Tooting Your Own Horn Versus Telling Stories About How You Help People

Bob Powell, in his post today on A4A about advisors using social media, says he does not like advisors tweeting about calling the last market top correctly. I agree. Apart from raising compliance issues, most investors would doubt your ability to call every market turn. However, it is good to tell stories about clients you help. For example, let me tell you about a client of mine that I just spoke with.

His name is Adam Wright. After graduating from Penn State with a degree in supply chain management and working in the field for five years, Adam joined his mother, Kathleen Wright, and her partner, Greg Lintner at Wright Associates. Kathleen and Greg are both Chartered Financial Analysts and manage about $100 million for wealthy individuals.

Adam says he was referred to Advisor Products by a Schwab Institutional relationship manager. Advisor Products was one of several firms Schwab mentioned that builds sites for RIAs, and Adam narrowed the list down to Advisor Products because of our online portfolio reporting solution that is integrated with Schwab PortfolioCenter.

Adam, who says he enjoys technology, says he wanted to start with a simple site. Nothing too fancy.

“Because this was our first foray into the Web, we wanted something cost-effective,” he says. “Advisor Products had the simple template we wanted, while other companies we looked at were much more expensive and complicated. This was easy.”

Adam started the site development process with Advisor Products on April 18 and the RIA’s website went live on May 18.

“Your staff was proactive and energetic about getting our site built,” Adam says, adding that his calls and emails were returned promptly. “But the most important thing that I appreciated about working with Advisor Products was that we were able to delegate design decisions to you. We are process and finance people and did not want to have to make graphic design decisions.”

While I personally would like to see every one of our website clients get the snazziest graphics and get involved with their firm's graphic design, the Wright solution was a simple one and the firm is happy with it, which is what counts. They address search engine optimization and copywriting and incorporating their processes into AdvisorVault in the months ahead.

Point is, advisors don’t need to claim to have called every market turn in their status updates or blog posts. Just tell stories  in your blog about how you help people in your practice every day.