Author: Mike McLaughlin

Your CEO is Not Using Social Media? No Problem

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Sep 06, 2012, in Thoughts , tagged with , ,

Over at Fast Company, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes tosses out another in the endless line of arguments about how companies aren’t using social media effectively. The points he makes are generally fine. Two of the central tenets have been, are, and will remain true for a long time:

He didn’t need a college degree. And he doesn’t need Twitter either.

  • Social media is a huge opportunity for corporations and will significantly impact the bottom line
  • We have a long way to go before these benefits are even close to fully-realized

People get it. Even skeptics understand there’s real opportunity. But it all takes time. After all, the same two ideas above still hold true for “old” technologies like e-mail, CRM tools, and (gasp) Web sites. If Mr. Holmes is up for it, he’ll be able to recycle his article a few years from now and probably not have to change much of anything.

Still, I have an issue with the starting point of Mr. Holmes’ argument. If you didn’t click through to the article, it begins with the following:

On June 6, Larry Ellison–CEO of Oracle, one of the largest and most advanced computer technology corporations in the world–tweeted for the very first time. In doing so, he joined a club that remains surprisingly elite. Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. Ellison, by the way, hasn’t tweeted since.

Mr. Holmes is making the point that big-time CEOs don’t get social media because only 20 have Twitter accounts. There are two big problems with this:

  1. A Lack of Usage Does Not Equal a Lack of Understanding. There are thousands of CEOs who know relatively little about finance, or marketing, or operations. This doesn’t mean that they don’t realize they are important to their organizations.
  2. Social Media Needs to be Genuine. There’s no point to a social media presence unless you truly care about it. If Larry Ellison and 480 other Fortune 500 CEOs aren’t huge Twitter fans, they’re better off not having Twitter accounts. And if they give it a shot and it doesn’t take, that’s fine, too.

Corporate executives typically have good reasons for doing or not doing social media at this point. They get it. They just might choose not do it.

LinkedIn Groups Stink

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Jul 26, 2012, in Thoughts , tagged with ,

I don’t suppose this post really needs any further words. The headline says it all. But since I don’t like to be purely black-and-white, let’s go deeper.

In two words: Not Good.

Did you know that a Google search for the phrase “LinkedIn groups stink” yields ZERO results? I was shocked. It’s the only time in memory that a reasonable (to me) exact-phrase search gave me nothing.

My interactions with LinkedIn Groups at this point typically involve:

  • Checking out a group a friend or client is part of that seems relevant
  • Signing up, then reading the first e-mail digest I receive from the group
  • Reading the second e-mail digest
  • Deleting subsequent, unopened e-mail digests from the group until a few weeks pass and I finally drop out

If you’ve ever been part of a group you know that the active ones are dominated by self-promoters, purposeful instigators trying to be provocative, and job postings. The flipside of active groups are those that are de-facto broadcast tools without any real conversation or interactivity. It’s a bit of a lose-lose proposition.

I’m not saying that groups are NEVER helpful or NEVER have useful information, but that the hit rate is so low as to be essentially zero.

I looked for arguments supporting groups to see what I’m missing. One that triggered a positive reaction was this post about using statistics to vet groups before you join them. The premise is that you can’t just “hang out here and there” for groups to work, which is potentially reasonable if not necessarily ideal for most people. I want groups to be useful with as little effort as possible on my part, and I imagine most people feel the same way.

So, for now, I’ll remain a skeptic when it comes to LinkedIn Groups, with the very real possibility of becoming a deserter over the next few months.

Who Says You Can’t Talk Product in Social Media?

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Jun 20, 2012, in Thoughts , tagged with , ,

“Anything but product.”

That’s what a client said to us recently as we worked through content options for social media. It’s a point we hear regularly and one that the industry seems to generally believe in, either because of regulatory concerns or because of the potential perception of “pushing product”.

Then there’s this:

A BlackRock Tweet from June 3, 2012.

That was followed by another Tweet on June 10th highlighting BlackRock’s Global Dividend Income Fund. And, in fact, the June 3rd Tweet wasn’t even the first. BlackRock specifically mentioned its LifePath Portfolios back on May 28th.

At the very least, this challenges the widely-held notion that product-specific promotion is an absolute social media no-no. It will be interesting to see if this type of content becomes more common moving forward.

Client Quotes: The Pace of Digital Change

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Jun 07, 2012, in Thoughts , tagged with , , , ,

In almost every client meeting I hear something memorable. It’s usually something funny, because my brain retains that stuff better. But it’s also always something that reinforces an important idea for me.

Still a dominant force, and a reminder that digital change happens slowly.

This week I heard two things that reminded me just how far our industry has to go when it comes to digital strategy and execution. Every day we hear about a new cutting-edge mobile initiative, or another firm expanding its social media presence, or a unique piece of content.

We hear less on the reality that in many ways the digital evolution is a slow one. Here are two client quotes from last week that hammer that home:

1. “When terrorists send a threat, they don’t do it via PDF.”

This got a big laugh from me. It was a moment of stand-up comedy in an otherwise serious discussion. In this case, the client was lamenting his firm’s struggle to produce compelling output in light of video’s immense impact on how people communicate memorable messages.

The fact is that the industry has gotten markedly better in using video, specifically by:

  • Mixing multimedia content in alongside traditional printed material
  • Keeping videos short, given viewers’ attention spans are at all-time lows
  • Finding the sweet spot among production quality, production speed, and cost

Even so, there’s an entrenched printed material legacy, and clients still prefer the printed option to multimedia in many cases. Video may have killed the radio star, but it hasn’t yet done major damage to the asset management PDF.

2. “I just received the regulatory ‘OK’ for two Tweets I posted in December.”

/re-checks calendar

Ouch.

We recently wrote a piece about the barriers to social media implementation (subscription) for Ignites. We didn’t delve into the issue of regulation if only because it’s so well-established as THE major contingency in many firms’ social media strategies.

That said, we have two active social media projects right now, and this client hammered home the potential negative impact of regulation. Not only do the rules need to be better crystallized, but the processes do as well.

Six-month waits for approval of 140 characters will put the brakes on some firms’ continued adoption of social media.

100% Alternatives in Your Portfolio. Why Not?

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on May 14, 2012, in Thoughts , tagged with , , , , , ,

Third in a series of posts about marketing alternative investment vehicles to financial advisors. Click to read Part I and Part II.

What’s a reasonable allocation to alternative investments within a portfolio? Most everyone agrees “more than 0%” is true. After that? Things get foggy.

For an asset manager marketing alternative vehicles, the allocation issue is important. Not only do many advisors struggle to understand alternatives in the first place, but they also have a lot of uncertainty when it comes to implementation.

I started with a simple review of the allocations firms use in materials that introduce alternatives:

  • BlackRock’s Investing for a New World sets the initial bar at 15%.
  • A Guggeheim (Rydex | SGI) tool implies that the answer is somewhere up to 30%.
  • A similar Altegris tool goes further, showing that a 50% alts allocation may improve results.
  • Raymond James highlights endowments’ 40% allocation to alts, then quickly notes that this is “too high for the majority of individual investors”.

From Raymond James overview of alternative investments.

To complicate things, consider yet another tool offered by Hatteras Funds, and what happens if you select a portfolio that is 100% alternatives (the Model Portfolio below):

In this tool from Hatteras, a 100%-alternative portfolio provides the best results.

Now an appropriate answer for allocating to alternative strategies is not just 15%, 30%, or even 50%. Here, a portfolio of 100% alts is the right choice. Confronted with this, advisors or investors are asking: what should I do?

Clearly there’s a lack of consensus. By itself, this lack of consensus is no big deal. After all, the goal isn’t for all firms to have the same perspective on alternative allocations.

The real problem is that firms only provide allocation guidelines implicitly. In the examples above, no rationale or explanation accompanies the percentages of assets that can (or should be) invested in alts. The data does the talking, and it gives a pretty vague (“more than 0%”) message.

I see two paths for firms in resolving this issue:

  • Punt on allocation, making it clear that alts have a role and the advisor is in the best position to decide what exposure is best for clients.
  • Build a concrete case for a baseline allocation, including the necessary caveats that one-size-does-NOT-fit-all.

Either approach can work, with the key being that the messaging is explicit. Not only will this close a confusing gap in alternatives marketing, but it will help make it clear that providers have a strong grasp on how their products should be deployed.