make up the AdvisorTweets.com universe. But when we saw an announcement today that TweetPsych creates psychological profiles of Twitter lists, we just had to give it a whirl. AdvisorTweets’ very reason for being is to follow financial advisors and better understand what what’s on their minds. And now there’s an app for that?
We submitted the full AdvisorTweets Twitter list for comparison with the thousands of other Twitter lists in the database. That’s how TweetPsych identifies traits that occur more or less frequently in the list analyzed.
Above is a screenshot for the profile. Given the nature of the list, which is drawn from who we follow on the curated AdvisorTweets site, we’re not surprised by the most frequently mentioned topic (money) or the least (sex). But the rankings of some of the other mentions (e.g., negative sentiments getting above average mentions and positive sentiments mentioned less than average) surprised us.
Above Average Mentions
- Money (257%)
- Leisure (38%)
- Time (13%)
- The Future (13%)
- Negative sentiments more than average: 10%
Less Than Average Mentions
- Work (-2%)
- The Present (-9%)
- Constructive behavior (-10%)
- Conceptual thoughts (-11%)
- Anxiety (-18%)
- Emotions (-18%)
- Social behaviors (-22%)
- Positive sentiments (-24%)
- Primordial content, defined as “lower level dream-state and unconscious modes of thought”) (-28%)
- The Past (-28%)
- Numbers (-33%)
- Learning and education (-37%)
- Senses (-40%)
- Self reference (-46%)
- Media (-48%)
- Sex (-79%)
Then just for fun, we thought we’d compare the advisors’ profile with the @RockTheBoatMKTG InvestmentManagers Twitter list. While individuals stand behind the advisors’ Twitter accounts, the investment managers on Twitter (18 that we know of) tweet with largely institutional personalities.
Again, no surprises at either end but the investment managers’ account profiles varied a bit from the advisors. The largest variations are in boldface.
Above Average Mentions Investment Managers Twitter List Results In Red
- Money (257%) 401%
- Leisure (38%) -88%
- Time (13%) N/A
- The Future (13%) -15%
- Negative sentiments more than average: 10% -74%
Less Than Average Mentions
- Work (-2%) 66%
- The Present (-9%) -33%
- Constructive behavior (-10%) 14%
- Conceptual thoughts (-11%) 16%
- Anxiety (-18%) -28%
- Emotions (-18%) -55%
- Social behaviors (-22%) 6%
- Positive sentiments (-24%) -36%
- Primordial content, defined as “lower level dream-state and unconscious modes of thought”) (-28%) -18%
- The Past (-28%) -75%
- Numbers (-33%) -21%
- Learning and education (-37%) 97%
- Senses (-40%) -44%
- Self reference (-46%) -80%
- Media (-48%) -60%
- Sex (-79%) -93%
OK, back to work.
3 Financial Advisors Who Innovated In 2009
Dec 29th
2009 was a very different year, wasn’t it? For everyone associated with investing. Personally, we’ll remember it as the first year that we had a view into the everyday life of financial advisors, thanks to Twitter. We think it’s sharpened our understanding of what advisors need and hence the value we bring to our clients.
As we review our direct tweets from the year, we see lots of dialogue with our fave advisors and the people we consider as part of the financial advisor support system. We’re also reminded of our interactions with advisors who have since stopped tweeting or have deleted their accounts altogether. We wish them well and look forward to re-connecting in 2010.
But as the days dwindle down to a precious two, we call your attention to three advisors whose tweets we’ve been following all year and who are included on AdvisorTweets.com. The advisors stand out to us both because we can see what they’re doing and because what they’re doing strikes us as pretty innovative. While their accomplishments are familiar to those in the Twitter stream, we thought we’d note them here for those outside the Twitter echo chamber.
We wrote about @RussThornton on our RockTheBoatMarketing.com blog in April. Russ founded the FinancialAdvisor Forum which offers advisors true networking. We show it to clients when we fear they’re on the verge of over-investing in their advisor content sites–if advisors are going to network, they’re likelier to network on Russ’ site.
Russ is a bit of a technology geek, which we mean as a compliment. We’ve shared notes with him off and on this year and were sorry when he said he was leaving Twitter in the fall. He’s back on Twitter now and offering a free five-part email course that offers to show investors “how to take control of your wealth management.” A couple of advisors have tweeted their approval.
Carl Richards’ (@BehaviorGap) work on his own BehaviorGap.com site and syndicated on MorningstarAdvior.com set the tone early in the year with his sketches and writing that seek to reveal and understand investor motivation. As you’ll note in his bio, he describes himself as the Founder of the Secret Society of REAL Financial Planners, a group he made up this year.
We commented on Carl’s rock star status in our ebook (5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media) in May, and we continually show the Behavior Gap work to our clients within asset management companies. There’s an economy (and a directness) to its messages that many mutual fund/ETF marketing communications lack.
Carl is on Financial Planning’s list of Movers and Shakers of the year.
Good Financial Cents, the blog of Jeff Rose, CFP (@jeffrosecfp) yesterday published a rich list of the top 135-plus 2009 personal finance posts as selected by the bloggers that wrote them. From my perspective as a former journalist and publisher, the work involved in coordinating the collection alone was impressive. What it shows, as we’ve seen all year as his work has been syndicated, is that this financial planner has serious content marketing chops, including search engine optimization savvy.
There’s still so much room for advisors to innovate and interact in new ways online. These three don’t cover the waterfront, by any means. (And if you have additional names to add, please comment below.)
Here’s to the new year and what it brings as advisors elevate their art of communicating their value online!
What To Do Before The Year’s End? A Bevy Of Financial Advisors Offer Tips
Dec 21st
Starting mid-November, the financial advisors who make up the AdvisorTweets.com universe have been doing what they can to focus investors on year-end financial planning considerations. There are investment gains and losses to be harvested, tax credits to be pursued and deductions to be accelerated. Below are some tweets with links to advisor-produced content.
In addition, advisors have found (and sent links to) a wealth of articles about year-end financial decisions. Use the AdvisorTweets’ Search box to find more on specific topics.
@jdbuerger Here are some great End of Year Tax Planning Tips for 2009 http://bit.ly/8ByFuk
@CurtisASmithCFP Two weeks left 2009. “Year-End Financial Moves” http://ow.ly/Mu0R
@MHSchneider 2009 Year End Tax Planning: http://bit.ly/6NnQeI
@BestAtlWealth Check out: “17 Tax Tips for Year End | Best Atlanta Wealth Management” (http://twitthis.com/saoiz4)
@OliverPlanning My year-end financial planning tips: http://bit.ly/8WWaup http://bit.ly/4FAICh
@rwohlner The end of the year presents financial opportunities and challenges. Talk with a NAPFA, Fee-Only advisor – http://bit.ly/JUWf5
Building Financial Advisor Referrals
Dec 17th
“When people stop looking at marketing as an event and start thinking about it as a system, everything changes.” Those were the words of small business marketing expert John Jantsch at Wednesday’s Word of Mouth Marketing Supergenius conference held in Chicago.
Having just researched a book on “highly referrable” small business professionals, Jantsch of DuctTapeMarketing.com had a lot to say about building referral systems. Afterward, we asked him a few questions about earning financial advisor referrals specifically.
In this three-minute video, Jantsch recommends following a thoughtful process that relies on advisor-produced content. Advisors’ work on Twitter (as showcased on AdvisorTweets.com) and their other social media activities provide a real-time way for clients and prospects to get to know advisors, what Jantsch considers a prerequisite to earning prospects’ interest and winning client referrals.
