Leading Advisor Social Media Survey Re-Visited

I was interviewed by a publication that serves financial and investment advisors on Thursday, September 15th about this Social Media Survey June 10, 2010 blog post that I wrote and here are the questions that I was asked along with my replies.

How many (approximately) financial advisors did you poll regarding their use of social media?

69

Were they advisors just based in your practice region of B.C.?

47 were from the a presentation that I did for The Independent Financial Brokers in Toronto and 22 were from a private company event that I did in BC, again it was ad hock.

Did many speak out about their compliance concerns, or other fallbacks of using social media for business purposes?

The survey was conducted by doing a web search of the names of the financial advisors so there was no verbal communication.

What surprised you about the results?

I wasn’t surprised and the results confirmed the CNBC results from the article I mentioned in my blog. LinkedIn is clearly the social media business platform of choice and one doesn’t really need a compliance department to question whether they want to be on FaceBook when FaceBook’s privacy policies have been at FaceBook’s discretion at times. So that seems to be FaceBook’s challenge from an advisor / compliance point of view and Twitter appears to be just too far out there. Some advisors are still finding their voice when it comes to their values, vision, purpose, mission, brand and tag lines without having to hammer it all into 140 characters on Twitter. Wired Magazine has a segment on Wired, Tired and Expired and their latest issue listed Twitter as Expired.

What inspired you to bring up this topic of social media in the first place? Do you and Laura use it for your own practice? How?

I’m just as curious about Social Media ROI as everyone else. I’ve been investing in what I call Social Media 1.0 which includes a web site, blog and e-newsletter since 2004 / 2005. I write about practice development and personal development financial advisor areas of interest. I’ve engaged the big 3 of Social Media 2.0 that include FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter a couple of years ago. Social Media for us is about building our brand while we invest our time in good old fashioned Marketing 101 activities like financial advisor speaking. Social Media is a tool to support Marketing 101 and one should never forget the basics. A sale requires human contact and clients that are investing in a consultative product or service want personal service. While there are plenty of instant social media experts representing sales results from consumer based simple transactional products like a book, advisors deal with consultative selling and should not assume that they will get the same results that so called experts are offering which are based on consumer based simple transactional products. Social Media is not a quick fix for instant sales success and it takes time just as any brand building does.