Surviving the Crisis: 5 Tips for Advisors in a Time of Market Turmoil

On August 16, 2011, In Current Events, By Bruce Johnston
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By:  D. Bruce Johnston, President & CEO

Today’s news coverage says it all: words like “plunging stocks,” “massive volatility,” “lowest levels,” “looming recession,” “double dip,” and “rout” are liberally peppered throughout much of the media.

In this environment, it doesn’t take long for the pundits and talking heads to start discussing what an advisor should be saying to his or her clients. It comes with the turf, and is certainly no surprise. Because the fact is, as your clients struggle to make sense of a situation they can’t control or comprehend, they will increasingly turn to you for context, calm and comfort. You need to communicate with them clearly and unequivocally. That’s why I recommend that you make the following five pointers the guideposts of your “crisis mode” communications (they’re good everyday pointers, too, regardless of a “meltdown”).

1.) Pick up the phone.

As obvious as this one is, it’s often neglected. There will be a leading research report issued within a few months that states that more than 40% of clients are not being contacted during the crisis that has followed the S&P credit downgrade. We’ve seen this type of inattention before. It happened in 1999-2001, 2008, and it’s happening this time as well. And there are additional research figures, too: 40% of clients state they would change advisors if they received a call from a new advisor asking them to move their business.

2.) Ask your clients about their concerns.

Needless to say, the purpose of this question is not to increase AUM for your firm. Rather, it’s to deepen your relationship with your client and to continue to establish yourself as their trusted advisor. You need to know what makes them tick, and there’s no better time to get a read on them than at a time of crisis and volatility.

3.) Reinforce your strategy.

Your clients have entrusted you to help them achieve certain short- and long-term financial goals. Let them know what form your strategy — indeed, your vision — is taking. And by the way, if there ever was a good time to remove the ticker tapes – oops showing my age – stock quotes from your website, this is it. When clients visit your site and view all the red flashing numbers, they’re not getting the impression that your firm stands for good advice and planning.

4.) Put the markets into context for your clients.

Sure, it’s easy for clients to panic now. That’s why, as you reinforce your strategy, you’ll also want to put the markets into context. While it’s true that the US downgrade is probably a once-in-a-lifetime event for all of us, we have all seen extreme volatility before. Have a discussion with your clients about how their portfolio has been constructed to achieve certain long-term goals. Likewise for those clients with shorter time horizons as well.

5.) Warn about the “too-good-to-be-true” promises that proliferate during a crisis.

Here in the post-Madoff era, it’s especially important to communicate with your clients. Let them know to beware of promises that “guarantee” them:

  • Unusually Attractive Returns. This is an old but effective tactic. During a time when clients have seen their portfolios erode by 30%, 40%, or 50%, these promised returns begin to look very attractive. Think Allen Stanford’s high interest rate CD’s.
  • Unusually Steady Returns. Classic Madoff…with steady and consistent returns “assured” over a long period of time. If the current situation has taught us anything, it’s that investment returns fluctuate!

Not talking to your clients? Someone else is! Today’s clients are baffled, confused and in some cases irrational as they struggle with the events of the past two weeks. They need to hear from you. Because one thing is for sure: if you’re not talking with your clients, someone else is. In today’s connected world, I can safely say that they’re receiving solicitations from other advisors and/or researching the web for answers.

To summarize: in our new, wired world — in a time of acute market uncertainty — it’s your responsibility to call, ascertain concerns, reinforce strategy, put today’s events into context, and protect clients from false promises (and from themselves).

 

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Inside the Mind of Madoff: An Interview with Diana B. Henriques, Author of the Bestseller “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust”

On August 15, 2011, In Current Events, By Bruce Johnston
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By: D. Bruce Johnston, President & CEO

On August 18th at 2PM EST I will be partnering with ByAllAccounts on a much anticipated webinar entitled “The Madoff Lessons: What Every Financial Advisor Must Learn From History’s Biggest Ponzi Scheme” featuring The New York Times Bestselling author Diana B. Henriques. While working on the webinar, I had a chance to sit down with Diana to ask her about her experience covering the Madoff story from start to finish, writing her bestselling book, and being the first journalist to have in-person access to Madoff in prison.

Q. How did you get interested in the Madoff story?

A. I had known Bernie Madoff slightly as a source on stories in the mid-1990s about how computers and globalization were affecting the structure of the stock trading business – one of the topics on which he advised regulators in his informal role as a senior “statesman” on Wall Street. He spoke frequently at conferences and SEC roundtables on the topic and I interviewed him now and then. Even before that, I knew his firm was a leader in “after-hours” trading in NYSE stocks, and I turned frequently to his trading desk for data on how late-breaking news was affecting specific stocks or the overall market. Then, at about 4:15 pm on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008, I saw the headline hit my email inbox — Madoff had been arrested for securities fraud. Frankly, I was astonished. He had been such a thorn in the side of traditional Wall Street trading institutions for so long, it seemed unlikely that they would have left any stone unturned in trying to discredit him. Surely this was some minor, technical fracas? In a quick call to a regulatory source, I asked the scale of the alleged fraud. “Huge,” was the nervous and abrupt response. So I was instantly intrigued that someone so much in the spotlight and so provocative in his views had been accused of fraud — it was reminiscent of the old Depression-era scandal involving Richard Whitney, the masterful “Prince of Wall Street” who gallantly led the NYSE through the 1929 crash only to be caught, years later, embezzling from the exchange’s widows and orphans fund. By nightfall, we knew that Madoff had been turned in by his two sons, and I was thoroughly and permanently hooked. This wasn’t just a Wall Street fraud, this was a family drama of nearly Shakespearean dimensions. That was the clincher for me.

Q. What were the best and the worst moments in the process of writing “The Wizard of Lies”?

A. The best? Ah, those are so hard to remember because researching and writing a book is such a relentlessly grueling process that the little triumphs are quickly eclipsed by the next huge problem. But I think it would have to be the night I was standing outside Union Station in Washington, straining to hear my cell phone over the taxi traffic and learning that HBO wanted to option the book for a possible film — confirmation that I had achieved my goal of writing a book that would break out of the confines of “business & investing book” and appeal to a much a broader audience.

The worst moment? Surely that was the Saturday morning, Dec. 11, 2010, when I was awakened by a call from our weekend editor at The New York Times telling me that there was a wire-service report that Mark Madoff had been found dead in his apartment. The sheer frantic urgency of reporting and writing our story for the web and the next day’s paper pushed all personal emotions into the background but when I’d finally made my deadlines and sat back, a wave of sorrow crashed over me. My initial sense that there was an element of Shakespearean tragedy in the Madoff scandal had been, sadly, far too accurate.

Q. What did Madoff think of the book?

A. The first word I got from him was in mid-February, when an article in The New York Times about my interview with him in prison mentioned the name of the upcoming book. Madoff said he thought it was “sensationalistic.” When the book came out, the publisher sent him a copy and he said he’d read it. He said he appreciated the fairness with which I’d treated his family and said the “vivid details” had made it hard for him to read, given his memories. But he firmly disputed my analysis suggesting the fraud started well before 1992. He insisted that was when his Ponzi scheme began and he tried, once again, to persuade me to believe him. We’ve exchanged some cordial emails since then, and a colleague (who was working on another story that required a telephone interview with Madoff) told me that he spoke admiringly of me and the book. So who knows what he truly thought?

Check out this video of Diana B. Henriques talking about the upcoming webinar below! REGISTER HERE for the live event and enter to win 1 of 10 free hardcover copies of “The Wizard of Lies” personally inscribed by Diana!

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Twitter’s Content Provides Advisors Up-to-the-Tweet Source for Breaking News

On August 9, 2011, In Financial Services Social Media Marketing, By Bruce Johnston
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By: D. Bruce Johnston, President & CEO

To say news of the US downgrade has thrown the US stock market into a tailspin is an understatement to say the least.  To help them through these troubled times investors are turning to their advisors for up to the minute news and advice.  Where are advisors turning to get the information their clients are demanding? The answer may surprise you.

Increasingly advisors are turning to twitter as a new up-to-the-tweet source of breaking news and its versatility as a terrific networking and marketing platform.   Other than being free, what else compels advisors to use twitter as part of their marketing strategy?

Here are a few reasons:

  • 51% of Twitter users follow companies, brands, or products on social networks
  • 5% of Americans were aware of Twitter in 2008 compared to 87% in 2010
  • Twitter’s search engine processes over 600 million queries every day
  • 82% of companies using Twitter tweet company news in an average week, with an average of 27 tweets per week

The infatuation with twitters speed and ease of use may have caused some to overlook the vast power of twitter’s content.

What’s obvious is today’s wired world is about content.  The very audience being targeted by advisors has a voracious appetite for content.

Social media content in and of it’s self is content.  Social media content when put into context is extremely valuable.   Social media content put into context and aggregated creates a competitive advantage that can power your brand to the next level and beyond.

What advisors are missing is that to be active, to be heard, to be found, to be a thought leader doesn’t mean you have to create all the content by yourself – that’s where twitter comes in.

How then can advisors leverage the content twitter delivers throughout the day, put it into context, aggregate it and deliver it to their clients in their own voice?

The first step is to get a copy of Twitter’s new guide “Twitter for Newsrooms”.   The guide, titled “Twitter for Newsrooms,” is a little bit obvious for anyone who uses Twitter on a daily basis.  But the fact that Twitter has launched an official guide for journalists is indicative of the impact of social media on the news.

Next, you will need to identify a social media archiving solution provider.  Your provider decision should take into consideration their ability to provide monitoring, market intelligence, and research in addition to satisfying compliance needs.

At a minimum your provider should:

  • Allow you to customize your Twitter experience with groups, columns, saved searches and automatic updates on topics and people you are following.  Being able to track what others are saying about you, give updates via tweeting, and to share photos, videos and links from a single dashboard is a must for convenience and efficiency.
  • Allow for the archiving of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
  • Allow for RSS integration for archiving blogs, blog comments and a wide number of other social and web destinations used for monitoring and archiving.
  • Allow you to leverage discovery tools such as StumbleUpon.  Discovery tools allow you to find fresh content and to share your content that you might not find on your own.
  • Provide a dashboard allowing you to easily and conveniently monitor and launch your communications

These features allow advisors to conveniently listen, converse, share your voice, understand your customers, gather feedback and engage a large audience in a more personal manner. By selecting a provider that is able to offer content management workflow for web and social content, analytics to measure results, while preserving compliance, satisfies the need for data aggregation and enhances your return on investment.

In markets like we are experiencing now, clients aren’t demanding that their advisors have all the answers.  However, they do expect their advisors to provide them a source of credible information from which they can make informed and intelligent decisions.   More and more advisors are finding those 140-character tweets provide them the ammunition they need.

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Six Ways Advisors Turn Their Websites Into Their Worst Enemy

On August 1, 2011, In Financial Services Social Media Marketing, By Bruce Johnston
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By D. Bruce Johnston, President & CEO

At Advisolocity we have had the privilege of designing and re-purposing our fair share of advisor websites.  One thing we have never understood is why advisors view their website as a “set it and forget it” proposition.  I’m sorry but a lighthouse, a sailboat and an older couple walking hand-in-hand on the beach does not a website make.

We encourage advisors to view their website as what might possibly be the hardest working piece of equipment in their office.  Think about the impact your website has on your business: it’s the only employee you have that works 24-7 telling all those who visit about you, your firm and your differentiating proposition.  Your website never asks for a day-off, never calls in sick, and doesn’t require benefits.  Yet, you don’t treat it as the integral part of the team that it is.

It is your firm’s face to the world.  In a nanosecond, which is faster then a Malcolm Gladwell Blink, visitors to your site are making stay, go, ask for more information or never return here again decisions.  We have a rule: in 10 seconds your website visitor has to be engaged.  Within three clicks they need to be able to download white papers, e-books, commentary or whatever your value proposition might be.

Visitors to your website have severe Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).  If you can’t make it simple, make it informative and make sure you tell them how you can help them within the time it took you to read this sentence, their gone.  This is the age of engagement and if your website doesn’t engage your visitors will look elsewhere for engagement.

So what are some of the ways advisors turn their websites into their own worst enemies?

  1. Advisor sites are disruptive.  Banner ads, pop-ups, graphics and video may have their place on your website but in moderation.  If a first-time visitor is greeted with a video espousing the virtues of equities and has never purchased an equity product in their life you’ve lost them.  Inform and engage your visitors and you won’t distract them.
  2. We don’t want you here. That’s the message advisor website send when they encourage visitors to click on a link to read another article, visit another website or visit a resource center other than yours.   We see it all the time.  Second sentence, instructions are to click this link for additional information, they do, and guest what – they’re gone, never to be heard from again!
  3. Most resource centers are like belly buttons – everyone has one! Next time you are reviewing websites count the number that brag about providing access to a set of valuable resources – WSJ, Business Week, Forbes, etc.  What’s unique about that?  In the state of Oklahoma there are 180 RIAs listed. 160 have websites and 40 of those have the same resource center.  Not only does this not add value, again you are inviting the visitor to leave your site.
  4. Advisor sites have their own secret code. I can’t count the number of times we review a site that has programming code leaking through the pages.  Not only does this look unprofessional but also what kind of message does that send to the visitor?  Detailed oriented?  Thorough?
  5. Stock quotes 24/7. Ask yourself, are you a trader or an advisor?  The vast majority will answer advisor so why provide up to the minute information on individual stocks on your website.  You never refer to it.  Your clients don’t use.   So why make it available to “looky lou’s” – those who spend all their time looking and have no intention of retaining your services.
  6. Lack of analytical tools. For an industry that is so measurement oriented it never ceases to amaze us that advisor websites don’t have any analytics attached to them.  At a minimum get Google Analytics so you can at least tell how many visited your site, where they came from and what interested them.

Contrary to popular belief this is rocket science!

Please join us on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 at 3:00 pm EDT where at the invitation of ProducersWEB we will host a web chat (#prowebchat) to discuss these and other mistakes advisors make with their websites.

 


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