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We left Charlotte, North Carolina behind and hit the road for Raleigh Durham, where we connected with Blane Warrene at the American Tobacco Campus. Blane’s involvement in financial services technology came quite by accident, so I asked him to tell me more about that over a cold glass of lemonade.
This is an audio-only podcast of the FPPad Tech Tour interview with Blane Warrene. Click here to view the full video.
Subscribe and listen to the five best podcasts for financial advisers
Note for September 2014: Like technology, podcasts change and get updated. Look for a new article covering the Best Podcasts of 2014 for Financial Advisers!
Here are the five best podcasts of 2013 featuring content specific for financial advisers
Few will argue that the amount of content online for financial advisers is exploding.
There are dozens of websites from traditional print publications that run digital editions of their magazines as well as online-only content.
Then there are several dozen more blogs and niche sites covering a wide range of topics relevant to financial advisers (with the top site being Michael Kitces’ Nerd’s Eye View blog*)
But one media format with just a handful of “publishers” is the podcast.
Sure, there are many podcasts with consumer-oriented content, featuring personal finance advice on how to pay down debt, reduce fees on investments, diversify a portfolio, and more. Many of these podcasts are excellent, but they don’t include content that addresses the issues concerning financial advisers and operating an advisory business.
The number of podcasts being created with content exclusive for the financial adviser audience is extremely small. Like less than ten.
With so few podcasts being created for financial advisers, how will you discover those with content applicable to your needs?
The answer is in my list of the five best podcasts for financial advisers!
But wait, why just five? Because that is exactly the number of active podcasts (with activity over the past year) to which I subscribe that I know produce content specifically for the financial adviser audience.
So here is my personally curated list of the five best podcasts for financial advisers, free and clear of irritating pageview-increasing slideshow gimmicks! (You can thank me by sharing this list with your friends.)
First, let me first start off with a pre-list bonus, because I have a horse in this race, too. If you don’t already know, audio and video content from FPPad is available as a podcast on iTunes.
So if you’re not yet subscribed, subscribe now!
But why subscribe on iTunes if you can get the content on FPPad.com?
Because in the Podcasts app on your iOS device, you can download content for listening or viewing when you’re offline or away from a strong broadband connection. Also, the Podcasts app lets you increase the playback speed of content, so you can get your five-minute weekly technology update finished in just over three-and-a-half minutes! Now that’s an instant productivity boost of 33%!
The Social Media Minute Podcast by RegEd is the best podcast for advisers seeking information on all things related to social media. Blane Warrene is host and producer of the Social Media Minute Podcast and does an excellent job addressing the timely issues surrounding the social media landscape.
As Senior Vice President of Customer Communications at RegEd, Warrene knows his stuff on social media. Sure, the content helps build awareness of RegEd’s social media compliance and content products, and that’s partly the point. But know that this podcast is all about deepening the conversation around financial advisers and social media and is NOT a blatant product promotion.
NAIFA, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, publishes a new podcast once every two months with a variety of content centered around practice management and business building ideas.
Occasionally the content addresses issues in the insurance marketplace, such as disability income policy sales and long-term-care insurance updates, but many of the podcasts feature interviews with advisers and insurance agents discussing strategies they have implemented to grow their business and enhance client service.
Subscribe to the AdvisorToday.com podcast now as six episodes per year will not fill up your “to-be-listened-to” playlist, and your odds of learning a good business-building idea are pretty good.
The award-winning Journal of Financial Planning has been in print for over 30 years, and just over three years ago the publication started creating podcast content around many of its featured articles and authors.
The Journal of Financial Planning Podcast Page is somewhat of a best-kept-secret, since there is one simple icon on the navigation menu of the website home page, but each print article featuring additional podcast content directs readers to the website to listen to more information.
Journal of Financial Planning Podcasts are centered around the “10 Questions” interview features, giving readers a chance to hear from authors, financial planners, and thought leaders in the industry (self-promotion warning: I was interviewed in February 2013).
While not directly available as an iTunes podcast, you can still manually download and then drag and drop audio files to your media player of choice to listen offline, at the gym, or during your commute.
Securities America, Inc. is a broker-dealer that walks-the-walk on practice management advice. Not only does the company urge its reps to be more active with client outreach and marketing initiatives, Securities America publishes these podcasts for advisers to back up what they say.
Led by Kirk Hulett, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Practice Management, AdvisorPod releases monthly updates on a wide range of practice management tips, including outreach to CPAs and other COI individuals, retaining relationships through family transitions, mobile app reviews and more.
Build Online Influence is a podcast from Stephanie Sammons, founder and CEO of Wired Advisor. Wired Advisor is a professional blogging platform for financial advisers and business professionals.
In Build Online Influence, Sammons reviews techniques financial advisers can use to increase their profile and brand recognition through the use of social media. Several of her podcasts include interviews with financial advisers who have created a large audience of people interested in financial planning (i.e. prospective clients) through their social media activity. Build Online Influence attempts to reveal what strategies work (and those that don’t) to help advisers compete in a social marketplace that is getting more crowded each day.
While Build Online Influence hasn’t been updated since January 2013, I know that Sammons is still active in her work with advisers, so I trust that a listing here in my top five podcasts for financial advisers will be enough motivation for her to pick up where she left off! Perhaps a tweet or two to Sammons wouldn’t hurt, either!
There you have it! My top five podcasts of content created just for you, the successful financial adviser.
Inevitably, I likely missed a handful of other podcasts out there publishing outstanding content for the financial adviser audience. Tell me which ones I missed in the comments below, and hopefully with enough submissions, I can double the list to include the ten best podcasts for financial advisers.
But first, I want podcasts with business building ideas, technology coverage, practice management ideas and so on. Podcasts with economic commentary, stock picking ideas, or investment-centric content can be curated by someone else!
So tell me what podcasts I missed in the comments below, send me a tweet, or email me offline.
Here are some of the podcasts recommended by readers since this article was posted on November 25, 2013.
*2013 top blogs according to the Zywave 2013 Top News and Blog Sites for Advisors Survey.
I’m recapping the best content found on FPPad this year. A few days ago I featured the top five videos from 2012.
Today’s update highlights the five most popular podcasts (ranked by total listens), and my final update in the series will list the top posts of 2012.
And before we begin, make sure that you’ve subscribed via iTunes so you don’t miss the next podcast.
Here are the top five podcasts of 2012.
In this year’s top podcast, Jo Day, co-founder of Trumpet, Inc., walked me through her company’s latest integration with popular online document storage provider ShareFile (ShareFile was one of this year’s Best in Tech winners).
Trumpet’s suite of software can take hundreds (even thousands) or reports generated in a batch, append custom content (say, a newsletter or cover page), and upload all the individual reports to their correct destination within ShareFile.
Imagine if you or your staff attempting something on this scale by hand. You’d likely end up making simple copy-and-paste mistakes, or worse, publish the wrong report to your client’s ShareFile folder.
The runner-up podcast for 2012 is my interview with Contactually co-founder and CEO Zvi Band. Band describes Contactually as “a professional relationship manager application” which I initially discovered early in 2012.
Fast forward to today, as I still find that I use Contactually every day. It’s sometimes spooky at how it picks up on conversations that have gone dormant, but inevitably my proactive follow up rekindles relationships and discussions (and more often than not, new clients!)
To learn more about how financial advisers (and others) are using Contactually, listen to the podcast below.
This podcast features a new product from Socialware, the social media compliance and strategy provider to financial services companies, called Social Network Listening.
Even if you don’t tweet or post to social networking sites, you can gain a tremendous amount of insight by paying attention to the posts and updates of others.
But with thousands of first- and second-tier connections scattered across social media sites, how do you efficiently monitor them and identify the important updates?
Tim Walker, Marketing Program Manager for Socialware, tells me that Social Network Listening is designed to do just that, saving you valuable time while delivering the most relevant updates from your social networks.
One of the tools I’m starting to see more and more in the enterprise (read: your business) environment is the internal social network. One such product is Yammer, purchased earlier this year by Microsoft for $1.2 billion (yes, billion with a B!).
If internal social networks such as Yammer are to take off inside the financial services setting, advisers need a way to capture and archive the internal network messages, just as they currently for email.
In this podcast, Sam Kolbert-Hyle, vice president of business development and strategic initiatives at Smarsh, discusses their new product to archive content posted to Yammer and allow regulated organizations to add this new tool to their business without violating compliance requirements.
Finally, the podcast rounding out this top five list is a new one featuring PreciseFP. PreciseFP is a web-based data-gathering tool advisers can use to streamline the data collection and data entry process when signing up a new client.
Now I have an aversion to filling out lengthy online forms that ask for a bunch of redundant data my adviser should already know.
So in this podcast, PreciseFP co-founder by Don Whalen sets the record straight about how advisers can use this tool to collaboratively work with clients on data gathering, yet avoid many of the frustrations clients may normally encounter with custom-built online forms.
Also, Wahlen offers a discount promo code for podcast listeners, which likely explains how this podcast, barely two weeks old as the time this review was published, vaulted into the top five podcasts of 2012. Well, advisers love to save money, and this is one way to do so (and in full disclosure, the promo is not an affiliate code, so I receive no referral fees if you sign up).
I hope you enjoyed this recap of the best podcasts of 2012. Return to FPPad one more time to get the list of the most popular posts for the year.
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Don Whalen, co-founder of PreciseFP
Client data gathering and form filling are the least glamorous tasks that make up your workday, but the activities are essential to create financial plans with correct information.
Fortunately, there are a few solutions that can significantly streamline the arduous data-gathering process.
One product is PreciseFP, co-founded by Don Whalen and Sebastian Skwarek in 2008.
In what probably sets the record as the longest time between my initial discovery (see: Has Laborious Client Data Entry Met Its Match? from September 2008) and follow up, I connected with Don Whalen to learn about PreciseFP’s growth over the last four years and how PreciseFP has matured to be a reliable, cost-effective tool advisers can use to facilitate the data gathering.
Listen to the podcast below, and note that Whalen provides a discount code all listeners can use to receive 15% off their subscription to PreciseFP (not an affiliate code, I receive no referral fees if you sign up).
Podcasting isn’t for everyone, but financial advisers who include podcasts in their marketing collateral can score points with prospective clients.
In this FPPad On Air broadcast, I connected with Blane Warrene, senior vice president of client communications for RegEd, to talk about how advisers can record, publish, and syndicate their own podcasts.
In the broadcast, Warrene mentioned tools such as Audacity, Garage Band, and Blubrry advisers can use to get started with podcasting.
Be sure to subscribe to the Social Media Minute podcast on iTunes (and the FPPad podcast as well!)
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Have you heard of social currency before?
Justin Wisz, co-founder of Vestorly
Before you buy a book, do you visit the reviews on Amazon.com to read what other people said about it?
And before your next dinner out, do you pull up Yelp to find 4- and 5-star restaurant reviews nearby?
Those are examples of social currency. You’re seeking feedback curated by social networks to find the best resource (be it a book, restaurant, mechanic, etc.) for your needs. Many times, recommendations from your immediate social network on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter point you to products and services that have already been vetted by your friends and colleagues.
So how can financial advisers take advantage of social currency?
To answer that question, I connected with Justin Wisz, co-founder of Vestorly, an investment adviser matching service powered by social communities. Hear what he has to say about social currency and how Vestorly can help advisers get the most out of it.
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Zvi Band, co-founder and CEO of Contactually
How did one financial adviser boost his client retention rate from 90% to 98%? According to this Wall Street Journal story, the answer was more client follow up.
So how do advisers target their most important client relationships with relevant follow-up reminders?
One way is by using a program called Contactually.
I’ve been a Contactually user for about a year (likely equivalent to a decade in “app years”). I first wrote about my experience with the program in January for Morningstar (see: Add Automation to Your E-mail Follow-Up).
I recently had the chance to connect with Contactually co-founder and CEO Zvi Band to learn more about how financial advisers are using Contactually to cultivate new and existing relationships and ultimately grow their business. Listen to the podcast of that conversation below.
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Advisers experimenting with enterprise social networks now have an option to solve their compliance needs.
Sam Kolbert-Hyle, vice president of business development and strategic initiatives at Smarsh, Inc.
There are a host of new collaboration tools on the market today, all attempting to harness the promise of an enterprise social network.
Services like Chatter, Jive, and Yammer allow you to create your own internal network for your business that resembles many of the popular networks like Facebook and Twitter.
These services offer many new ways to work with colleagues and review important news at a glance, but advisers must address one persistent complication of any new technology: compliance.
Until now, there have been few methods available to capture and archive content posted on enterprise social networks, which is required for all communications related to client service.
Earlier this week, Smarsh, the email and social media compliance provider, announced the launch of Archiving and Compliance for Yammer, the popular enterprise social network.
For more information on Archiving and Compliance for Yammer, I spoke with Sam Kolbert-Hyle, vice president of business development and strategic initiatives at Smarsh.
Listen to the podcast below to learn how these collaboration tools can now be used without sacrificing compliance.
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Tim Walker, Marketing Product Manager for Socialware
Some financial advisers are under the impression that the only way to benefit from social media is to tweet on Twitter or propagate Likes on Facebook. That’s just not true.
Advisers can benefit from social media simply by listening to what others are saying, a technique called “social listening.”
Unfortunately, most software designed to survey the social landscape for relevant updates is targeted to huge enterprises with recognized brands and millions of customers (think Coca-Cola, Southwest Airlines, etc.). Tools like Radian6 start at $5,000 per month, well beyond the reach of nearly all independent advisers.
Now, Socialware, a social media compliance software provider, just announced its own social listening software called Social Network Listening.
To get more insight on how Social Network Listening can help financial professionals, I connected with Tim Walker, Marketing Program Manager for Socialware for the following podcast.
View more information about Social Network Listening at Socialware.com.
One item of note: Social Network Listening is currently targeted to institutional financial services companies and broker-dealers, but Walker said that sales to independent advisers is on Socialware’s roadmap for the product.
