Finra says social media is OK. BDs are implementing compliant systems. So for advisors, using social media is easy and free, and they have little excuse, at this point, to resist the revolution.

Finra early this year released Notice 10-06, its long-awaited position on the use of social media Web sites by registered reps. The notice says that preapproval is not required of "non-static" content (such as tweets, status updates and blog comments). But static content needs preapproval (i.e., your profile on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook). Non-static content must be supervised (i.e., archived, filtered), but requires no preapproval. Clarification is still needed, but Finra has opened the way for registered reps to use social media.

Most BDs have told reps they can't write blogs, and many simply have forbidden the use of LinkedIn and Twitter. With Finra giving the go-ahead, however, BDs have now begun introducing compliant technology systems that enable registered reps to write blogs, respond to comments on blogs, tweet and post content on social media sites. It's a watershed event in advisor marketing. For example, Cambridge Investment Research, which has 1,800 registered reps, just announced the launch of a social networking pilot project. Cambridge says it selected a vendor that enables it to supervise its reps' social media activities on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If the pilot program is successful, the firm will launch the program for all of its reps in August, according to Cindy Schaus, Cambridge's vice president of sales and public relations. Schaus says Socialware, the social media compliance system that Cambridge is piloting, lets a BD compliance analyst set rules for monitoring posts at the rep level. So the BD can require preapproval of tweets posted by one rep but not for another. The adoption by BDs of such systems is the beginning of the end of the social media revolution. The old regime has been overthrown and a new marketing regime-social media marketing and blogging-is now taking hold. Social media marketing is now legitimized as part of an advisor's marketing campaign.

Meanwhile, many registered investment advisors, unhampered by the compliance requirements imposed by the BDs, are already using social media-although the technology's effectiveness at these firms and their compliance efforts largely remain unknown.

Advisors And New Technology
Yet advisors are very slow at adopting new technology. In late 1996, when I started making Web sites for advisors, I figured that, by the end of 1997, 80% of independent advisors would buy a Web site. Thirteen years later, most BDs say they have yet to reach the 80% mark. In fairness to advisors, anytime new technology is introduced, it's reasonable to expect a delay in widespread adoption. After all, advisors are supposed to be prudent.

Complicating matters is the surge in new technology they can adopt: Ever since the fax machine was introduced in the 1980s, the pace of innovation has accelerated, markedly so in the past decade. The technology revolution has led to personal computers, Microsoft Windows, network servers, the Internet, e-mail, spam, antivirus, smart phones, Web-based applications and now social media-mind-numbing technology changes that have transformed the small business world. Meanwhile, most successful independent advisory firms are owned by people in their 50s and 60s, people understandably tired of all the unrelenting technology change in the latter half of their lives. That spells opportunity for those who think young.

Let's face it: The notion of social media networking sounds silly to many advisors. Twitter, as Jay Leno pointed out recently, sounds like a urinary tract condition, and Facebook rose to prominence as a site for kids posting comments about pictures of drunken antics at frat parties. And of course the big reason advisors avoid social media is they fear running afoul of compliance. How will Securities and Exchange Commission examiners treat RIAs who are blogging, tweeting and asking friends for recommendations on LinkedIn? We simply don't know yet. If they are careful and archiving their social media profiles and comments, then they should be just fine-because it's just like any other advertising material, after all. But if an RIA rep is not taking compliance seriously, there's a chance that eventually SEC examiners will crack down. The same is true of registered reps, but they have mostly stayed away from social media and blogging because their broker-dealers watch them more closely than the SEC and state regulators watch RIA reps.

Advisors must realize social media are not a fad. Just as fax machines, e-mail, network servers, Web-based applications and a string of other innovations once helped you build your business, blogs and status updates are about to become key vehicles in advisor marketing. Online marketing is where all marketing is headed, and social media networks are a key component of online marketing. Facebook is clearly the most popular social networking site, and it trails only Google in visitors. The largest social network, the six-year-old phenomenon Facebook says it has more than 400 million active users and that half of its active users log in on any given day. The average user has 130 friends and people spend more than 500 billion minutes per month on the site.

LinkedIn, meanwhile, says it has more than 70 million members in more than 200 countries, about half of them from America. A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second. Twitter says it has about 125 million registered users and is adding about 340,000 daily. Its search engine gets more than 600 million queries daily and it gets about 190 million unique visitors a month. About 65 million updates are posted daily by users.

The number of people networking on social media is booming. According to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Internet users are now more likely to search for social networking profiles than they are to search for information about someone's professional accomplishments or interests and "a Facebook profile may get more traffic than your resume or your bio on your employer's Web site." With these kinds of statistics, it is undeniable that you must learn how to leverage social networks and blogs in marketing your services.

According to a recent report released by Spectrem Group, social media networks have become an important stop for investment information for all age groups. Spectrem reports that 77% of investors who read blogs are likely to consult them for information on new financial products and services. Similarly, 69% of LinkedIn users are likely to consult their networks on the site about investment issues, and 63% of Twitter users would pay attention to investment tweets. Nearly half (46%) of YouTube users and 41% of Facebook users would seek investment information from these forums. Social media networks are also popular sources for developing new investment strategies and seeking buy/sell advice.

Using The New Technology
Advisors must set clearly stated social media goals. It's no different from any other business project. Write down the three main goals you hope to accomplish in using social media. Do you want to get referrals from other professionals? Are you networking with executives at a local company who all have the same deferred compensation plan? Are you targeting doctors in a particular specialty or who are in the same "megagroup"? Write down how you will accomplish these goals.

Now decide how you will accomplish your goals. Will you write a blog? Is Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn your primary medium? Each venue has its own strengths and benefits. You'll probably want to try each one and see which one you like best and which gets you the most engagement from others in your network. You can take advantage of tools that allow you to simultaneously post in more than one medium. Each medium also has its own tools allowing you to explore and build connections with the people most likely to help you-referral sources and potential clients. You'll need to set aside time weekly to do that research. Set a limit on the amount of time you will place on your social media activities-a minimum as well as a maximum. Social media will not be effective unless you work at it consistently.

But that also means you might want to delegate some of your online chores, because social networking can be time consuming. If you're updating your status and sending ideas through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, it can take 15 or 30 minutes a day to find and post a few good items your network is interested in. What you could do instead is delegate content creation-ask each person on your staff or a consultant to find three, five or ten articles a week relevant to your specialties to tweet. You can ask staff or a consultant to write a blog and post it.

But the research involved in building the network is probably not something you can delegate. You can't put a 21-year-old recent college graduate in charge of your LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter account, for instance, and expect her to find you the right connections. Only you know which of your high school buddies would now be a good person to make part of your network on Facebook. Only you know that, in your former career as a restaurant owner, you went to a convention for restaurateurs and met the owner of 17 Taco Bells who would be a good connection.

Be sure your social media goals are aligned with your firm's marketing strategy. Ask yourself if your profile pages on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook succinctly achieve your firm's marketing goals? Is the content of your blog useful to your target markets? Does your Web site's marketing content-your online brochure-speak to your target markets? Have you examined the keywords and phrases used on your Web site? Keywords are the terms people use in search engines to find you. Your Web site brochure text should repeatedly use the terms people are most likely to use when searching for information related to your expertise. You want the text on your Web site, blog, profile pages and status updates to mention these keywords frequently.

If you want to write a blog to help market your advisory firm, you'll need to do it at least once a week and preferably two or three times a week. It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours to write a single post, depending on how fast you write and how complicated your message is. A post should be about 200 words and no more than 600 words. It's short. If you hire a writer, you'll still need to set aside time to let her interview you. If you are a lousy writer, read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. If you're still a lousy writer or hate to do it, then try dictating a post and handing that off to a professional. If you are a gifted speaker, then find a cozy chair near a fireplace, add bright lighting, and video yourself speaking about topics of interest to your network-just two or three minutes each. Be sure to transcribe each video for search engines. Posting your blog to the Web-cutting and pasting it from Microsoft Word-should take no more than ten minutes and can be handed off to someone else.

If you are using wealth management content on your Web site from a company like mine, it's not helping you with search engines. Such content is important because your clients will go elsewhere to find it if you do not provide it and it works well in e-mail newsletters. But search engines don't give you any credit for content that's duplicated on multiple sites. If you want to create search-friendly content that will improve your search engine rankings, you must post articles unique to your site, targeted to your niches, and then tweet about them on Twitter and automatically pull them into Facebook and LinkedIn.

Instead of spending hundreds of dollars a month on search engine marketing-in a pay-per-click program such as Google AdWords-you may be better off writing content targeted to your ideal clients and making it search friendly. This is not easy, however. Why should you bother? Because such search-friendly content improves your search engine ranking naturally and the search engines will then help you find clients for free. Also, your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter updates are indexed by search engines. Google, which in June launched a new version of its search engine, says it now indexes hundreds of thousands of Web pages in parallel. "If this were a pile of paper, it would grow three miles taller every second," says Google.

Advisors can automate their social network posts, too. Facebook enables you to feed your blog posts to automatically update your wall. LinkedIn feeds your status updates into Twitter. Bit.ly (or Bitly.com) lets you tweet whenever you use its link-shortener. You can use such integrations to update several social media sites at once.

Getting Started
Using Twitter is the easiest way for an advisor to get started. As mentioned in my column in May 2009, Twitter is free and it takes about five minutes to create an account. Tweeting about your blog posts, client events and links to articles your target clients will find valuable is easy.

Editor-at-large Andrew Gluck, a veteran financial writer, owns Advisor Products Inc., a marketing technology company serving 1,800 advisory firms.