LinkedFA

The LinkedFA.com home page, once you’ve registered, is bright, colorful and looks professionally done in terms of the graphics.
I continue to wonder, however, what it is really offering to the advisers it is trying to entice into joining it.
To begin with there doesn’t seem to be that much social about it. Once you register you don’t see who else is present, online or suggestions for you to link with.
Then, over to the side I notice a big orange, glaring: “Free concierge service. We know you’re busy and we want to help. We’ll export your contacts from Outlook, Act!, Salesforce, Goldmine and more and upload them right to your account.”
But why would I want to do that when I’ve already put a lot of effort into building my networks on the already established LinkedIn and Facebook? Why would I want to send invites that many of my clients might consider just one more bit of spam?
I’m all for innovation but I have yet to see anything innovative or new in what LinkedFA is doing.
They also just put out a press release touting “a compliance guarantee for its US members stating that it agrees to pay fines levied on a financial advisor by FINRA due to any electronic recording keeping violation as a result of the FA’s use of linkedFA. Specifically, this guarantee covers any fine that results from linkedFA’s failure to produce copies of any actual correspondence, media, comments or content shared between a financial advisor and any investor in his or her linkedFA network.”
This sounds good (except for the typo, there are others in the release they sent me) but I’m not aware of any fines levied by Finra or the SEC in relation to social networking yet (I’m sure readers or the folks from LinkedFA will set me straight if I’m wrong).
There are already solutions like arkovi.com, facetime.com, and socialware.com that have worked out many of the obstacles for keeping advisers compliant with established social networks. Yes, these are for profit companies but LinkedFA has stated in the past that once out of beta it will charge as well.
Anyway, I’m not trying to be overly critical here and perhaps I’m over-simplifying things but I have to go back and ask myself what is in this for the end user other than advisers in need of a compliance tool built directly into their networking application?
I don’t think the end consumer is going to have much use for the site because it’s not meant for them to network with anyone but their adviser.
Any advisers using the site so far please comment.

For more information visit LinkedFA

Related stories:
New networking site for advisers said to comply with Finra regs