RIAs, Content Scoring, YouTube Views: It’s A Random Reading Round-up

I never met a free ebook that I didn’t download. I’m inclined to take online surveys and accept flyers from people on the street, too. Hey, we’re all in marketing, we have to support one another.

Here’s my latest report on a random collection of ebooks, reports, a presentation deck and a whitepaper that I’ve read in the last few months, and recommend to you.

Rounding Up The RIAs

“The RIA Channel: A Roadmap for Driving Growth” is a 14-page whitepaper from Broadridge. It’s a data-packed overview of how mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing has needed to dramatically change as RIAs have become an increasing focus.

“While the four main wirehouses offer central points of contact and provide a degree of product and process uniformity for their approximately 57,000 advisers, a number of RIAs just shy of that number are spread among 14,000 RIA firms,” is how the paper succinctly summarizes the challenge (while simultaneously making the argument for digital).

The paper includes insights on RIA segments and some suggestions for targeting the best prospects and product positioning. My favorite graphic maps where RIAs are in the country, shown below. Sourced by Access Data, a Broadridge company, it’s a nice content marketing turn, too.

A Broad Dive Into All Things Digital

Before you reflexively go to print Experian’s The 2014 Digital Marketer, you should know that it’s 138 pages long. Then again, it's a resource you may find yourself referring to all year. 

Published in March, this is Experian’s sixth annual report of benchmarks and trends. Financial services is mentioned as one of the leaders in Internet advertising, second only to retail, and there’s this table showing the percentage of people who transact stocks/bonds/mutual funds on mobile, tablets and desktops (more on tablets than on the PC?!).

But read this more as a lay of the land of all things email, mobile, social and search/display. Also, this year’s report devotes several pages to cross-channel marketing, as important to this space as it is to business-to-consumer businesses. 

Some Of These Are Not Like The Others

First there was lead scoring—online it involves interpreting a Website visitors' digital body language and behavior and understanding where they are in their information-gathering process. Because it’s marketers who are accountable for creating the online content offered at various points in the purchase funnel, it naturally follows that there should be some scoring of content, too.

This Kapost deck (the link opens a PDF)—and the video below—is slightly more commercial than the others in this round-up. Kapost sells content marketing software. Even so, it’s a good primer if you haven’t yet started distinguishing between the performance of your individual content assets. It’s a quick, heavily illustrated 40 pages. For the video, you’ll need to know that MQL stands for marketing qualified lead.

YouTube Views Before Subscribers

To no one’s surprise, OpenSlate’s Top 500 Brands on YouTube industry report does not include an investment company.

The most successful non-entertainment brands average 1.4 million average monthly video views and have an average of 82,000 subscribers. Investment firms don’t come close. In fact, the Business and Finance Industry, lumped together in a way that echoes YouTube’s maddening categorization, represents only about 20 of the top 500. And, they’re companies like SpaceX, Boeing, Geico, GE and Lockheed Martin. 

Here’s the graph from the report that’s worth your consideration: The relationship between views and subscribers. On average across all YouTube channels, every 200 views results in a new subscriber, OpenSlate reports. Brands generally need almost four times that—750 views—to convert a single subscriber. And, as you can see in the OpenSlate graph below, “business and finance” channels need close to 1,000. 

“There are many factors working against brands in this regard, including an inconsistent content and publishing strategy and the likely impression by a viewer that whatever drew them to the brand’s content in the first place will not be repeated. A high percentage of TrueView driven (paid) views by brands also has a large impact,” according to the report.

The Raw Power Of Tech-Driven Marketing

I don’t even know where to start to summarize this must-read perspective on how Marketing has changed. In the 40-page New Brand of Marketing ebook, Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec.com takes a leisurely approach as he recounts seven “meta-trends” that have led to nothing short of "cataclysmic" disruption in how marketers work:

• From traditional to digital
• From media silos to converged media
• From outbound to inbound
• From communications to experiences
• From art and copy to code and data
• From rigid plans to agile iterations
• From agencies to in-house marketing

You’ll see much of the research and many of the datapoints that digital marketers like to quote and cite (e.g., on average 57% of the buyer’s journey happens online before prospects even talk to a salesperson), but Brinker provides the context and direction for them.

The narrative builds as a call to action for marketing to step up and “harness the raw power” of what's disrupted it. Brinker—whose work I’ve mentioned before—believes that marketing needs to assume responsibility for technology strategy and marketing. Specifically, he advocates for the role of a chief marketing technologist.

“If you’re responsible for the outcomes—how customers will perceive your brand in the digital world that is run by software—then you cannot afford to take a laissez-faire approach to the technological mechanisms by which those outcomes are achieved,” he writes.

Even if you’re familiar with Brinker’s chief marketing technologist argument, read this book for the extended reasoning supporting it. It’s all there.

Read anything good lately? Your recommendations are welcome below. 

A Must-Read Book For Fund Company Marketers

“Must be curious.”

If I were hiring a marketer for a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) company today, that’s the requirement that I’d lead with in a job posting.

Curiosity is what elevates the marketer from the daily grind of “making the donuts” and propels the kind of inquiry that produces above average work. For content marketing and storytelling, in particular, a marketer needs to be curious about the world around him or her.

There is a way to do fund marketing—just go to the meetings, pick up the work, turn around the work and then route it to everybody else to have the final say. Ugh.

Marketers who overcome this dynamic want to learn more, to know more and to develop a deeper understanding of how investment products are manufactured, managed, distributed and evaluated. With that knowledge as a basis, we should be better able to create and advocate for communications and marketing initiatives that better connect.

Toward Better Question-Asking

It’s never been easier for asset management marketers to learn more about the business they’re in. As I mentioned in my last post, the full ecosystem—financial advisors, wholesalers, investors, media, vendors—can be observed in real-time online.

This week, a new resource has been made available, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Letters to a Young Analyst is a 99-page ebook by Tom Brakke, with contributions from other industry veterans.

Brakke describes himself as a consultant, writer, and investment advisor. Over his career, he has been an analyst, portfolio manager, director of research, professor, and “creator of investment products and systems for evaluating and communicating investment ideas.”

On Twitter, he is @researchpuzzler, an account (and related blog) that I consistently name when asked about favorite accounts to follow. Brakke discovers and shares relevant content that I wouldn’t stumble upon on my own. Links to his own work provide access to critical thinking on how professionals evaluate and present investment opportunities, including due diligence.

His is a different, increasingly influential voice that frequently comments on what investment managers (including their marketing efforts) are up to. It's helpful as a perspective on how your "audience" is reacting to your communications.

A few examples:

• Alts Boot Camp—Brakke calls out a Pioneer Investments chart as “an example of the superficial simplicity with which retail alternatives are being marketed.” 
• Years of Experience—Brakke says the promise of portfolio teams’ “years of experience” (a common measure used in asset manager marketing materials) is a mirage, and probably not worth giving so much emphasis to.
• A Fund Manager’s Actions Should Match the Message (on the Wall Street Journal Experts blog), in which Brakke answers the question, “What is the No. 1 warning sign for investors in a fund’s marketing material?”

Brakke’s tweets are a must-read, and if you were on my Marketing staff, you’d now be required to read his book. Marketing barely rates a mention in it, and that’s the point. Curious marketers excel by learning more about everything else, including—and maybe especially—thinking beyond what’s happening in Marketing and beyond your firm’s walls. This ebook is an antidote to the “investment guru worship" that asset management marketers can be sucked into (and then help perpetuate).

Letters to a Young Analyst contains a trove of insights. I’ve tried but I can’t extract pithy lines to illustrate its value. You have to surrender to the story—in two parts of the ebook, Brakke is coaching a young analyst over a series of several “letters.” It’s a career guide that draws on his experiences, his influences and his biases. Another part of the book includes commentary from others, also filled with gems.

Taken all together, it provides a grounding for marketers who aren’t trained in investment analysis. It's Inside Investing for those who work on a different floor than the Investments team.

A better understanding of what analysts do, and even where they’re vulnerable, can help tune your next information-gathering/content idea-harvesting encounters with your Investments teams. It wasn’t written for you but you can benefit from it.

The last part of the ebook is a compilation of relevant resources (books, publications and Websites) that I’ve never seen pulled together in one place before. Brakke gives a shout-out to a few lists I maintain, and I should say that he provided the book to me as a thank-you. I would have happily paid the $24.95. There's $5 off if you're among the first 100 purchasers using the offer code: puzzlepiece.

You can buy the ebook here. Those who purchase the book will automatically be signed up for a quarterly newsletter subscription.

State Street Uses TED Talks To Showcase Employee Ideas

Most of us could not try this at home. Nonetheless, it's wonderful to learn about how State Street committed the resources to organize its own TED event for its employees.

TED@StateStreet is the mash-up of two powerful brands—TED being the brand for “riveting talks for remarkable people” and State Street being the institutional investment firm rarely if ever described as riveting.

Following a TED format, 13 State Street employees “told their own stories of innovation, triumph and driving transformation” at an employee event held in November 2013. Those talks, on a range of topics, can now be seen here.

According to State Street’s page on TED.com, “Everyone knows that the challenges in our world of finance are considerable. But if we as an industry get the next chapter right, so too are the opportunities … for our clients, for society in general and for us. New thinking in finance will require change from within and fresh perspectives.”

That new thinking is needed in finance is not a new idea. TED@StateStreet seems to be a vote of confidence from State Street that new thinking could come from within its own walls.

Response 'Through The Roof'

The TED.com partner page went live in January. But more information and color is available from a Forbes interview with Executive VP and Head of Global Marketing Hannah Grove, published last week. (The image below is just a screenshot to click on. Forbes doesn't allow embedding.)

State Street is just one of three corporations who so far have participated in the TED Institute, the professional development arm of TED. Boston Consulting Group and Intel are the others.  

At about 4:30 in the video, you’ll hear Grove explain how the program came together. More than 200 of State Street’s 30,000 employees applied to present a talk. The TED team, not State Street, selected the speakers and, according to this Businessweek article, provided coaching. The speakers range in seniority from an associate to Alison Quirk, State Street’s chief human resources and citizenship officer.

Grove is especially tickled that four of the State Street talks have been added to TED.com. One presentation is by Joe Kowan, a graphic designer on her staff speaking about his stage fright. Watch it not just to hear what Kowan has to say but to also see some shots of the State Street crowd looking more genuine than most TED Talks audiences. 

Response to the State Street program have been “through the roof,” both externally including from clients and internally, according to Grove. 

“It felt like we started a movement,” Grove says. “Our employees have such great ideas, and to sort of bottle that up, we’ll definitely do it again.”

Maybe not under the auspices of TED and maybe not for a public audience but would an employee talent show—which is essentially what this is—be so out of the question for other firms?

Social Media Strategy

Bonus: At 9:30 in the Forbes interview, Grove discusses the “safety-first” direction of State Street’s social media strategy. And, she brags that the firm was the first business-to-business firm to use Vine. 

Below is a Vine the firm created to promote TED@StateStreet.

22 Content Highlights To Remember From 2013

“And, the audience sprang to its feet and cheered…”

If you’re in the online content business, such physical signs of positive reinforcement are hard to come by. But, know that what you do is appreciated and often celebrated.

The following list contains 22 pieces of content. I cheered these gems when I learned about them at one point or another in 2013 and they've stood the test of as much as 12 months' time.

As in previous Rock The Boat Marketing annual content highlights (last year’s), this is an idiosyncratic compilation across multiple digital marketing subject domains. Most of these I like for their content, some for their design, their delivery or the evolution they represent. They're presented in no particular order.

Want to play along next year? Come join me on Twitter where the majority of these highlights were surfaced by the awesome information hounds I either follow or am led to. In 2013, I also explored more content on LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest—follow me on those networks or just check in once in a while on this site's Resources page.

1. How Google Reads Minds

The results that Google presents to you the searcher are based on how it “understands” the words you type into the search engine. You know what you want but your search query may have literal meanings that you don’t intend.

This excellent Vertical Measures graphic from April details what Google has in place to read your mind, and how that's evolving. The screenshot below is just a slice of the full infographic.

2. No Money Manager Is An Island

Part of being social is taking part in the broader community. Quite a few mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms seemed to acknowledge that this year with how they managed their social accounts. We saw more accounts following others, more sharing of others’ content and an occasional #FF (Follow Friday) recommendation.

No less than PIMCO’s Bill Gross acknowledged that investment and economic insight takes a village—and people showed a lot of interest in who influences this influential money manager. From August, this is one of PIMCO’s all-time most favorited tweets. It would have been too much to expect him to use the Twitter handles.

Gross: Strategists/writers I follow? Dalio, Durden, Bianco, Arnott, Aitken, Santelli, Grant, Grantham, Inker, Marks, Quaintenance & Brodsky

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) August 9, 2013

3. And We Are Doing This Why?

“…The silence around the economics of content is deafening,” says Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner in this July post 16 Ways to Turn Content Marketing into Business Value. Skinner then proceeds to break down what he names as catalysts of content marketing value: brand, next click, relationship, reach, data.

Many firms aspire to be content factories today, which is all well and good. Before you plow ahead into production, read the Skinner post to make sure you’re aligning what you’re doing with what drives value.

4. While You're At It, Throw In Some Sincerity, Too

It’s a good idea to present yourself as authentic and transparent. But, um, as this Tom Fishburne cartoon from June suggests, you may need to bring that in-house.

5. DIY Dashboard Help

Marketers need to be more analytical. That drumbeat got louder and louder as the year progressed. If you’ve ever found yourself looking for Excel training applied for marketers online, you may be happy to learn about this Excel dashboard series. Written by Annie Cushing and augmented by a video or two, it started in June on Search Engine Land and then continued on Marketing Land. 

6. Showing Signs Of Life On Google+

This November update isn’t on the list because the content is break-out. It’s a little more Facebook-y than I like for Google+.

But it’s an example of how the largest mutual fund company is not just experimenting but succeeding (relatively speaking) in engaging people on a social network that most investment companies have decided to ignore.

More than 700,000 people have circled the Vanguard account, 22 people +1ed this post, three shared it and 13 commented. And, what other social network (i.e., somebody else’s platform) provides such open real estate (no ads) for your message and yours alone?

7. A Map Can Show You Where You Need To Go

Infographics were so 2010. Still, I couldn’t resist spending several minutes of my life with this Gartner Digital Marketing Transit Map released in June.

Gartner says, "Organizations should use the map to identify the connection among business functions, applications tracks and providers. Map elements can be used to find additional research or structure questions about strategy and best practices as well as providers, products and selection criteria. It is also a useful device for mediating discussions between marketing and IT."

Show this to the people in your life who think all digital marketers do is email and the Website.

8. Right Time, Right Place

Advertising a financial advisor-only conference call? On Twitter? By Royce Funds? Yes, yes and yes. In October, Royce Funds showed its leading edge lead-generation chops by employing a Twitter card to drive sign-ups.

9. Lovely To Learn From

Design is rarely front and center for digital marketers, and yet it's especially important at a time when so many clients and prospects access information via mobile devices. You’ll take a lot from this Prophets Agency presentation published last January—and follow the account to learn when the 2014 outlook is available.

Trends in interactive design 2013

from

Prophets Agency

10. Where Do I Sign Up?

Few of us have high expectations when we go to a conference Website. Oh sure, the highest-profile events command the resources to deliver a functional, pleasant experience, but the majority of event sites lack luster.

That’s not the case with this vibrant LPL Connect 2013 site. I’d bookmarked it during the August event (which I attended by hashtag only) and hoped it would still be reachable when I returned to it for this list.

Outstanding—not only did it not go dark after the event, it’s been updated. Why would you go to a conference site afterward? Just one reason, probably. LPL lets the presentation archive dominate the home page, while most event sites require attendees to go looking. All that’s missing from my cursory review of the site is a Search capability. 

11. Sharing The Data

TD Ameritrade knew there was value in providing insights on what its investors were thinking. Previously, according to their Website, they'd satisfied media and others’ requests for information with opinion surveys.

That approach was upgraded considerably in January with the release of a quantitative, behavior-based index that reports on what retail investors are actually doing.

The Investor Movement Index, based on a sample of the firm’s 6 million accounts, is a tool that has ongoing marketing and communications utility. It raises the bar for other investment companies whose proprietary data contains insights when aggregated.

Wouldn’t it be cool (and ostensibly instructive) to someday get a full picture of what investors and 401(k) participants are doing, via a single site driven by the sampled and anonymized data from individual brokerage and investment firms?

12. Two Pictures = 1,000 Words

Nowadays, people are relying on mobile devices to share what they see around them and especially the news. We all need to plan accordingly.

Not that you needed the previous two sentences after looking at these photos comparing people anticipating a 2005 papal announcement in St. Peter's Square, Vatican City, and those in March 2013. 

If your client or boss isn't taking mobile strategy seriously, show them this picture of the Vatican crowd: pic.twitter.com/CPlrCbwrnp

— Fike (@MichaelFeldman) March 15, 2013

13. We Were Right There With You

From Google Earth to Reddit to Twitter, the Internet was focused on April’s Boston Marathon-related bombings.

From my perspective, this is the best content that came out of it. The rest of us were worried about Bostonians. In an inevitably schmaltzy way (is there any other when Neil Diamond is involved?), this video demonstrated their resilience. 

14. The Dope On SERPs

Google’s search engine results page (SERP) changed big-time in 2013. In October Moz provided a visual guide to all the variables that could possibly appear in (mostly organic) search results and why. Study the full guide (the screenshot below is just an excerpt) but don’t bother printing it—things may have changed since you started this post.  

15. Starting With Why

Water Investing, Calvert’s iPhone/iPad app launched in November, is different from other investment manager apps in at least four ways:

• It’s about something—the world's water crisis—as opposed to being a container of investment commentary and investment product information. The embedded video is effective at using the medium to communicate more than just words and images could.
• Its Daily Drip is an aggregation of others’ (non-Calvert) views and updates.
• It offers the tweets of not just the firm but three analysts using a #CalvertH20 hashtag.
• It includes a "Play" feature that uses the device's camera to simulate a water effect. Kinda corny but something to build on.

16. A Framework For Your Work

You could land on any blog post on Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor site and find Web analytics gold. But, make a special effort to read See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework. Your entire day every day can be filled in the pursuit of digital marketing tactics. This post is a nudge to be more strategic in how you think about your work and its effectiveness.

BREAKING: Sorry, I can’t let this post fly without also mentioning a December post in which Kaushik lays out a digital marketing “ladder of awesomeness.” Another must-read. You might just want to subscribe to this site.

17. Endorse Me As Father of The Bride

A chuckle is the last thing I expect when I log into LinkedIn but, no kidding, some of the photos being used for profiles are funny. This MarketingProfs 19 More Reasons Your LinkedIn Headshot May Be an Epic Fail presentation is not exaggerating. Too bad it doesn't touch on one of the types of photos I commonly see. Men in tuxedos, really?

19 Reasons Your LinkedIn Photo Is an Epic Fail

from

MarketingProfs

18. Looking Under The Hood

Last week was all about learning an hour of code. I’m guessing most of you sat that one out. But this week, how about learning to just read the source code on your Website?

If your work has anything to do with optimizing your site for search engines, this KISSmetrics post from August provides an excellent foundation for how to confirm what's happening on your site. Bonus: Check other sites' source code to learn what they're up to. This screenshot is just the first example the post provides.

19. Out Of The Ashes

First there was the dramatic reading by James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell of Jenna’s Facebook for a Sprint commercial. I loved that. Moving onto the digital realm, on YouTube two actors re-enacted a YouTube comment war between two One Direction fans.

But the investment industry has nothing to do with most memes. We wouldn’t do the Blurred Lines knock-off videos, twerking is out of the question, and the President of the United States took part in a selfie before an asset manager CEO has. 

So, while I suffered along with other financial services marketers when the #AskJPM Twitterchat imploded, I have to say that a subsequent CNBC video published the next day thrilled me. Stacey Keach provides the dramatic reading. 

It didn’t go anywhere (just one tweet!) but let history show that this may have been the first stab at a meme. Thanks to my buddy Todd Donat for first sending me the link to this.

Too soon? I hope not.

20. In Another's Eyes

When one Website sneezes, do the other Websites catch a cold? Nah, the failings of healthcare.gov just inspired Slate in October to show how iconic sites Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon and Windows would have made the site over in their own image and likeness. Pretty genius. 

21. Borrowing From The Journalists

The introduction of data, including visualization, can add to the usefulness of content you’re creating.

But this is yet another competency that people in marketing positions today will have to learn on the job. Most likely, you will not be crunching the numbers, you’ll be managing the data-driven work. To be an effective partner and contributor you may have to dig in.

It was prepared for journalists and not marketers, but the Data Journalism handbook may be just the resource you need. The handbook, a version of which is also available in print, is a project of the European Journalism Centre’s Data Driven Journalism initiative.  

22. Tech To Watch Out For

The Marketing Arm’s Tom Edwards, the author of this contribution to iMedia Connection, sounds like he has one cool job as an evaluator of interactive/new media and emerging tech.

We’re the beneficiaries as he outlines—and provides plenty of examples of—six marketing technology trends. Included: collaborative commerce, curation, second screen and social TV, rich social media, crowdsourcing and social and CRM. The screenshot below shows the user interface of a social TV app.

This post will do it for me for 2013. Happy Holidays to all and see you back here in the first week of 2014! 

The 4 Presentation Tics That Show You’re Left Over From The Last Century

Unlike my esteemed colleague Investment Writing blogger Susan Weiner who says she’s planned through March 2014, I don’t plan and write these blog posts months in advance. I bookmark ideas, write a few lines here and there, and once a week something gets published.

As we draw toward the close of the year, I’m organizing what’s left to say in the remaining posts of 2013. There’s one idea that’s been brewing all year. I’ve been putting it off while adding to it. It doesn’t quite meet my loose standards for a Rock The Boat Marketing blog topic: needs to be relevant to mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers, should offer something helpful and take an overall positive tone.

However…if I promise extra jolliness in subsequent posts, maybe you’ll indulge my following gripes about presenters at conferences whose topics touch on but are not limited to digital marketing at asset managers. Helpful? Gosh, I hope something below helps in some way to minimize these presentation offenses in 2014.

There are few business activities I love more than attending conferences and sitting in on sessions. I’m not making voodoo dolls out of most presenters, I promise. And, yes, I do have a sense of humor usually. But, what century are some of these presenters from? The following is directed to the offenders.

1. Butchering the name of the speaker you’re introducing and laughing it off.

You’ve been asked to introduce someone and didn’t go to the trouble to learn the pronunciation of the speaker’s name? Don’t try to enlist the audience in your attempts to obscure the fact by guffawing your way through a name.

People’s names aren’t an occasion to poke fun or point out differences, their names are who they are. Nobody in a 21st century audience laughs along, and you are up there all alone. If you are not a xenophobe, why act like one?

2. Blaming everything that goes wrong on “technology.”

Granted, this may have been an audience sympathy winning move at some point, back when speaker and audience stared at each other waiting for the AV guy to zoom in to save the day.

But look at the audience you’re presenting to in 2014—that is, if you can see their faces behind their smartphones and tablets. They’re not technophobes and Luddites, and they know that “technology” isn’t the bogeyman that inexplicably sabotages presentations. What’s the deal? Internet access? Display issues? Files gone missing?

Give your audience a little credit for being able to distinguish between a hapless presenter and setting-specific challenges.

3. Making jokes at the expense of women.

“The wife” is still a go-to source of inspiration for would-be jokesters. For as commonplace as this is, it still stuns me when it happens, which was at least once at every conference I attended this year. Examples: The portfolio manager who repeatedly referred to “the wife’s” dress size. The payments presenter who explained that alerts could be used to curb “the wife’s” spending.

People attend presentations to hear something new, not to be taken back to the days of Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners. This tic antagonizes women, but all in the audience are dumbfounded.

Do this at the risk of completely losing your audience. It’s impossible to pay attention to someone so gleefully disrespectful and hanging on to an earlier time.

4. Ignoring the social back channel.

Time doesn’t stop between the day presentation materials are due and the date of the presentation. The best presenters keep current and will refresh their slide content on the fly during the presentation. But that isn’t enough anymore.

Hello! In almost all public presentation contexts today, there’s a back channel on Twitter, blogs or other forums. Your audience is sharing what’s on their minds, what they’re interested in, even what they’re hoping you’ll be covering. 

Nowadays, following an event's hashtag is the least a presenter can do, to get a sense of the attendees and the overall tone of the conference.

The slide below is from a presentation that Morningstar's Leslie Marshall gave on hashtag conference use at financial services events at a Business Development Institute forum in October. 

Hashtags - How to engage with your audience one tweet at a time - BDI 10/15/13 Financial Services Social Business Leadership Forum

from

Business Development Institute

You have two choices:

• To take the stage oblivious to your environment and deliver a hermetically sealed presentation. Just so you know, things can turn south when you step into something and it’s obvious that you haven’t been “listening” to what’s being said. The back channel works before, during and after your remarks.
• To check in on Twitter or other appropriate networks and learn what you use as an opportunity to deliver a relevant, timely talk. At the minimum, you’ve shown your audience that you care about what they say. Additional, positive social lift for you and your content is a possibility, too. 

C’mon, let’s get it all out before the holidays’ official start: What tics tick you off? 

Note:The December 12 RegEd Webinar with Blane Warrene and Susan Weiner, which I mentioned when I published this post, has been postponed. Watch for an update from RegEd.