Susan B. Weiner Investment Writing - Susan B. Weiner Blog

Social media are great, but sometimes I want to meet my business colleagues, prospects, and referral sources in person. 

In this post, I share some names of networking organizations in greater Boston. Perhaps you’ll find an organization that works for you. Even if you’re not in Boston, some of these organizations have a national presence.

My anchor organizations are the Boston Security Analysts Society (BSAS), the local chapter of the CFA Institute, and the Women’s Business Network (WBN). I’m a volunteer for the  BSAS. I try to attend at least one program monthly to keep on top of investment management issues and to meet new people. I belong to WBN out in Wellesley to get myself out of my office to chat with other small business owners.
 
Here are some other organizations I’ve enjoyed on multiple occasions. They’re a mix of financial, communications, and business groups.

• Boston Women in Finance– I’ve enjoyed presenting to their members on writing techniques.
• Downtown Women’s Club
• International Association of Business Communicators-Boston chapter
• Public Relations Society of America-Boston chapter

There are many more worthy organizations in greater Boston. One that intrigues me is the Boston Economic Club. If only I had more time… 

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Copyblogger Brian Clark’s lessons in “The two most important words in blogging” apply equally to any form of marketing communication. Pay attention because using these words will make your communications more persuasive.

See if you can guess the two words before you surf to Copyblogger’s site. If you have attended any of my presentations on writing, you should know one of the two answers.
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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Copyblogger Brian Clark accurately notes in “How to write exquisite subheads” that subheads can turn scanners into readers.

I especially like his advice that a subhead should “express a clear and complete benefit.”
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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Financial advisors who want to communicate effectively will follow the example set by Bill Carter in “The Scoreboard Can’t Tell You Everything.” Carter’s lesson boils down to this: Put yourself in the mind of the person with whom you’re communicating.

Here’s what Carter, partner and co-found of Fuse, said in his interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times:

In terms of communication, I think that I do my best to try to step away from my own belief system and my own priorities, which are the priorities of a 41-year-old man who’s married and has a young daughter. Instead, I try to evaluate decisions based on what the 25- to-32-year-olds in our office are trying to get out of their career, what they want in a workplace. 

Your articles and conversations will be more persuasive when you phrase them in terms of what your clients, prospects, and referral sources care about. 

For example, say “Your interests come first because we don’t accept payments from product providers” instead of “We are a fee-only financial advisor.”

Do you apply this rule to your communications? Please share your examples.


Related posts
* Focus on features, not benefits, in your marketing
* Encourage good communication or lose your multi-generational clients

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Investment expenses have been on my mind this month, as you know, if you’ve read “Morgan Creek Capital’s Yusko on investing,” “Morgan Creek Capital’s Yusko riles up Tweeters with comments on investment fees” or you follow me on Twitter.


This prompted me to revisit my article, “Have mutual fund fees gone up or down? Are they fair or unfair? It depends on whom you ask.” 


Many of the points raised in this 2006 article still apply.

•  For most advisors, it’s a no-brainer to pick the fund with lower expenses, assuming the fund’s style, market capitalization and other major factors are equal. 
• Controversies swirl around several topics related to fees, including their fairness, their correlation with higher fund returns, whether they’re rising or falling, and whether fund firms are responding adequately to advisor demands.
• Some financial advisors say both critics and boosters of mutual funds may be missing the point by focusing on disclosed expense ratios. 
• One thing seems clear: Advisors will continue to gravitate toward low-cost funds that also meet their other investment criteria.

One change since my 2006 article: The Investment Company Institute’s research no longer shows that overall mutual fund expenses are dropping. The headline for its latest study says, “Mutual Fund Expense Ratios Ticked Up in 2009, While Total Fees and Expenses Remained Steady.” Morningstar Advisor put a more negative spin on fees in “Mutual Fund Expense Ratios See Biggest Spike Since 2000.”

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Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Advisors, you can deepen your connection with folks who attend your investment or financial planning workshops using a technique I observed at the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts annual conference on May 7.

Consultant Shari Harley, whom I wrote about in “How to improve your financial planning client relationships,” handed out postcards to her audience. There’s nothing unusual about that. But what she said next grabbed my attention.

Harley asked us to write on the postcard (shown in the photo above) at least one thing that we learned from her presentation that we’d like to apply. Then she promised to mail the postcards to us in one month, if we dropped them off on our way out of the auditorium.

I like Harley’s postcard idea because

1. Her question spurs the audience to think about what was most valuable in her presentation.
2. She gains valuable feedback when participants hand in their cards.
3. She reminds potential clients of her existence–with their permission–when they receive their cards one month later.
4. If audience members haven’t acted on their goals by the time they receive the cards, they may say, “I need a consultant to help me act on this.”

This postcard technique should work nicely as follow-up to any sort of financial seminar or workshop.
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_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Copyright law isn’t on the curriculum of most business schools or for CFP or CFA candidates. So it’s not surprising that I’ve seen well-meaning financial advisors unintentionally violate copyright law in their blogs. 

What NOT to do
You cannot copy someone’s entire  newspaper article or  blog post  word-for-word, then make it okay by giving credit to the author. This won’t suffice. Not even if you link back to the original article. You are violating copyright law. 

When in doubt, paraphrase
U.S. law allows you to quote part of a written work under the doctrine of fair use, which you can read about on the federal copyright website.

Fair use is a murky concept. “There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work,” as it says in the federal government’s FAQ on on “How much of someone else’s work can I use without getting permission?”

As the Copyright Office says:

If you use a copyrighted work without authorization, the owner may be entitled to bring an infringement action against you. There are circumstances under the fair use doctrine where a quote or a sample may be used without permission. However, in cases of doubt, the Copyright Office recommends that permission be obtained.

Your safest course is to simply paraphrase or summarize the article that interests you, while also citing the source. It’s courteous to provide a link to the article, if it’s available online.

Using quotes very selectively will keep you safe, while protecting other authors’ copyright.
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Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.  

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

“…the lead is the doorway into every text. Its job, never a minor one, is to draw the reader over the threshold,” says Francis Flaherty in The Elements of Story, p. 201.

The lead, also spelled lede, is the first sentence or paragraph of your blog post or article.  Write a weak lead and you may lose your audience at the very beginning of your piece.

When you write your lead, Flaherty suggests you ask “What lead will prompt in the reader the most irresistible questions, questions powerful enough to propel him through that doorway and into the story?” p. 202.

When you write an investment or wealth management blog post, the most powerful leads often pose a problem faced by your readers and dangle the possibility of a solution. Have you written a powerful lead of this type? Please post a link to your blog post, so we can see how you’ve mastered the lead.
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Susan B. Weiner, CFA
Check out my website at www.InvestmentWriting.com or sign up for my free monthly e-newsletter.
Copyright 2010 by Susan B. Weiner All rights reserved

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

Using a term such as CFP in your Twitter name makes sense as a marketing strategy for financial advisors. It immediately identifies you as a credentialed professional. However, it also means you’re violating the CFP Board’s rules.

Twitter alerted me to this issue. When I dug into the CFP Board’s Guide to Use of the CFP Certification Marks, I discovered that point 1.7 says “CFP certificants may not own or use an email address or internet domain name that includes the CFP mark.” (Sorry CFP Board, I don’t know how to make the (R) mark appear in a Blogger blog). 

Here are some examples from the CFP Board of proper and improper use of their mark.

A Twitter name isn’t an email or a URL. But Twitter does make the name into a URL following the format http://twitter.com/TWITERNAME.

I contacted @CFPBoard to ask if a Twitter name using CFP would violate its rules. Here’s the reply:

It sounds as if the CFP Board is open to your feedback about using CFP in Twitter names. So shoot SLaBonte an email, if you’d like to be heard.
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Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.  

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.

CFA Institute Annual Conference speakers raised many concerns about the future during the conference, which ran from May 16 to May 19 in Boston. But they didn’t always agree with one another. Their mixed opinions inspired this month’s poll.

Which do you fear more? 
* Inflation or deflation? 
* Continued fiscal stimulus or spending cuts to focus on deficit reduction?

Please answer the poll in the right-hand column of this blog. I’ll report on the results in the July issue of my e-newsletter.

For a sampling of the mixed opinions, see
* Memo from Van Hoisington: Inflation Won’t Be a Problem for Some Time to Come on the CFA Institute’s conference blog
* Why Niall Ferguson’s Forbidden FT Headline is the Key to Understanding Sovereign Risk on the CFA Institute’s conference blog
* Harvard Professor Kenneth Rogoff Offers a Historical Perspective on Financial Crises on the CFA Institute’s conference blog
* R Koo, “Lessons from Japan: Fighting a Balance Sheet Recession”
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Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.  

_______________________________________________________________
Need to write better? Register for my next class on “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Writing Class for Financial Advisors” starting May 16. You won’t get another chance to take this class until 2013.

Receive a free 32-page e-book with client communications tips when you sign up for my free monthly newsletter.