“Wealth Under-50s have different needs and interaction preferences due to their higher use of—and comfort with—technology. And among all customer segments, they are the most interested in the kinds of new services that will drive the next generation of wealth management.”

It attracted little notice in the blogosphere except for this contrarian post from Bob Clark, who’s also a columnist for Investment Advisor. Ignore this demanding, restless segment, says Clark, and focus on clients over age 50—they’re calmer, more likely to listen to you, less likely to leave you.

One container is PCs, the rest are smartphones

And it may be that the this generation of high- and ultra-high-net-worth clients, once it turns 50, will suddenly become docile, unquestioning, and otherwise well-behaved for advisors. But it’s a separate question whether they’ll change their habits and preferences for communicating.

There’s lots of reason to believe they won’t. The Cisco study is just a droplet in the encroaching tide of evidence that we’re undergoing huge changes in how we interact. Anyone still doubting where world is headed just needs to absorb one fact: In 2011, for the first time, more smartphones shipped than PCs.

The devices on which we access the Internet will only get more portable and more embedded in our day-to-day lives. Which means that social apps, video calling, and other web and IP-enabled communications will also become more embedded in our lives. Including the way we communicate with advisors.

Bringing us back to the $9.8 trillion (as of June 2010) sitting with the Wealthy Under-50s in North America. With every passing month, the money you want to help manage will increasingly be held by people who want to communicate with you differently from how you’re doing it today. As Wayne Gretzky said, are you skating to where the puck is going to be, or where it’s been?

You’d expect her to know Disney, Apple, McDonalds, maybe Nike. What’s really interesting is which logos she has begun to “genericize” or equate with the thing itself: Starbucks is coffee, Xbox is a remote, BP is gas, Pepsi is the drink machine at the pizza place.

What really matters? Color. Clarity (clear loser: Monster Energy). What doesn’t matter? The logo’s subject. Starbucks doesn’t need to use a coffee bean; a mermaid works just fine. As the great logo designer Paul Rand once said,

“… A logo derives its meaning from subject matter [which] can be almost anything… [and] is of relatively little importance. Ultimately… logos [should] be distinctive, memorable, and clear.”

What really matters, once you achieve those three must-haves, is that you consistently brand every possible customer experience with your logo. That’s how you win hearts and minds—especially small, cute ones.

(This show happens to focus on social media’s giant—Facebook—but it’s really about social media.)

So if you’re still trying to understand the profundity of social media, listen to the whole thing if you have an hour, or the lead story if not.

“There will never [again] not be a period when most human beings on the planet are connected to the same grid.”  Clay Shirky, On the Media

On the other hand, if you’ve drunk the Facebook Kool-Aid, check out this chilling segment on life in Facebookistan (now the third-largest nation behind India and China). Because increasingly, we all live there—whether we’re on Facebook or not. That’s because Facebook tracks member activity outside the service, and has even begun tracking people who aren’t Facebook members.

“Facebook has nothing to fear. ‘They have now achieved not just the largest user base in the history of the internet… they have a majority of their potential user base already on the service.’” Clay Shirky, On the Media

Or for a profile in guts, listen to how one woman handled being “friended” by the man who raped her when they were both in high school.

For now, I leave it to you to connect the dots from Facebookistan—and social media—to your business. I’ll do my own connecting, as I have tried to do, on this blog over the coming weeks and months.

This week’s speaker at Ringling College Library Association’s Town Hall lecture series was Dr. Roland Fryer—a 34-year-old tenured economics professor at Harvard University and leader of its Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs).

Like countless reformers before him, Fryer thinks he knows how to close the disgraceful educational achievement gap between black and white children in the U.S. Unlike other reformers, Fryer came to his conclusions by testing every likely theory—from incentive pay to longer school hours—in the data-rich charter schools. (His five best practices are fascinating for what they include and exclude; EdLabs has since tested them successfully in the Houston and Denver public schools.)

When he shared his eureka moment with his wife—a mathematician working in chemotherapy efficacy—she thought his job was over. Public schools would obviously follow EdLabs’ best practices, right? After all, that’s the way it works in medicine: If several hospitals demonstrate conclusive success in treating, say, early onset Alzheimer’s, every hospital in the country will descend on them to learn and replicate their techniques.

Dr. Roland Fryer

But the U.S. educational profession doesn’t work like the U.S. medical profession. Educators and their constituencies are not scientists, and as a whole are not math or statistics-savvy. Fryer says most educators use “the cardiac test:” when asked how they know a certain technique has worked, often as not their response is “you can feel it in your heart.”

I’m afraid we still use something close to the cardiac test in evaluating marketing effectiveness—even as we rely more and more on data-rich electronic marketing. Who out there is doing unbiased, unsentimental, sound statistical research on what works and what doesn’t in advisor marketing?

Borrow

“King saw the whole world as his sourcebook.” He borrowed from such disparate texts as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Samuel F. Smith’s “America,” and Archibald Carey Jr.’s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention. But he added to them and shaped the amalgam into an original, powerful message.

Advice: You don’t have to create blogs from whole cloth. Take the ideas and words from others that inspire or provoke you—then add your thoughts, reactions, conclusions to them. (Give credit where it’s due, as King did.)

Test

King had been trying out his “dream” idea with audiences months before that day in late August, 1963. And he kept listening, even there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Sensing his prepared conclusion was terrible, and hearing Mahalia Jackson yell “tell them about the dream,” he decided on the spot to change his ending.

Advice: Your blog and social media posts are an unbeatable workshop for testing your thoughts, ideas, marketing messages, and so on. Your audience will tell you what they like and what’s weak. Don’t stop listening.

Prepare

Surprise, surprise: King’s “improvisation,” like any musician’s, was actually the result of long preparation. Not even as gifted an orator as King could change tack midway through a speech and grab a spectacular ending without having been prepared.

Advice: The discipline and experience of publishing your ideas will hone your delivery and make you better prepared to communicate, in any forum. Blogging isn’t just about promoting yourself—it’s about improving yourself, and what you offer.

Listen to the first seven minutes of this podcast to pick up your own insights.

While an RIA can presumably use a like button on a posting about new tax rules or on an article saying the economy is doomed, it would be unwise for RIAs ask [sic] people to “like” your firm or you. Similarly, seeking “fans” is a bad idea.*

If true, this would make it very hard for advisors to have Facebook company pages, since the only way people can follow your company on Facebook is by using the “like” button.

It seems very unlikely to us that the SEC would bury such a game-changing announcement to the thousands of advisors out there with Facebook pages (and the thousands more considering it) on page six of a seven-page agency bulletin. You can question the SEC’s competence and its cozy relationship with Wall Street, but accusing it of something that clueless takes things just a little too far.

It also seems unlikely to Blane Warrene, CEO of Arkovi (our social media compliance software partner). “Sounds like an over-interpretation,” he said, after speaking with Carl Cline, Arkovi’s chief counsel and a former NASD attorney. “You do have to be careful about using “like” buttons, but we shouldn’t overgeneralize.”

To clarify:

• If you have a company Facebook page or a personal page you’re using for business, no need to panic. People “like” your page to follow you, not recommend you. The SEC’s language allows for this.
• Be very careful about “liking” content on third-party sites, however—and consider resisting the urge entirely.
• Don’t allow people to “like” content on your firm’s website or social media pages (or, failing that, delete the “likes”). This is clearly different from following you, and could reasonably be construed as a testimonial.

Until Silicon Valley starts consulting FINRA regs and the ‘40 Act when it names its buttons, we’ll have to live with some uncomfortable wording to get business done. As Blane said, “Facebook is an extraordinary platform for advisors to share content and information. They just have to use it wisely and correctly.”

*The spark for this claim was this passage in a recent National Examination Risk Alert by the SEC’s Office of Compliance and Examinations (emphasis ours):

… 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.

As you watch this video, ask yourself:

(If you’re over 50:)

Which U.S. luggage maker is it advertising?

(If you’re younger:)

Is it a trained or a wild gorilla?

OK, the banner gives it away, but most people who remember this commercial think it’s a Samsonite ad—including people like my wife, who actually owned luggage made by American Tourister, the company behind the ad. It’s perhaps the most infamous case of mistaken brand identity.

Marketing experts like to trot out this ad to prove a supposed truism: brand advertising usually benefits the market share leader. (In the early ’70s, when this ad aired, Samsonite was the market leader in molded luggage.)

But can’t market share also-rans succeed with brand advertising? Of course they can. I think market share has little or nothing to do with this.

Instead, what’s wrong with the gorilla ad—tragically wrong, since it was one of the century’s most memorable campaigns—is the concept. The ad emphasizes the product’s strength against overpowering force. Whereas the root of their biggest competitor’s name—Samson—is synonymous with… strength against overpowering force.

Great creative has great power. Make sure those great words and concepts aren’t inadvertently marketing your competitors

And the gorilla? It’s neither trained nor wild. It’s an actor in a gorilla suit.

“… Google tries to make it so that sites ‘don’t have to do SEO.’ First and foremost is content, and there’s no bonus for having good SEO.”

Turns out that the same thing that benefits your audience most—good content—is what gets you found by search engines. I love it when that happens.

Not to say that SEO optimization doesn’t work. It can be effective, as long as you keep feeding it money. But if your content is boring, or obviously ghost-written, or just plain reeks, you’re not going to keep that audience you bought for very long.

On the other hand, spend your resources on creating good content and you’re building a marketing asset that grows over time—and pays dividends. More viewers. More subscribers. More social media followers. More mentions on other websites. Attention from the press (even the national press).

Paid SEO is like renting an audience. Publishing decent, authentic content is as good or better at getting you search results. Plus it builds real relationships over time. Which would you rather have?

Write the site that you want to read. That covers story selection, length, frequency, style, vocabulary, attitude, humor, level of sensationalism, and more. Don’t publish anything you’re not proud of. Be yourself.

His recommendations may be more apt for blogging journalists, but blogging advisors can benefit from his insights. For financial advisors, I’d slightly re-order, making the quote above step #1 and moving this one closer to the top:

Try new things, all the time. Especially those that are a little outside your comfort zone. This is the Internet — don’t act like you’re writing for Time Magazine in the 80s. Stories can be pictures, charts, lengthy essays, numbered lists, or 140 characters. Measure how your experiments do, and take the results into account for the future.

I’d also add a step and make it #2: Write with passion. (This may be restating Dan’s step #2, but humor me.) I hesitate because it’s so overused, but “passion” is the right word here. All things equal, passionate writing attracts readers and lukewarm or confused writing repels them. Choose blog topics you really care about—and don’t be afraid to show a little enthusiasm in your language and your writing style.

One of the most graceful practitioners of the reader comment is Andrew Sullivan, who’s been writing his blog The Dish (née The Daily Dish) since 2000.

The Dish doesn’t allow direct commenting. There is no comments box at the end of a Dish post. To tender your opinion, you have to email it to the Dish—if you can find the well-hidden email link.

But you better believe these people read their emails. And when they get comments they think are worthwhile, they get published as blogposts.

A post last week about Black Friday elicited a number of email comments, which The Dish promptly turned into a blogpost:

There are many things to love about this technique:

• Readers get a voice, while The Dish retains almost total editorial control
• Comments can be cherrypicked to include only the best, and each comment shortened to include only its key point
• The dialogue gets extended, with no risk of expletives, disparagement, or fights
• The Dish demonstrates that it’s listening to its readers and holding itself accountable to them (a blogging ethic not to be underestimated)
• It’s really easy to create—no writing necessary

This is also a great way to handle corrections or emendations:

Given FINRA’s Regulatory Notice 11-39, this approach to comments has no additional compliance hurdles if you’re already blogging. Just continue archiving and monitoring your posts.

You are doing that, aren’t you?