The financial community has been slow to adopt social media. One big fuzzy gray zone has been compliance.

But that process is evolving. Last week, a National Examination Risk Alert went out that called into question the Facebook ‘Like’ button.

Testimonials:  …The term “testimonial” is not defined in Rule 206(4)-1(a)(1), but SEC staff consistently interprets that term to include a statement of a client’s experience with, or endorsement of, an investment adviser. Therefore, the staff believes that, depending on the facts and circumstances, the use of “social plug-ins” such as the “like” button could be a testimonial under the Advisers Act.16…

Steph and I discuss this issue (and a lot more) on our AdvisorGo Podcast this week. Go to AdvisorGo to listen/subscribe via email or listen below:

Taking the Social out of Social Media by AdvisorGo

Advisors ask me all the time about their websites.

Most of the time, they’re asking for help in terms of optimizing their site’s performance: capturing more leads, driving new prospects, expanding their reach.

To be honest, building a website for most advisors (for most people, really) is an utterly overwhelming process.

Why building a website is overwhelming

It’s human nature: when we don’t quite understand something, we seek professional help.  That’s why your clients seek out your advice, right?

I’m guilty as charged, too. Here — and on my exclusive Advisor Insider newsletter – -I’m also trying to provide you with powerful tools, tips and technologies to help you build your financial practice.

But when it comes to something so far out of our expertise — like technology, website design, Internet marketing — we seem to slink away from making big, bold decisions and almost over-delegate to the work.

Most advisors will turn to someone who understands this stuff and empower them to get the project done. Without oversight, without true understanding of what’s going on technologically, without understanding design best practices — as advisors, we overpay on technology projects and frequently, get underdelivered on our results.

That’s just the facts.

A better way to get a better website design

Many designers — good, honest people — wouldn’t want you to know about the resource I’m going to give you next. It’s major competition for them (in a good way). It keeps prices competitive and standards high for designing awesome websites.

It’s www.99designs.com

With 99 designs, you can get a professionally-designed website for about $600 (not the thousands that you would normally need to pay).

Q: What is it? How does it work?

A: Essentially, you hold a design contest where thousands of web designers compete to design a site you’re 100% happy with — or, you get your money back.

So, for about $600, you get to plumb the ideas of designers around the globe, tweaking your site until you get an awesome design. The great thing is that this process is transparent, so you see the ideas designers are generating and you can build upon them to get exactly what you want.

By the way, you can get almost anything designed here — logos, stationery, book covers, etc.

How it works

Here’s how www.99designs.com works:

Why 99 designs is good for advisor websites

1. competition is good: We’re in the investing game and we know competition is good for business. Getting multiple ideas and designs only makes the final product — your website — better.
2. diversification keeps costs down: Getting numerous designers to compete for your business means you place less responsibility on a single service provider. You have less chance of getting screwed — or at least, taken for a ride.
3. transparency is awesome: the contest is held in the raw — wide open for everyone to see. It keeps standards high and ideas flowing.
4. cost: I know from speaking with friends in the web development business that they like advisors as clients. Because we don’t know a whole lot about technology or web design, we don’t ask too many questions. Costs aren’t always competitive. Designing a site via 99 designs ensures they are.

That’s it.  Check out www.99designs.com

Let me know what you think — I’m curious to see if this is helpful for you.

Asking for referrals isn’t easy.

Alll the data show that as professionals, we are sitting on gold mines of referral value (!), just ready for us to unlock it to build a super practice.

Clients should be lining up, checks in hand, begging — pleading! — for us to manage their portfolios.

Yeah, right.

The truth about referrals in the financial business

The truth is that very few of us are able to fully leverage referrals.

Why is that?  Have you ever asked yourself that?

If it’s so easy – all you have to do is ask! — why aren’t we all managing $40B like Ken Fisher?

Well, the first thing is that it’s not.  that.  easy.

It just isn’t.  I don’t know about you but my clients don’t suddenly call tons of hot prospect friends when I pop the question.

It takes guts to work up the question.  Beyond that, who wants to sound like a sleazy salesman?

Second, I’m convinced that just asking the question is certainly NOT enough.  Maybe it used to be but there are plenty of reasons your clients aren’t manning the phones — right now! — dialing for dollars, hitting up all their friends to bring you business.

The real reasons clients aren’t referring you business

1. referrals cost A BOATLOAD of social capital — by referring someone to a professional, you spend some of your social capital.  If your contact isn’t happy for any reason, that looks bad on you.  Rightly or wrongly (caveat emptor, right?), your contact will blame you for making a poor referral.

That’s it, one reason.  There has to be a damn good reason for your client to open his rolodex, risking his street cred with his friends and contacts. There’s too much at stake for you to screw up.

In other words, it’s risky — and getting riskier with social media — to make important referrals to a financial advisor.

You’re still TOO FAR OUTSIDE YOUR CLIENTS’ SOCIAL CIRCLES TO GET REFERRALS.

In fact, the more I think about it: asking the common referral question — hey, who can you refer to me? — is the wrong question.

One financial advisor found that he was able to grow his practice 5X by tweaking the question.

He went from…
OLD SCHOOL REFERRAL QUESTION: Hey, you know my business requires referrals from happy clients.  Who do you know who you could refer to me right now?
to…
NEW-FANGLED MONEY REFERRAL Process (2 parts):

1. Hey,what are your hobbies? Interests?
2. With this question, find some overlap with your own interests.  If they like PLAYING SQUASH, tell them you do too. Hey, can I get in to your weekly game?

Of course, this isn’t a direct plug for your client to open his Outlook and begin scheduling meetings for you with his wealthy friends.

And that’s the point — it’s an indirect referral process.

Let’s carry this SQUASH PLAYING example through

1. So, you go to the game
2. Hopefully, you can play squash well-enough to not embarrass yourself
3. Get invited back and begin to integrate into the social circle

Once you’re in the social circle (how many times has this happened to you?), the referrals will happen naturally.  One of the regular players will come over (make sure he’s not sweating in your ice tea) and tell you about a money problem he has or a friend who’s looking for ‘someone good’.

By the way, research has shown that these crucial social bonding questions come in 4 flavors:

1. hobbies
2. interests
3. lifestyle
4. values

Why does this work?  Well, if making a referral means spending social capital, this puts everything on sale.  Suddenly, by integrating into your clients’ social circles (online and off), making that referral is less risky.  They have to spend less social cred to get you in.

Everyone wins.

Referrals aren’t about just asking for networking opportunities or some hoogie-woogie esoteric mindset.  Getting referrals is about creating an ongoing process to ensure that those opportunities present themselves to you.

Ultimately, it makes for good business — you’ve always got to listen to your clients and determine what gets them juiced.  If you can help them get juiced, they’ll help you, too.

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LinkedIn is such a powerful tool for researching prospects and networking with professionals, I’m always surprised when I meet advisors who aren’t using it.

Oh, and it’s free. Hard to beat that.

Wayne Breitbarth, the author of The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success, joins me to discuss the power of LinkedIn and how financial and investment advisors can quickly get on the platform and begin getting real value out of the business social network.

Make sure you listen to the whole recording because Wayne takes aim at my own LinkedIn profile (connect with me here) and dismantles it — with powerful advice to really sharpen up my presence on the network.

Listen to this episode and you’ll learn:

• why your profile on LinkedIn is so important and how to optimize it
• how LinkedIn is NOT a resume and how to structure your story to maximize
• networking and prospecting activities
• how Wayne dissected my LinkedIn profile with real action points to make it stronger
• how advisors can use LinkedIn redefine their value proposition to go after new business

Listen to the FULL program

Using LinkedIn to network and prospect – with Wayne Breitbarth by newrulesofinvesting

About Wayne Breitbarth

Wayne Breitbarth was an accidental user of LinkedIn.  After seeing the light, Wayne’s become a leading expert and is the author of the top selling book about LinkedIn on Amazon.

More Resources

• The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success: Kick-start your Business, Brand, and Job Search (Amazon)
• PowerFormula.net (Wayne’s website)
• LinkedIn profile keyword worksheet [.pdf]

If you’re been running successful seminars to help prospect for your business, you know how hard it is to get everything right.

From getting your list, to creating engaging invitations, to finding a facility, to RSVP’ing your guests.   It’s a lot of details and processes.

That works in our favor — getting a good event off the ground isn’t easy, so if we can do it, that’s something our competitors can’t.

While it sounds easy to do a good marketing event, the truth is few are able to them well consistently.

Prospecting seminar checklist

Here’s a checklist of what you’ll need to do to put on an awesome marketing event.

1. Goals first: Before you do anything, you need to make it clear why you’re putting on this event.  Who’s your target attendee?  What does he/she look like?  What’s that person struggling with that I can solve for them?  What type of event suites that target’s schedule? Without looking at your goals, your event may miss its target and there’s no way to really judge your performance.
2. Concept:  This may sound too softy-feely but the best event-driven prospecting advisors are really good event planners.  Not only do they make sure everything looks good, the topic/concept of the event tends to be really tight.  Again, this goes back to your goals — the event should be really appealing to your prospects.  What’s going to get them to shlepp out on a cold winter night to hear what you have to say? The draw may not even be you — maybe it’s a wholesaler (though you could do better ) or a respected author or analyst that could attract an audience.
3. Location: Whether its online or offline, the event needs to be housed somewhere.  So, either find a compelling facility in your target location or find online meeting software to stream your event (like GotoWebinar).
4. Scheduling: Make sure there aren’t any major conflicting dates (like Super Bowl weekend) that may prevent prospects from taking you up on your invite. You can check your local paper for upcoming events, a local website or something like Lanyrd — a repository for many events around the world. Spend some time to make sure you’re the headliner that night.
5. Target list: Your list can be bought from a local data provider or it could be made up of prospects you already have in your database (like people you’ve met but haven’t closed yet).  Partnering with a local service provider (lawyer/accountant) expands your prospecting exponentially (if you can ensure your marketing partner will hit his prospects, too).
6. Coordinating signup: Whether you are emailing or sending a mailer, have someone follow up with a phone call.  It’s a nice touch and could answer some questions have about the event but haven’t answered for themselves.
7. Coordinating signup v2: If you’re doing an online event or an event that you’re charging for, consider using a full service ticketing solution like Eventbrite.  If you’re charging for the event, Eventbrite has a built-in credit-card processing tool that is REALLY easy to use. Secret tip: You can also incentivize others to help you market your online event (like that lawyer/accountant marketing partner).  If you use Eventbrite, you can provide your marketing partners with their own link and they get a percentage (set by you) on all  proceeds from the tickets they’ve sold.
8. Deliver a great performance: Just getting prospects to show up is a big deal.  Now that they’re warm, you’ve almost there.  You’ve still got to put on a great presentation.  Here are some tips on a great prospecting presentation.
9. Provide accessibility: Finish speaking and allow for questions before the scheduled end of your event.  Make sure you mingle about afterwards.  This gives your audience the chance to corner you to ask personal questions.  Your call to action should happen right there — set a meeting up on the spot.  Carry around your iPhone or organizer or have an assistant schedule people there on the spot.  That’s key — when the prospects leave the room and the event, they lose the drive to find help for their problems.
10. Follow up: Whether you follow up personally or have an assistant do it, follow-up closes the circle on the event.  It provides context to the entire process and again, makes you accessible to prospects who want to take the next step.  This is also a chance for great market research — if they’re interested, ask them why.  If not, find out what events/topics are important to them.  Get permission to invite them again to exclusive events.

What are you doing that works for seminars?

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