Advisers still social networking in the slow lane

“I thought Twitter was something Brett Favre uses to pick up women.”

It was a pitch-perfect one-liner that woke up the packed early-morning audience of a thousand advisers attending a session on social networking at the Schwab Impact conference in Boston last week.

The quip was dished out by CNBC’s “Power Lunch” co-host Tyler Mathisen at a session entitled “Social Media Revolution: The New Look of Business.”

Were it not for the cast of characters assembled, I would have feared that this was going to be the 500th discussion I had been forced to sit through — or asked to lead — on why advisers are not, and should not be, using social media.

Instead, it was a lively macro-level string of anecdotes on how social media are changing the world of business.

Panelists included black-hoodie-wearing Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; the young, contemplative Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook; and Gerd Leonhard, a well-known German media futurist and author.

Mr Leonhard joked that Twitter, the real-time, one-to-many network, has made him like people he has never met and how Facebook has made him hate people he knows.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

For those in the know, the statement deftly illustrates the unintended consequences of using those social networks.

Many of the uninitiated advisers in the audience required the discussions and suggestions that followed to give meaning to Mr. Leonhard’s remark.

For example, Mr. Stone empathized with how intimidating it could be for people who have never tweeted — writing and sending the 140-character-max messages that make up the traffic on the Twitter network — to get started, so he suggested that they begin by becoming followers.

In other words, advisers can get comfortable with Twitter simply by signing up for the service and then searching for a product or issue of interest to them.

Given its 165 million active users, 90 million tweets a day, 400,000 new users each day and the subsecond indexing of its search engine, a query about even the most esoteric topic is likely to receive revealing responses.

“Toilet paper, no one would be writing about that,” Mr Stone said, pausing for effect, “but they are.”

When advisers land on interesting tweets, they can begin to follow that person and receive all his or her messages. After following and digesting the content from areas of interest to them or their business, advisers may feel comfortable sharing their own thoughts and building an audience.

Similarly, according to Mr. Hughes, a more passive, search-based initial approach on Facebook can reap greater returns for advisers than full-blown sharing out of the gate.

“There are personal uses and professional uses [for Facebook], and the lines are somewhat blurred,” he said.

“The key, though, is for advisers to humanize themselves on these networks and build substantive connections,” Mr. Hughes added. The network’s newly implemented privacy policies can assist advisers in choosing what content they want family and close friends to see, and which topics of interest they want to share with clients.

The point, according to Mr. Hughes, is that advisers have to be present on these networks, participating in the conversation, or risk becoming irrelevant.

“With half a billion users, a search will reveal that there are already thousands and thousands of advisers on Facebook,” he said.

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And now on to SI2, SII, Project C — er, Schwab Intelligent Integration.

While The Charles Schwab Corp. has not settled on an acronym or pet name for it, the announcement of which companies and programs will participate in the initiative was the most eagerly awaited by advisers at the conference.

Bernie Clark, executive vice president and head of Schwab Advisor Services, confirmed in a speech that several makers of customer relationship management software are committed to the project, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Corp. and CRM Software, creators of the popular Junxure program.

He added that Schwab is looking at other vendors, and said that the Intelligent Integration project is “one of Advisor Services’ most important initiatives and in fact … is one of Charles Schwab’s most important initiatives.”

The endeavor, referred to as Project C when it was announced in June, is meant to address one of the chief complaints among independent advisers — applications that don’t talk to one another. Schwab has sought input from advisers through a write-in campaign on its website. More than 1,200 registered investment advisers from among the company’s 6,000-plus RIA customers had sent in suggested programs for inclusion.

Other technology news coming out of the conference:

• Availability of Version 5.0 of Schwab’s PortfolioCenter software.

• A major integration with third-party provider Laser App Software.

• New cost basis tools.

• New trading features.

• Enhancements to the Advisor Center website.

• Several improvements to schwaballiance.com (an online resource for advisers’ clients).

(In the online version of this column, you can find Chris Hughes’ comments about the book he says most accurately tells the real story of Facebook’s founding, insights on where each of the panelists sees social media heading in the next five years, what Mr. Stone said about JetBlue and much more detail about Schwab’s new technology initiatives).

E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].