As I wrote in Cloud Computing and RIAs, the IT world is changing pretty rapidly. And although we serve as a technology consultant for many investment advisory firms, our role has already begun to shift from a pure on-site network management position to that of a systems integrator, reflecting the recent embrace of cloud-based platforms within the investment advisory community.

Returning to yesterday’s email, in it Dell touts the company’s market share leadership in x86 servers (who uses x86 anything anymore?) while planting the idea that the company will become more of a platform-based systems and data provider. While this announcement didn’t really surprise us, what is surprising is the amount of time it took for Dell to read the writing on the wall – and that is trying to survive primarily off of hardware sales is a surefire way to find yourself six feet under in today’s world of technology. The problem Dell will have moving forward is that as of right now, the big three weathermakers in enterprise cloud platforms – Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – all have extremely rich service offerings that have set the proverbial “bar” quite high for any provider trying to break into that segment of the market.

In over 20 years of technology consulting, we have witnessed how time has become existing technology’s worst enemy because time waits for no one. Tech firms can either use time wisely or foolishly. While Dell has rested comfortably on its hardware business, other companies have already spent the time and resources necessary to ascend the cloud platform learning curve – 10 years ago. These companies have emerged with very solid, enterprise-grade offerings that may, in the end, prove to be insurmountable to Dell if the company actually intends to try to compete mono y mono.

Bringing this discussion back to your advisory business model, mistakes made in technology investments can prove quite costly. And the degree of complexity in today’s tech-centered world is unprecedented. We serve as forward-looking technologists who help our clients navigate uncharted waters, often choosing to make conservative investments in technology while liberally exploiting technological advancements. It’s a role we take quite seriously and one which has earned us countless referrals. If you would like to initiate a conversation regarding the many ways IAS can become an asset to your firm, simply reach out to us today!

Any comments or questions, add ‘em below!

Ordinarily, it’s exactly these types of reporting exceptions and special requests from clients that kill the automation efficiency of an RIA’s back office. However, in this case, after we customized a standard Axys catalog report, our client now has the ability to deliver a customized performance reporting package tailored specifically to the desires of a single client.

If you would like to learn how we can help your firm manage individual client requests like this one without frustrating your operations staff, contact us today!

For this project, we first helped our client define their investment approach – generally the most difficult part of the process even though, in this case, they have been using this approach everyday for over 30 years. We then worked with their team to determine the best way to bring this investment approach to life so that it could become an asset to the firm’s online branding efforts.

The end result of our efforts can be viewed below. Additional samples of our branding work with video for this firm can be viewed on this page. If you have any comments, please add them below. And if you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.

Networks for All

Along with the LAN came various competitive protocol stacks including AppleTalk, IPX/SPX, TCP/IP, and NetBIOS – each vying for a foothold in the distributed computing wars between competing (mostly) network file & print server operating systems. Small business benefited the most from this competition as even the smallest companies were able to afford corporate LANs that facilitated the sharing of data. Client-server apps grew in popularity due to the proliferation of LANs of all types and topologies including Ethernet, Token-Ring, 100VG, and ARCNet. Finally, TCP/IP rose to the top as the Internet became a ubiquitous phenomenon, even as bandwidth options increased.

A Complete Circle

In the mid-2000′s, virtualization technology came to the forefront when companies such as VMWare and Microsoft essentially gave away the ability for anyone to run virtual machines, thus completing the full circle of distributed computing – from centralized processing coupled with dumb terminals to networked PC’s and then back to centralized processing using VMs launched from a server residing in a remote data center.

Big Data in the Sky

And it’s this virtualization technology that is largely responsible for the instantaneous growth of cloud computing platforms. Having the ability to inexpensively allocate chunks of hardware resources from a single physical machine serving data to multiple disparate parties has redefined the early 21st century IT landscape.

Certainly, the largest investors in cloud computing – Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – have bet big that the corporate world will embrace this model and reallocate their data from an onsite server to an offsite cloud. We think the big providers are going to reap handsome returns on this bet because the benefits to most end users are just too attractive: minimal to zero onsite IT staff/equipment required, access data anywhere from any device, no more worries about maintaining IPSec & SSL VPNs, no more data center maintenance/patching, and the list continues…

But What’s Best for RIAs?

For RIAs, several issues surrounding data integrity, confidentiality, encryption, and access can be raised, particularly depending on which portfolio management software package your firm uses. For our Axys clients, we generally recommend they retain that dataset onsite due to the file structure used by Axys. For those firms that refuse to maintain their Axys installation onsite, we offer to take possession of their data and host that data on their behalf once we create a private cloud infrastructure between their firm (and any other remote office locations) and our data center.

For RIAs looking to experiment with cloud computing, we generally recommend allocating a handful of office-type documents, void of any confidential information, to the host that offers the feature-set and terms and conditions most relevant to the firm’s operational preferences just to evaluate the service. For our clients, we take care of this process for them and setup all of their devices for anywhere access to these files.

If your firm has been contemplating the benefits of transitioning either partially or entirely to a cloud computing IT model, contact us for a free no obligation, no cost consultative meeting. If you would like to add to this discussion, please comment below. And if you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.

Few would debate the notion that we live in a media-driven world today. So when one of our clients approached us to discuss options to redeploy the firm’s website, the topic at the top of our list was media generation. Specifically, what’s the most effective way to integrate media generation with a firm’s intellectual capital content for inbound marketing purposes?

Online Branding

Of course what we’re really getting at when we talk about leveraging media within the RIA business model is the desire to build and maintain a strong brand to both increase client engagement and build firm awareness among prospective clients. The beautiful thing about the Internet is the manner in which it facilitates the sharing and distribution of digital media in order to extend a firm’s brand once developed. And that’s why digital media and digital assets are the most important elements in a marketing strategy today.

Never has it been easier or cheaper to distribute your marketing collateral globally. We are no longer at the mercy of the major broadcast networks for our message dissemination. Nor do we have to spend considerable amounts of money on physical assets for distribution. Suddenly, the world has become very small and very immediate in terms of message reach.

Media Creation + Web Development

Bringing this discussion back to our services, we consider ourselves very fortunate to have all of the skill and production equipment in house necessary to professionally produce all forms of digital media — from HD video to digital stills to live media broadcast streaming. Combined with our web development expertise, it becomes apparent how we act as a public relations department for each of our clients, responsible for taking a firm philosophy and building and maintaining an attractive brand.

Our clients appreciate working with one firm which generally results in achieving an end result that is much more closely aligned with the original design objectives in less time.

The collage that forms the graphic on our homepage associated with this work example was derived from employee photographs we shot and produced to anchor our client’s “Our Team” section and individual bio pages of their new website. We also helped the firm produce and arrange employee biographical information designed to raise existing and prospective client engagement.

Contact us today to discuss how modern web development combined with media production can increase your firm’s AUM!

If you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is simply marketing efforts designed to facilitate the discovery of your firm through your target market’s own Internet-related activities. This means instead of you finding your most qualified leads, they will find you. Some of the key drivers of inbound marketing include social media use, Web 2.0 development frameworks, video-based content, search engine optimization efforts, RSS feeds, and webinars. The common denominator here is content, thus proving, once again, content truly is king for online visibility! For RIAs, that content, parked in clear view on your website (as I discussed in Website Development for RIAs), should represent your firm’s intellectual capital which will differentiate your firm from your peers. For the most effective results, your firm needs to implement a comprehensive strategy that collectively leverages all of these drivers.

What About Traditional Marketing?

So what about all of those cold calls, broadcast media advertisements, direct mail campaigns, and spammy email messages still used by everybody else? Outbound marketing techniques such as these are becoming less effective due to behavioral changes in your target market brought on in large part by advancements in technology. The common denominator among these traditional methods used by businesses (including some RIAs) to engage clients and prospects has been their interruptive nature. Cold calls have interrupted your workday or family time, commercials have interrupted your television and radio programming, and direct mail and spam have interrupted your daily procedures.

But now, instead of permitting cold calls to interrupt my day, I can check caller ID and send the call to voice mail with a push of a button. I can even blacklist numbers using our virtual PBX platform. I can download apps to block all cold calls on my smartphone. And this is after I’ve registered with the various “do not call” registries, which dramatically reduces cold call volume. I find myself consuming less and less traditional broadcast media, instead, favoring the convenience and portability of using my smartphone for media consumption and information aggregating. And when I do spend time in front of the television (generally accompanied by a phone or tablet), my DVR permits me to easily advance through all of the commercials. The direct mail I receive from unrecognized senders typically ends up in the recycle bin. And email filters effectively eliminate email spam before it ever hits my inbox. Instead of forcing your marketing message onto your target audience, inbound marketing pulls members within your target audience to you, enabling them to consume your intended message on their terms and at their convenience.

Why We Prefer Inbound Over Outbound

In addition to the above-listed reasons, we prefer inbound marketing strategies because the Internet is a fantastic competition leveler. As long as your content is compelling, timely, and bundled in an easy-to-consume package, your inbound marketing strategies can enable your firm to compete on a level playing field with those firms possessing massive marketing budgets (not necessarily other RIAs either). Although a firm can persistently buy its first page Google search results placement, the fact is as many as 70 percent of the links clicked by online search users are organic links provided by the search results, not paid links according to MarketingSherpa. Finally! Your marketing results are rewarded based upon the quality of your content, not the size of your wallet.

Further, moving from a local or regional presence to a global presence can be easily accomplished by exploiting existing inbound marketing strategies. The scale of your firm is no longer limited by its geographical presence. Instead, your firm’s scalability essentially becomes limitless as soon as you embrace inbound marketing. For the vast majority of RIAs, this is incredibly empowering.

So What About These Technological Trends?

Listed below are key statistics that lend insight into the behavioral changes currently taking place within your target audience:

Interpretation Please!

Here’s what I take away from that list of facts:

“More people continue to use multiple social media sites, everyone now has an Internet connected mobile device and people are using them to search for online content, people are consuming vast amounts of video content apart from traditional broadcast media channels, and search engines are perfectly content to serve that video content up on a platter to those who search for it.”
At the beginning of this discussion, I said the global marketing landscape is “quietly” undergoing this transformation from focusing solely on traditional, outbound-centric, marketing campaigns to incorporating inbound-centric strategies. Clearly, inbound marketing calls into question the relevancy of most marketing firms that continue to rely on traditional marketing methods. The more nimble and tech-savvy marketers have already embraced this paradigm shift while many traditional agencies continue to tread down familiar paths. Echoing this sentiment is Craig Davis, former global chief creative officer for J. Walter Thompson, the world’s fourth largest ad agency:

“Audiences everywhere are tough. They don’t have time to be bored or brow beaten by orthodox, old-fashioned advertising. We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

So What Do We Do?

As I mentioned in Website Development for RIAs, your firm’s website must become the online central repository for your firm’s intellectual capital. This represents the compelling, timely content in the inbound marketing strategy. By using Web 2.0 design principles, your content will be positioned to be leveraged by downstream inbound marketing strategies. Next, read Social Media For RIAs and learn how to integrate social media into your overall inbound marketing strategy. Learn how to use video content for inbound marketing purposes by reading Social Media For RIAs (Part II). Lastly, read Social Media For RIAs (Part III) and learn how to exploit the social sharing functionality inherent in many social media sites in order to globally distribute your content.

Any questions or comments? Simply add them below!

If you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.

Web 2.0 came and went and the vast majority of RIAs missed the boat! However, the great thing about web development is the absence of persistence. You can jump on board anytime and, for new visitors at least, it can appear as if you’ve been Web 2.0 savvy since day one. Now the actual meaning behind the term “Web 2.0″ has been debated for years; but for the purpose of this discussion, I’m going to use it to refer to an online model that facilitates visitor interaction with dynamic content. The opposite of this model, therefore, is one that serves content that never changes or doesn’t change frequently enough to warrant a return visit within any reasonable time frame.

Some Internet History

I remember the day when Al Gore invented the Internet! In all seriousness, it wasn’t that long ago when we spoke of “surfing the web” using proxy servers that existed to cache page elements on 500MB hard drives because we had to wait so long for our browsers to download them over our 28.8K modem-based dial-up connections. Not long thereafter, 56K modems were created and we all thought we were in fat city! But that is no longer the case. Today, I can access a 32Mb/18Mb 4G network and browse the ‘net on my phone. That’s over a 500X increase in bandwidth over those old 56K modems, and it’s mobile. Wow, how things have changed in 15 years!

The simple fact is most of the world was far too bandwidth constrained to permit anything other than a static experience during that time period. It was painful to wait for content to download; so much so that few would have tolerated the slowness in order to engage in any sort of media rich dynamic interaction. So it isn’t surprising that Web 2.0 didn’t appear until the era of broadband Internet access.

Put Web 2.0 To Use

If your viewers are no longer bandwidth constrained, then there’s little reason not to embrace a modern Web 2.0 framework for your website. Specifically, we believe your website should become a living extension of your firm’s intellectual capital. Whenever a client requests additional information on any topic within the scope of your firm’s commentary, your reply should direct that person to your website. Just as your firm’s intellectual capital grows continuously, we believe your website’s content should concomitantly increase.

Thankfully, the management of that content has become much easier due to modern Content Management System (CMS) web development frameworks like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. These tools enable your firm to very easily publish new content, update existing content, manage that content, and allow your viewers to interact with that content. Once associated strictly with blogs, these frameworks are now being used to build corporate websites possessing incredible functionality thanks in large part to the thriving third party developer community that has embraced these platforms. We use these platforms because they give us the ability to create highly styled sites, rich in functionality, and, at the same time, present a central repository for all of your firm’s digital-based assets.

What Are The Benefits?

A Web 2.0 styled site becomes much more than a repository for static marketing material. Your site actually becomes a conduit through which you distribute relevant content to your clients, prospects, referrers, and allied professionals. Similar to distributing content via social media (as was discussed in Social Media for RIAs Part II), published content on your website is literally infinitely scalable. There is no need to replicate that message for each member in your target market. It’s immediately accessible to the entire Internet-connected world. But it also doesn’t have to be. Your website can provide an authentication mechanism to restrict access to sensitive material.

Combined with proper email notifications, we believe timely, relevant content served in this manner is counted by your clients as an additional “touch”, helping to strengthen the client/advisory firm relationship as was previously discussed in Social Media for RIAs Part I.

Additionally, web-hosted content, particularly media-based content, is extremely easy to consume thanks to the proliferation of Internet connected mobile devices. By now, most of your clients likely find it more convenient to read or watch commentary hosted on your website than receive it in physical form.

Real World Examples

Listed below are some functional examples that have guided our development efforts for websites we have designed for our clients.

Summary

Viewers revisit websites with the expectation of being able to view additional and up-to-date information. Today, websites that fail to meet this expectation are generally forgotten or replaced with sites that do satisfy that expectation. RIAs have the ability with modern CMS frameworks to conveniently meet this expectation and begin the process of “branding” their intellectual capital in the eyes of their clients, referrals, referrers, and allied professionals. Not only will embracing a Web 2.0 model increase repeat traffic aiding in the establishment of a firm’s brand, the interactive nature of timely, relevant content distributed by this model may lend itself toward counting as additional client “touches”, thus increasing the opportunities afforded the RIA to move client relationships into a more engaged status, reaping the benefits associated with that classification. If you would like to contribute to this discussion or have any questions, please comment below!

If you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.

Microsoft Hits a Homerun!

Well, with Office 2010, the BCM development team at Microsoft finally put together a package that merits serious consideration for firms desiring the ability to design their own Outlook-friendly CRM package. As soon as we had the chance to evaluate this redesigned framework, we immediately approached one of our clients who was in desperate need of a centralized CRM platform that would be embraced by the firm’s technical and non-technical users alike.

Our Task

After an initial demo of the package, we were commissioned to migrate the functionality of the firm’s Microsoft Access database into a user-friendly CRM system that would gain firm-wide acceptance in order to become the primary repository for all current and historical client information.

The Account Screen

We began by creating the primary account screen containing all of the desired account-specific details including account numbers, discounted billing accounts, portfolio manager, advisor, and other professional contacts for the account (click the image above for a larger view). Additionally, all historical information and individual correspondence regarding the account can be placed in the history section of the account record viewable by the firm’s staff. This happens automatically for all email correspondence as long as email tracking is enabled for a given client record. And yes we have confirmed email tracking functions correctly even if correspondence is sent and received from mobile devices connected to Microsoft’s Office 365 and Exchange Online hosted options, which means that correspondence is immediately available for viewing back at the office by other employees even if you’re corresponding with clients on the road.

The Client Screen

Next, we created the firm’s client screen that contains all of the requested details to assist the firm in enhancing their client relationships (click the image to the right for a larger view). Because Business Contact Manager is a component of Outlook, nearly all of Outlook’s functionality has been seamlessly extended to this CRM package, including scheduling, correspondence tracking, contact filtering and segregation, and other personalized capabilities. When you integrate the product with your smartphones and tablets, distributed computing takes on a whole new meaning!

Other Contacts Screen

We also added multiple custom records corresponding to other professional services providers for the firm’s accounts such as attorneys, accountants, custodians, and brokers (click the image to the left for a larger view). Each service provider has a unique template designed specifically for that provider type. And the tabbed arrangement combined with filtering capabilities permits employees to quickly locate these contacts for every account.

Comparison With Previous System

As I mentioned earlier, our client’s previous CRM package was a purpose built Microsoft Access database. However, the database’s generally non user-friendly interface limited its appeal among the firm’s employees, and, therefore, its mass adoption for aggregating all historical and future client interaction. The CRM package we designed within the Business Contact Manager framework has removed those adoption barriers, and now the firm has a coherent system in place designed to enhance its client relationships.

If you would like to discuss the option of creating a custom CRM package built on Microsoft Business Contact Manager, contact us today!

If you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.

The Like Button Changes Everything

In Part I, I said the following:

“I know that I’m not using my Facebook time, the small amount I do allocate for ‘Facebooking’, to search for professional service offerings from various companies advertising or promoting their Facebook pages.”
and

“The whole idea of professional services firms ‘Facebooking’ has such an air of cheesy consumerism to it…”

But if that same content, instead of being self promoted by a firm on its Facebook page, is shared with me by a trusted Tweeter, Facebook friend, LinkedIn connection, or Google+ circle member, I am more apt to consider that content, particularly if I find it relevant. Again, we believe your clients and prospects, found both inside and outside your target audience, will react in a similar manner. This is the nature of social networking within the social media framework. And it’s all made possible with Javascript widgets that you are able to embed in your website.

These widgets are made available from countless social media platforms, but the most appropriate ones for use by RIAs, in our opinion, are provided by Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. These buttons permit your website visitors to share your firm’s website content through their social media networks, using their social media accounts, in a very dynamic manner. As you can imagine your firm’s exposure has the potential to instantly increase exponentially solely from the use of these widgets.

Avoiding A Regulatory Nightmare

Although we do not provide legal advice, we do provide compliance guidance vis-a-vis our clients’ installed technology, operational procedures, and marketing efforts. And we have been telling our clients for the past few years to expect aggressive enforcement of securities laws in these three areas as the SEC attempts to “save face” in light of recent, widely known, regulatory failures. Reading through the recently released SEC risk alert on social media use by RIAs, it is pretty clear the SEC intends to regulate the flow of information authored by your firm and promoted via your firm’s social media pages in the strictest possible sense. Let’s take a look at a couple of key paragraphs extracted from that document:

“RIAs that communicate through social media must retain records of those communications if they contain information that satisfies an investment adviser’s recordkeeping obligations under the Advisers Act. In the staff’s view the content of the communication is determinative. A firm that intends to communicate, or permit its IARs to communicate, through social media sites may wish to determine that it can retain all required records related to social media communications and make them available for inspection.”
“The term “testimonial” is not defined in Rule 206(4)-1(a)(1), but SEC staff consistently interprets that term to include a statement of a client’s experience with, or endorsement of, an investment adviser. Therefore, the staff believes that, depending on the facts and circumstances, the use of “social plug-ins” such as the “like” button could be a testimonial under the Advisers Act. Third-party use of the “like” feature on an investment adviser’s social media site could be deemed to be a testimonial if it is an explicit or implicit statement of a client’s or clients’ experience with an investment adviser or IAR. If, for example, the public is invited to “like” an IAR’s biography posted on a social media site, that election could be viewed as a type of testimonial prohibited by rule 206(4)-1(a)(1).”

Anticipated Regulatory Actions

We believe the take-home message from the first paragraph is the anticipation that the SEC will now expect to be able to review all of your firm’s communication distributed through social media sites. We believe the take-home message from the second paragraph is the anticipation that the SEC will now expect to be able to review all content hosted on your firm’s social media pages regardless of who wrote it. So now, not only should your firm have compliance procedures established to regulate the content posted to those pages by all parties within your firm, you should also have procedures in place to regulate the rest of the world’s commentary posted on your firm’s social media pages. And the idea of anyone “liking” anything about your firm being construed as a testimonial indicates, at least to us, that the SEC is going to be extremely aggressive in its application of existing securities laws to social media. Curiously absent from the “liking” warning is any mention of Facebook’s other buttons: Recommend, Send, Share, and Subscribe.

Finding A Happy Medium

Considering all of the above, we can now create a social-media-use framework using two extreme positions and evaluate our recommendations within this context. The most conservative stance would be for your firm to forbid all forms of social media use by everyone in your firm, essentially ignoring its very existence. The most liberal stance might be to create social media pages across multiple social media platforms and permit everyone in your firm to use social media without creating any centralized compliance review or record retention policies for any distributed or hosted content. We believe the use model we have established within this multi-part article balances the wish-list of all RIAs by satisfying the compliance risk aversion of ultra conservative RIAs while meeting the desires of more aggressive RIAs to maximize the potential ROI offered through the appropriate use of social media.

Summary

In conclusion, we believe the opportunities created by the ubiquitous nature of social media mandate a paradigm shift in the way your firm thinks about its interaction with clients, referrals, referrers, and even allied professionals. However, we do not believe your firm needs to incur any additional regulatory liability by establishing and promoting social media pages, particularly over and above your website, in order to leverage social media to your firm’s benefit. Instead, we believe you can take steps to minimize your firm’s own social media footprint and, instead, rely on your contacts’ existing social media use to distribute your message to their network of contacts, about whom you know nothing and would likely otherwise never reach through your own social media efforts.

Recall the only social media page we created during this series of articles was a Google+ page designed to serve as one of your firm’s primary media distribution conduits to your contacts, segregated by Google+’s “circles” feature. Additionally, your firm can avoid the need to review third party commentary on your firm’s Google+ video posts simply by disabling the posts’ commenting functionality. Regarding Google+ hangouts, the potential exists to record the entire hangout session for archival purposes, most assuredly satisfying all current and future SEC multimedia review requirements. Lastly, we sidestepped a potential regulatory headache by permitting your website visitors to share your content with their social media contacts using their social media accounts instead of delivering content through your firm’s accounts. Clearly, this model relies on successfully driving traffic continuously to your firm’s website instead of any social media pages. How best to accomplish that objective is addressed in this article. Of course, as with most things related to technology, future actions by the major social media platform publishers could change significant components of this discussion; but, as social media stands right now, we are confident in our recommendations.

If you have any comments to add to this discussion, please enter them below!

If you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.

The Relationship

For RIAs, it has always been about the client/advisory firm relationship. If your firm is looking for more organic growth, the question necessarily becomes: “How do we strengthen the relationships we have with our existing clients and move them into a more engaged status,” which at least one study has shown will lead to a greater share of wallet as well as a greater number of referrals. The answer to that question has been shown to be correlated to the number of client “touches” initiated by the advisory firm, with as many as 24 contacts per year defined by some as the ultimate goal. Historically, those client contacts have been satisfied through quarterly report meetings, telephone calls, mass marketing emails, multiple rounds of direct mail, and other physical engagements.

A New Way To Get The Message Out

As was mentioned in Part I, anyone has the ability right now to produce compelling digital content and distribute that content or even stream it live across all forms of consumptive devices used today, including tablets, smartphones, PCs, and Internet-connected televisions, using functionality currently built in to at least one social media platform. This model permits your clients to very easily engage your marketing collateral and other digital assets representative of your firm’s intellectual capital regardless of whether they are working at the office, having lunch, spending time at home, or wrapping up a golf outing at the course clubhouse. This should lead to greater message penetration because of the incredible convenience at which your clients (as well as prospects, referrers, and allied professionals) will be able to consume your intended message. Equally beneficial is the fact that the actual distribution of that media is completely free. Further, the model’s scalability is not predicated upon further investment in either time or resources, removing the labor-intensive element found with some of the traditional methods used to satisfy additional annual client touches. Once the content is created, it’s just as easy to distribute it to one person as it is to thousands. Even if your firm is not looking to attract new business, we believe there is an entire generation, likely found within your existing client base, that will soon expect nothing less from your firm, perhaps even expecting as much as being able to download mobile apps connecting some degree of your back office to their devices.

A Real World Example

So what does all of this talk about content distribution actually mean? Let’s say a recent geopolitical event has just potentially altered the investment strategy for a group of your clients whose portfolio allocations have some measure of exposure to assets that you believe will be affected by this event. Perhaps this event was significant enough that pockets within your client base are also aware of its implications which leads them to wonder about their portfolios’ current exposure. Here is a perfect opportunity for your firm to add tangible value to the client/adivsory firm relationship by providing timely, relevant, market commentary surrounding a topic that interests your clients.

How to Use Social Media’s Distributive Capabilities

Sounds great, but what does social media have to do with any of this, right? Here’s one recommended course of action for a 21st century RIA looking to leverage social media:

The Printed Word Just Isn’t the Same

Now, let’s compare your clients’ reactions to the above delivery mechanism vs the traditional mass email message or newsletter snippet. In reality, the content, derived from your firm’s intellectual capital, is the same. But the experience enjoyed by watching an engaging presentation is simply different better than that received by reading its transcript, particularly if the presenter is addressing the viewer directly. Placed in the context of the client/advisory firm relationship, we believe bundling your message into a media rich package like this imparts the feeling of exclusivity vis-a-vis your clients’ perception of their ability to access your firm’s intellectual capital because they are able to view you presenting that same content, and even engage in real time two-way communication during the Google+ hangout sessions. Further, the initial video can be shared across your clients’ social media networks (more on that in Part III).The implications of exploiting social media as your real time media distribution backbone are truly monumental. In our opinion, the above scenario, which is entirely do-able right now, represents the most significant value add in the client/advisory firm relationship today! And remember, this model is incredibly scalable.

Why Not Just Use Our Website?

Certainly, this is a valid question. But here’s the problem – your website will not segregate your viewers like the social media platforms can unless you implement some sort of login feature with the requisite back-end processing which merely attempts to replicate the grouping functionality already provided by social media. And we want to segregate your contacts and serve relevant, easy to consume content on a timely basis to your clients first because it reinforces the notion of exclusivity. Additionally, the real time videoconferencing framework built into Google+ hangouts combined with the ease of access offered by the iOS and Android apps (all offered freely) is tough to beat.

Lastly, there’s the issue of where to host and how to serve up the original five minute video. There are technical issues surrounding self-hosting HD video on your website that are beyond the scope of this article, but I would be happy to address them in the comments area. For now I’ll simply say it’s unfortunate that an HTML5 video codec standard still has not yet been established. We rarely recommend building a professional brand via a YouTube channel even though YouTube may have the best “all-platform” video encoding distribution system on Earth. There are far too many distractions presented to viewers of YouTube hosted content – from advertisements to recommended views to comments sections. Instead, it’s far better to embed your YouTube-hosted videos in your website. Vimeo (Plus & Pro) subscriptions also provide custom skinning options and HD playback for embedded media players.

The great thing about using Google+ is your content is actually served by YouTube’s back-end, just without all of the YouTube branding. This is crucial because we want your content to be associated with your firm’s brand only, not the hosting service’s brand. And the quality is simply outstanding across a wide range of mobile devices.

After your clients have had a chance to consume your content and interact with you in a small group Google+ hangout, then you can publish the availability of that content for mass consumption via your website in order to attract additional prospects via all of your contacts’ social networking use. And that is what we’re going to discuss in Part III. Once again, if you would like to contribute to this part of the discussion, please add your comments below!

If you are an active social media user, please consider sharing this topic with your acquaintances who may benefit from our services.