Adam Metz’ book, The Social Customer, targets companies with 1,000+ employees, but some of its social media information is useful for companies of all sizes. This is true of the chapter on “The Social Customers and the Law.”

Financial advisors tend to focus their legal concerns on laws specific to their industry. However, other laws also demand attention, most notably the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

DMCA “makes it easy for copyright owners, like your brand, to challenge any website owner (or social customer) to remove or take down any content that is infringing,” as Metz says on p. 226. Metz suggests reading “Fair use in a nutshell” by Lloyd J. Jassin to understand whether you can make a case for issuing DMCA takedown notice.

Here are more Metz recommendations for resources:

• FTC guidelines regarding endorsements (FTC File No. PO34520)
• Online Word of Mouth and Its Implications for Trademark Law by Eric Goldman, who writes the Goldman’s Technology and Law Blog.
• Glenn Manishin’s Managing Legal Risks in Social Media.

Don’t forget financial regulations

Financial advisors, your industry is highly regulated, so don’t forget the best practices for your industry.

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in return for agreeing to write about it.

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The last singles dance I attended taught me a lesson that has served me well with social media. The lesson? Don’t always trust your gut reaction.

My wedding picture, taken in the room where I met my husband at a singles dance

The cute man whom I glimpsed across the dance floor at Boston’s Parker House Hotel looked way too young for me, so I mentally crossed him off my list. There was no sense in trying to catch his eye.

However, I said yes when he asked me to dance and again when he invited me to escape the overcrowded room for a drink in Parker’s Bar. He seemed nervous over drinks – not the suave smooth-talker of my dreams. But we started dating, and he grew on me. Earlier this year we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

How does this story relate to social media?

I didn’t like social media at first. Twitter, especially, struck me as stupid. But I gave social media a chance. Just like I gave that young man a chance. Now I appreciate my many relationships fostered by social media.

Give social media a chance. You may find more positives than you expect.

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The NICSA General Membership Meeting on October 6 addressed challenges facing investment managers and their service providers. Compared to other industry conferences, it emphasizes the “back office” functions that support investment professionals. In this post I present some of what caught my attention at the conference–mostly information about regulation and marketing.

The short statements are tweets, grouped by speaker. I also link to my blog posts on the meeting. In case you’re wondering, #NICSAGMM is the hashtag used on Twitter to help people find tweets related to the conference.

My blog posts about #NICSAGMM

OppenheimerFunds on the separation of marketing and sales

Citi on financial services’ biggest potential social media mistake

Opposing financial services’ social media paralysis at #NICSAGMM

Robert Pozen, MFS Investment Management, on financial reform

The back office makes mutual industry go, says Bob Pozen, MFS #NICSAGMM

Bob Pozen: SRI = systematically risky institutions. Means lots of extra regs #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Cost of SRI bailouts borne by other SRIs, NOT taxpayers #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Proprietary trading will shift from US banks to least regulated countries and companies with Volcker Rule #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Good change with Dodd-Frank: clearing for derivatives #NICSAGMM

Pozen suggests investment advisors form their own SRO #NICSAGMM

Pozen: C shares will be required to convert to A shares eventually #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Fluctuating NAV for money market funds would be end of MMFs for retail investors #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Hope we don’t over-regulate MMFs. Only 2 broke the buck #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Public-private firms like T Rowe, Franklin, Legg Mason, Black Rock will be winners in asset mgt #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Public-private means some public stock, but strong internal mgt control #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Restricted shares shouldn’t vest just because you’re still alive. Tie to performance. #NICSAGMM

Pozen: “Mortgages are the big banana that has never been touched.” Barely touched by Dodd-Frank #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Qualified residential mortgages (QRMs) will be important. Downpayment requirement will be key. #NICSAGMM

Bob Pozen: Europe has solvency crisis, US doesn’t have one…yet #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Repeated budget crises -> instability. Need to bring back compromise. #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Another crisis is inevitable at end of 2012 when Bush tax cuts expire & budget is issue #NICSAGMM

Pozen: Customers want best products at best price. #NICSAGMM

Pozen: People don’t understand inverse relationship between interest rates and bond prices #NICSAGMM

Marty Willis, OppenheimerFunds

Marty Willis, Oppenheimer Funds: Mutual funds’ biggest challenge = lack of differentiation. #NICSAGMM

Willis: New tech will allow wholesalers to improve the value they offer. Like pharmaceutical reps. #NICSAGMM

M. Willis, Oppenheimer Funds: Marketers’ toolkit now more complete. #NICSAGMM

M. Willis: Fund marketing has become editor of content across web, print, social media. #NICSAGMM

OppenheimerFunds is using predictive modeling to help wholesalers decide who to call on. #NICSAGMM

Peter Thatch, Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management

Peter Thatch, Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management: “Clients’ risk appetite has fallen off the cliff.” #NICSAGMM

Thatch: Products that meet clients’ current needs are more complicated #NICSAGMM

P Thatch: You’ll see more global TAA with risk parameters. #NICSAGMM

Joseph D. Kringdon, Pioneer Funds Distributors/Pioneer Investments

J. Kringdon, Pioneer Funds Distributors: If you died tomorrow, what would your clients miss about you? That’s your value. #NICSAGMM

J. Kringdon, Pioneer Funds Distributors: Clients don’t care about benchmarks #NICSAGMM

Kringdon: Pioneer Investments tries to build its intellectual capital & deliver in multiple media #NICSAGMM

Visit multisectorbond.com to see creative site for advisors to back-test fund #NICSAGMM

Lee Kowarski, kasina

L Kowarski of @kasinaUS: Compensation is broken, but no one wants to lose wholesalers. #NICSAGMM

Penny Alexander, Franklin Templeton Investments

Penny Alexander, Franklin Templeton: Best biz growth opportunities for fund cos = non-US #NICSAGMM

P Alexander: Most developed countries aren’t breeding any more. #NICSAGMM

P Alexander: $10/month invested by world’s middle income earners−>$391 billion in annual gross sales. #NICSAGMM

P Alexander: Need scale to manage lots of small accounts #NICSAGMM

Cartoon: “If we take a late retirement and an early death, we’ll just squeak by.” #NICSAGMM

P Alexander: 3-legged stool for retirement isn’t enough #NICSAGMM

P Alexander: Retirement now needs a kaleidoscope with lots of little pieces. #NICSAGMM

P Alexander: Fund industry can affect mindset & behavior to meet retirement challenge. #NICSAGMM

Penny Alexander: Technology is key to reaching next generation of investors. #NICSAGMM

P Alexander: Muslim investors don’t get as much attention as they should. #NICSAGMM

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important topic for bloggers. I turned to Steve Tannuzzo, the talented copywriter whom I’m glad to call my friend, for his insights into how you can use SEO effectively.

Even if you don’t care about SEO, I think you’ll enjoy Steve’s writing, which lives up to his statement that “My mission is to replace boring, hackneyed copy with words that zing and sell.”

Easy SEO: How to Really Get Found on the Internet

By Steve Tannuzzo

So you’re writing a blog but very few people are reading it. Now what?

Perhaps you’ve learned some tips and tricks that were “guaranteed” to elevate your search engine rankings. You may even have tried a few suggestions from website articles written by so-called search engine optimization experts, yet your blog is still starving for readers.

If you’ve taken the advice of these alleged pros, you’ve probably kept your keyword frequency between 3% and 7% of the article’s total word count. You’ve chosen accurate meta tags for the description of the blog post and your title tag is, in your humble opinion, a Google magnet.

You may even have avoided the pitfalls of sloppy SEO: You resisted overstuffing endless keywords into your coding. You didn’t list your town along with 40-50 surrounding towns in your site’s footer in a shameless attempt to build a local following. You didn’t intentionally misspell names and words in your meta tags to ride the coattails of your competition and capture the bad-speller demographic. You understand that Google is smart, and you didn’t run afoul of their rules.

So what gives?

Here’s the problem: Google and other search engines use complex algorithms to determine exactly how they decide their rankings. These formulas, rules and calculations are subject to change and no one is really sure exactly how or why they alter them. So for the immediate future, here is the best advice I can give you to get found on the Internet. That is, until the next time the search engines stir the algorithm stew.

Seven Ways for Your Blog to Get Found and Read

1. Choose Your Headlines Carefully. Make your title stand out from the crowd. Be specific to your article’s content. Imagine how someone might search for your article and use those words in your title.

2. Use Multiple Headlines. While Google may have lost its love for keywords, they really have a thing for those header tags. Use those h1 and h2 options rather than using a larger font and making it bold. Apart from your title, use sub-headers throughout your article.

3. Choose a Searchable URL. If you owned a dog-walking business, you’d get a lot more hits with www.walkmydogboston.com than you would with something like www.wmdenterprises.com.

4. Use Keywords Sparingly. Put away the calculator. 3-7% is just a guideline. If you’re overusing certain words and phrases, you’ll know it. Your post will sound like spam—and no one wants a blog that reads like that.

5. Build Your Reputation. Volunteer to be a guest blogger. Have websites with related content link back to your blog. Get your name and the name of your website mentioned on other sites. Pick one or several social media platforms to promote your latest articles. Inbound links from reputable sites like Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and Facebook tell the Google-bots that your site deserves respect and attention.

6. Think Small. Let’s say you’re a foodie and you want to blog about bread. An article on baking bread will yield endless pages of search engine results. You’d be much better served writing about, say, sprouted grain bread. It’s a specific topic with a cultish following. It’s perfect for search and it’s a more interesting read. Think of it as narrowcasting as opposed to broadcasting and apply this rule when choosing bite-sized topics related to your business. You may be pleasantly surprised to find your blog getting more traffic when casting a smaller net. They’ll read the whole post and they may even comment on your blog. That’s when you’ll really see the start of a regular readership.

7. Write for People, Not Search Engines. This may be the most important lesson of all. You could be sitting atop the search engine rakings with cleverly strategized SEO, but once someone clicks on your site, you’ll need to deliver the goods. Choose a voice that doesn’t talk down to your readers. Be relevant. Teach something new. Engage and entertain. Make your posts worth their while. Balance how your readers find you with the outstanding content you give them with each new post.

And that’s it. You don’t need an advanced degree from MIT to unravel the mystery of Google’s evolving algorithms. You probably don’t have the time. But if you follow these reasonable rules, you’ll build a solid readership and a reputation for delivering compelling content.

Steve Tannuzzo is the owner of Tannuzzo Copywriting. He helps people grow their businesses by providing clear, goal-specific copy that gets them noticed and increases their profits. His specialties include advertising copy and social media marketing content. Visit his website at www.tannuzzo.com and follow him on Twitter @BostonProWriter.

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“Lawyers never get in trouble for saying ‘no’ to marketing.” I learned this from one of my favorite corporate bosses.

So I hastily scribbled a tweet when Rajib Chanda of Ropes & Gray made the following statement on the “Social Media in the Workplace” panel at NICSA’s General Membership Meeting on October 6.

Chanda made the point that there’s plenty of guidance for social media compliance. FINRA has been more forthcoming than the SEC. However, firms that fall under the SEC can look to its regulation of communications via other media.

Like Chanda, panel moderator Paul Butcher, director of global corporate social media for Citi, urged financial services companies to act.

He said, social media is NOT like walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope carrying a piano. In his opinion, companies should use social media within carefully defined constraints.

Citi’s approach includes the following:

• Global social media guidelines
• A registration process for those who will potentially use social media on behalf of the company
• Training on Citi’s best practices and guidelines
• Appropriate use of technology and branding

If you’re still worried about risks from social media, panelist Anthony “Sandy” Codding, Jr. of Marsh/FINPRO described the kinds of insurance you can buy for protection in areas including defamation, intellectual property, errors and omissions, privacy liability, disclosure of financial information, and employment.

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“Where are financial services companies most likely to go wrong in their use of social media?” This is the question I asked of the panelists on “Social Media in the Workplace” at NICSA’s General Membership Meeting in Boston on October 6.

Surprising answer from Citi’s Butcher

I liked the answer given by Paul Butcher, director of global corporate social media for Citi.  He said companies could make a mistake by not listening enough to customers. Social media is not just an outbound channel, he added.

Earlier in the panel he’d mentioned that Citi listens to customer comments. It handles comments by first categorizing them, and then responding accordingly. For example, comments that are blatant violations of the firm’s terms of service are taken down. The work flow for other comments depends on their nature.

In one example, the firm’s call center in Jacksonville, Fla., monitors customer comments, engages with customers in the channel where they find the comment, and then move it into a regular, private channel, if appropriate.

In my opinion, too many financial companies treat their social media activities as one-way communications. I understand that compliance fears prompt much of their inactivity. Still, it’s frustrating for the folks who follow them. Financial companies that don’t respond to their followers risk alienating them.

Concerns of Marsh/FINPRO and Ropes & Gray

Prior to Butcher’s comment, Anthony “Sandy” Codding of Marsh/FINPRO commented on risks from an insurer’s viewpoint. Regulatory compliance and defamation are the two greatest risks, he said.

Rajib Chanda of Ropes & Gray added to Codding’s comment by pointing to the risks of financial services companies using mobile apps. As more people store information on mobile devices, you start to work about identity theft, he said.

I’m sure we’re going to hear more about all of these issues in financial services.

This post was updated on October 7, 2011.

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Registered investment advisors, how much should you disclose when you use articles written by others? Is it okay to slap your name on articles largely written by others? What if those articles may also appear under the names of other advisors?

Below is a question posed by one of my readers.

Several DFA staff members write commentaries which are kept in a “library” for the approved advisors to use. Approved advisors can search for a commentary that they feel is timely (not usual to see commentaries which were written by DFA in 2008-2010 used in the present by an RIA).

A simple search of an DFA used commentary by an RIA will bring up multiple “DFA-approved RIAs.” However, in the individual RIA commentaries a few will use a disclaimer that states the subject matter was “Adapted From Joe Smith of Dimensional Fund Advisors” while many others will treat the commentary as their own work.

RIAs are quick to market their role as a fiduciary to their clients but I feel that acting with integrity is just as critical. I believe that citing sources correctly is fundamental to acting with integrity when communicating with clients and the public.

Do you think that clients would appreciate such disclosure and conversely disapprove of portraying another firms thoughts and research as originally from an RIA?

This isn’t–or shouldn’t be–an issue for registered representatives because FINRA advises them to disclose the role of other writers, as I discussed in “Registered reps, it’s time to ‘fess up.”

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I know many investment professionals who feel skittish about dipping their toes into social media. To them, I parrot Nike’s line:

Photo by Ivars Krutainis

“Just do it.”

LinkedIn is a great place to start.

Try this experiment. Post a LinkedIn status update once a week for a month. See if you get any responses.

Start by writing status updates within your comfort zone. You can say something as innocuous as “Have a great weekend!” or “I’m reading today’s Wall Street Journal.” You can steer clear of compliance-sensitive content, but still show some personality by commenting on your hobby or other leisure activities.

If you monitor your LinkedIn account regularly, try posing a question.  People love to talk about themselves. Again, you can keep the topic innocuous. For example, “Beach or mountains – which vacation spot do you prefer?” or “What’s your favorite hobby?”

If you’re willing to venture into financial topics, you might link to an article you enjoy. Check with your compliance professionals to see what they’ll allow.

Half the battle in social media is just showing up. Try it, and see what happens!

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I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to develop a business presence on Facebook. LinkedIn, Twitter, and my blog kept me busy enough.

But then I heard that the CFA Institute had way more followers on Facebook than LinkedIn. How many? I forget the numbers I heard at the institute’s 2010 annual conference, but more recent statistics include

• Facebook – more than 40,000 fans
• LinkedIn member group – almost 14,000 (and 27,000 in candidate group)
• Twitter – more than 8,000
• LinkedIn company page – almost 3,800

I found these stats in “The CFA Network” in CFA Magazine. The big gap between Facebook and other social media made me think seriously about Facebook.

I’m not saying that 40,000 fans on Facebook are worth more than 14,000 group members on LinkedIn. It seems as if the CFA Institute’s LinkedIn members are more engaged than its Facebook members. I enjoy my conversations on the group very much.

However, the Facebook numbers made me think about delivering content the way my readers want. I’ve blogged about this in “Great blog posts don’t matter…” Eventually I started an Investment Writing Facebook page. The Facebook page has become another way for me to share my blog posts and to experiment with starting conversations.

My Facebook page is still evolving. I haven’t found the right formula yet. But I’ve had fun experimenting. Thank you, CFA Institute!

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Want to hear from two of the women who are pioneering social media use in financial services? Watch this webcast featuring Cathy Curtis of Curtis Financial, an independent advisor, and Lauren Boyman, director of social media for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. The webcast was organized by LinkedIn.

If you listen carefully, you’ll hear Curtis identify the form of social media that has helped her the most in connecting with prospective clients. She also mentions an interesting measurement of her social media success: The large number of prospects who find her small independent firm through a Google search.

Curtis keeps her content 80% business and 20% personal. The personal content focuses on food and wine. There’s nothing like one of her @CurtisFinancial foodie tweets to make me hungry.

Boyman discusses her firm’s strategy of providing pre-approved content to start conversations. Once that content starts the conversation, there will be more leeway for personalization. This is because a Twitter conversation, for example, moves away from being “static content” that requires pre-approval. It will be interesting to see how much flexibility the firm’s advisors actually receive.

Boyman’s firm will provide a calendar and worksheets to advisors. This sounds like an idea independent financial advisors could benefit from adapting.

To read about some of the webcast’s high points, plus some analysis of the webcast, go to Pat Allen’s “Personal Or Turnkey? This Must-Watch Video Presents 2 Very Different Approaches To Social Media.”

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