TELEPHONES
October 20th, 1916

I WONDER if they realized
Their mercies, in the long ago,
E’re we were ruled by telephones
For good or ill, for weal or woe ?

E’re all our days were minced to bits
With friends or foes to “call us up”,
While ideas cooled upon the pen,
Or coffee in the breakfast cup.

E’re “Central” at the dead of night
Could fright us, breathless out of bed,
And bring us the ‘phone to hear
They wanted someone else instead !

When a man’s house his castle was,
Where he could say, or “Come” or “Go”,
And not be talked at, day and night,
None asking, if he would or no.

BICYCLES
Spring of 1896

BICYCLES — six — eight — twelve — fifteen !
With not a single horse between;
And riders ranging all the way
From babes, to men and women gray —
All out of sight e’re fully seen !

And does this hurrying pageant mean
That be we fat, or be we lean,
We’re all to be propelled some day
By ‘Cycles ?

O ! May the kind fates intervene !
Too fast we move, e’en now I ween
The World to haste will fall a prey;
We need less “Europe”, more “Cathay” —
Cathay — where progress still has been,
By Cycles.

In collaboration with Barth and Co we humbly offer you Gypsum Ipsum.  Spark up your dummy text, and learn more than you ever wanted to about the not-so-humble mineral gypsum.  (Tofu coagulant ?  Yup.)  www.gypsumipsum.com

Rob Barth: Glenn, in our work together we deal with SEO all the time. We go to great lengths to assure our clients that SEO considerations play a critical role in the planning and execution of their sites. So here I go winning a design award for the Englander Cabinetry site—a web site that by design pays almost zero attention to SEO. Naturally, I’d like to feature the award in my next promotion … but I’m concerned that people might get the wrong idea and think we don’t consider searchability important. Are you going to treat me as a pariah and pretend to not recognize me if we pass on the street?

Glenn C. Devitt: Fear not, Rob, I will still be happy to bask in your reflected glow of success. Congratulations on your latest design award! I presume that you and your client were aiming for a specific goal with www.EnglanderCabinetry.com by creating a conceptual piece that does a great job of communicating your client’s attitude, history, and skill. The video clip and atmospheric audio draw me in and give me a clear sense of the quality of their craftsmanship. What were the business goals for the site that gave you the unusual freedom to disregard SEO?

Rob Barth: Phil Englander was very clear about what he wanted his site to do. He had a page of notes that served as the basis for our creative brief. It boiled down to this: he wanted the site to be unique and compelling from a design standpoint; he wanted it to be welcoming and friendly; he wanted it to showcase his work; and he wanted it to have an element of fun. What made it different from a business — goals perspective was the fact that Phil is an artisan whose work comes to him via referral—he’s not a mass marketer looking for a huge audience. The site was intended to act as an intimate portrait of Phil and his charming shop in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. So, with our client’s blessing, we felt comfortable thinking about art first and commerce second. Thus our somewhat eccentric approach and the softening of the SEO requirement. And thus our comfort level with making it a Flash-based site, which we’d been avoiding recently for SEO reasons. Not to mention there’s literally no text. Not even a menu!

Glenn C. Devitt: Well you definitely nailed Phil’s goals—which is exactly what we want to do for every client, right? And that solves your quandary about using an approach that differs from our usual advice. Englander Cabinetry is a local business, already very successful, and (I presume) not looking to expand. So generating lots of unsolicited inquiries through their website would be a distraction from business. (Online& uses a similar model : 95% of our clients come through referrals, and that’s how I want to continue to grow the business.) But as you mentioned, the vast majority of our clients should take a different approach to generate as much quality, targeted traffic to their websites as possible. That’s where SEO enters the picture. Our basic advice for good search rankings includes :

• Post fresh content, regularly.
• Get incoming links from other legitimate sites.
• Post information your audience wants, not only what you want to say.
• You cannot game the system. Don’t buy snake oil from shills who ‘guarantee’ high rankings.

Rob Barth: I recall that caveat emptor warning from one of the white papers you released not long ago. Yet those “guaranteers” persist. Sometimes clients forward solicitations to me that are clearly bogus. I just feel like saying “Look, this is a scam. Forget about it.” But that can sound defensive and I feel like I owe them a better explanation than that. The concept of a system that can be gamed is very appealing to a client who is thirsty for increased traffic. Is there a good way to explain that it’s a waste of time and money?

Glenn C. Devitt: I think most businesspeople understand when it’s put this way :

• Google is currently valued at $130,000,000,000.
• GOOG stock is trading at $579 per share.
• One of Google’s most valuable assets is the integrity of the search algorithms that consistently return relevant results.

So can any SEO consultant really promise to ‘beat’ their system, at any price? Over the years ‘black hat’ attempts to do that have been temporarily successful — like ‘link exchange’ schemes. But as soon as Google detects this sort of technique, not only does it adjust its algorithms to block it, it actually penalizes sites that use it. Earlier this year JC Penney got busted and their search rankings dropped dramatically. (We could debate whether either Google or JC Penney has a right to exert such influence over the search marketplace, but that’s a topic for another time.) So once we dispel the myth of magical SEO techniques we help our clients develop an effective, sustainable, achievable plan for search visibility. Honestly, I think that requires more effort offline than online. What kind of approaches do you recommend based on your extensive experience in branding and marketing?

Rob Barth: You’re right. SEO per se is only one tactic in the mix. I tell clients to avoid getting so laser-focused on search that they miss other opportunities to promote their sites. It sounds elementary, but don’t forget to simply advertise in the most traditional sense. Place an ad. Put up a banner. Plan an event. Hire a sky-writing plane. No budget? Spray-paint your URL on a bridge! What we’re really talking about here is getting people to your site (period). And search is only a part of that. Even SEO companies recognize this. SEOmoz, one of the largest providers of SEO tools and services recently stated that roughly only a third of their traffic comes from organic search results!

Speaking of traditional, Online& has been been active with direct-mail lately, sending out greeting-card styled pieces. I find them refreshingly personal—and they really cut through the clutter of same-old business mail. The very fact that they are sort of “old school” is what makes them feel new! How did you think of that and what kind of reactions have you had?

Glenn C. Devitt: Rob, did you just call me old?

Basically, I decided to practice what I preach. For the look & feel of the cards, I’m simply trusting my instincts and using ideas that I like. Not everyone shares my taste of course, but—like Englander Cabinetry—I am not seeking mass-market appeal. While deciding on how to present Online&, and even while selecting the name, I thought a lot about how I like to be treated as a customer and why I want my firm to be more than just an entity in pixels. It’s an intentionally small company and customer relationships are everything. And I don’t mean that in a cheesy ‘Walmart is a member of your family’ kind of way.

Hopefully some genuine personality comes through. It was a huge leap of faith for me to bring that personal touch into our communications materials. In particular I was more than a little queasy about using a head shot : Brad Pitt I am not.  More like Peach Pit. It helped to work with an amazingly kind and creative photographer, and I think even that little photo helps convey that, like Soylent Green, Online& is people. The response has been great. I’ve heard from business contacts I hadn’t been in touch with for years.  Though I regret having neglected those relationships for too long, by reaching out now in a variety of ways Online& has become a case study for why frequent communication through a variety of channels is important.

Rob Barth: Well, your recent promotions prove the point. And I think by working through your initial discomfort with making them more personal, you’ve successfully emphasized that what’s done offline matters as much as what’s done online. You’ve shown through example that leveraging both channels can truly maximize customer response. By actively embracing a multichannel approach to marketing, you’ve truly put the “&” in Online&!

I’m glad my discomfort with straying from SEO inspired this conversation. I’m already “back to reality” with the new sites we’re working on, but my dalliance and the resulting discussion has reframed the bigger picture for me.

Glenn C. Devitt: Me too. By questioning the accepted norm, you reminded me that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.  We serve our clients best by collaboratively evaluating their individual needs. Good stuff.

Personal relationships with eye-to-eye contact may be considered so important to building trust in the alternative investment industry that our clients often dismiss opportunities to use email and other forms of electronic investor communication. Your marketing tool kit may need a refresh or re-interpretation.

In this eletter we suggest ways to enhance your client relationship management — not by substituting electronic communication for human contact, but rather by enhancing your offline relationships with new tools. We are all constantly reminded that we live in “the digital age,” yet many firms in the funds management and the service provider space leave an opportunity on the table by failing to employ current, legitimate marketing technologies that complement and enhance brand building efforts. Eschewing emarketing today is as inefficient as calculating NAVs manually.

The Trend: Adapting to New Tools
We recognize that a certain portion of your investors and prospects may prefer personal contact exclusively. But as younger generations mature, managers and marketers who do not adopt new tools will be perceived as being out of touch and behind the times — an image you can ill afford. Don’t mistake stubbornness for tradition. Perhaps you haven’t tested whether new tools may help your marketing objectives, but it’s easy and inexpensive to do so.

Trap #1: Well known emarketing tools that we do not suggest for fund managers:

• Facebook (unprofessional)
• Twitter (frenetic and impersonal)
• Bulk mail to strangers (untargeted and noncompliant with industry regulations)
• Purchasing commercial marketing lists (unseemly and probably ineffective)

Trap #2: Popular eblast options may be abundant yet unsuitable.
Be careful about which of the many ecommunication platforms you choose. Some popular options are best suited to general, bulk email. These include ConstantContact, Emma, and MailChimp. We do not recommend them to our clients in the alternative investment industry, because they do not integrate well with specialized customer relationship management (CRM) database systems that support broader marketing goals. Which leads us to:

Tip #1: Employ targeted and selective email approaches.

• Send monthly email communication to clients and prospects. Even if you call each client regularly, you should also send them a brief email that reflects your firm’s branding elements, and contains links to your firm’s current performance information and investment commentary on your secure website. Many people receive email more quickly than voice messages, and will appreciate that you communicate with them in multiple ways to suit their schedule.
• Prepare occasional special messages to address hot topics, such as a sudden market shift or unusual performance factors. Making numerous phone calls to investors is very time-consuming; smart investment managers leverage technology to send important updates to a group of investors in a few seconds.
• Limit your emarketing to pre-qualified investors and prospects. Play it conservative to avoid running afoul of regulatory restrictions. Your email lists should only include people with whom you already have a documented relationship. Check with your legal/compliance advisor before proceeding.
• Grow your personal network via LinkedIn. With this service you can discover first– and second-degree links to people with whom you might want to do business, and find out who you know in common. However, be careful to avoid marketing specific investments or funds via LinkedIn and as noted above, avoid non-compliant use of social media.

Tip #2: Integrate your CRM system.
Adopt an ecommunication platform that will integrate with your existing CRM system. This avoids having multiple databases that must be maintained independently. Third-party service providers such as Backstop, PerTrac, and SalesForce provide differentiated services for integrating all of your CRM tasks.

We invite your inquiries about what solution can help you achieve better investor communication, take advantage of easily accessible marketing technologies, integrate your existing CRM system, and do it all at a cost that fits your firm’s budget. If you haven’t already taken advantage of some of these tips and opportunities to update your marketing tool kit, drop us an email. We’ve been in the marketing communications business, serving the alternative investment community, for almost two decades.

[This post will bore techies, but I have been asked this question several times and expect that it will be interesting to some of our clients.]

In a web page address — known technically as a URL (universal resource locator) — the ampersand is considered a ‘special character’.  In conjunction with the question mark, it is used to specify parameters that customize web pages.  For example :

Our complete list of clients is at :

But the same page displays a sub-list if a specific parameter is included :

In this case, sector=1 causes the page to display only clients in the Financial / Investment sector.

You might ask, then, why does our logo use the & instead of And.  I like the idea that a ‘special character’ that is so integral to our web development work is incorporated into the logo.  It’s also a nod to my pre-internet appreciation of the ampersand, which I wrote about in a previous post, Part 1 : The Noble Ampersand.

Superfluous footnote :  Our site is also aliased as OnlineAmpersand.com to protect our brand — but that’s way too much of a mouthful to use routinely.

A lion and a tiger were drinking beside a river when the lion let out a huge roar.  The tiger asked, ‘Why do you roar like a fool ?’

‘That’s not foolish,’ replied the lion with a twinkle in his eye.  ‘They call me the King of All Beasts because I advertise.’

Successful marketing requires constant attention.  In difficult economic times some companies misguidedly shrink their marketing budget – at the exact moment when they should reallocate scarce resources to increase their investment in promotion.  When customers are not beating down your door, that is not the time to lower your visibility.

The story continues :

A rabbit heard them talking and thought he’d try the lion’s plan.  But his roar was just a squeak.  A fox came to investigate and ate the rabbit for lunch.

Roar, don’t squeak.  And make sure you are prepared for the increase in business when it happens.  Don’t squander opportunities that your marketing efforts generate.

Short-sighted decisions impede long-term success.  This is common sense.  But as my parents have told me many times, ‘Common sense isn’t very common.’

Prompted by questions from some of our clients regarding the recent headlines about data security breaches and “cloud” computing catastrophes¹, we are writing to offer some suggestions about how to protect your company’s valuable information on your website.

Tip #1: Adopt open source web solutions

You might wonder, “Who in their right mind would trust their firm’s website to run on free software?“² In fact, 66% of websites are hosted on open source Apache server software. Microsoft’s platform, the second most popular, has only an 18% market share. Apache-powered sites include Apple, Goldman Sachs, Booz Allen Hamilton, CNN, eBay, Ticketmaster, ESPN, Cisco, PayPal, Twitter, LinkedIn . . . the list goes on.

Some of the benefits of open source solutions include:

• transparency of security methods
• development communities that attract some of the best minds from business and academia
• natural selection – only quality sustains open source software, not marketing or monopolistic strategies
• no license compliance or renewal issues

Tip #2: Avoid “free” commercial solutions

This advice might seem to contradict Tip #1. But it doesn’t. Some open source solutions are offered for free, and the publishers generate revenue by supporting large corporate and government installations. One prominent example is OpenOffice, an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office.

Other “free” commercial offerings like Gmail, Google Analytics, and Facebook actually extract a significant hidden price. Their business model generates revenue from the information that users of their “free” services provide. It has been said that under this arrangement, you are the product being sold. Are you willing to donate proprietary information about your company and your customers to use these “free” services? We urge our clients not to mistake simplicity or inertia for a good business decision. Keep your data under your control. Even third-party, paid providers are not always a safe bet; for more information on this topic, see a previous post, What should your business learn from the Epsilon security breach?

Trap #1: Beware discount mega-hosting providers and off-the-shelf website management solutions

It might be tempting to sign up with one of the huge website hosting providers like GoDaddy. After all, fees as low as $3 per month are naturally attractive. But ask yourself about the quality of service you get for that price. These companies don’t make money by dedicating resources to high-quality service – the math simply doesn’t work out. We recently encountered a new client who was unwittingly running their website on a platform that was three years out of date and vulnerable to multitudes of widely-published security holes.

Your website is an important component of your business. Is it wise to skimp on a few hundred dollars and risk a breakdown? Bulk service seems great when it’s humming along, but if something goes wrong you could incur a lengthy site outage, lost revenue, damaged client relationships, time and cost to fix the problem, and extreme embarrassment and frustration. Online& actively monitors its systems daily and applies necessary updates as they become available, at no additional charge to clients. It is simply the right thing to do.

The same conscientiousness has driven the development of our custom ControlPanel™ website management system, designed specifically for the alternative investment community. This modular, scalable suite of services robustly supports content management, marketing, customer relations, compliance, and data security requirements – at a lower cost than other general-purpose products like Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla.

If you have any concerns about the security of your own website platform, or are ready to move up to the next level of functionality, we welcome an opportunity to discuss your questions.

¹ A small sampling:
Sony Attack Shows Amazon’s Cloud Service Lures Hackers at Pennies an Hour (May 16, 2011)
Microsoft business cloud customers suffer email outage (May 13, 2011)
Sony’s Security Breach May Be the Biggest Personal Data Heist in History (May 4, 2011)
After Breach, Companies Warn of E-Mail Fraud (April 4, 2011)

² “Free” and “open source” are not necessarily equivalent, but may be considered interchangeable for our purposes here.

Developed and refined over the course of the past decade, the Online& Investment Management components have been deployed for large established hedge fund organizations, small start-up managers, CTAs, funds of funds, and industry service providers.

“We offer a range of customizable solutions that scale to fit any size firm, and payment options for nearly any budget, while providing a more secure and flexible solution than off-the-shelf alternatives,” observes Online& founder and technical director Glenn C. Devitt. “Our clients particularly appreciate that, unlike some of our competitors, we do not use an expensive subscription model. Once we launch a client’s site they own it outright, and can update it easily in-house using our ControlPanel™ system – without third-party maintenance fees. The total cost of ownership is much lower than less comprehensive solutions, enabling our clients to recognize a return on their website investments almost immediately.”

“Our project development cycle is specifically designed to comply with relevant regulatory restrictions and embrace each client’s legal/compliance review process,” notes Holly Singer, President of HS Marketing, LLC. The Online& Investment Management suite was developed over the course of Devitt’s longtime collaborative relationship with HS Marketing, LLC, which is dedicated to serving the marketing communications objectives of firms in the alternative investment community.

But you have never even heard of Epsilon before, right ?  How did they obtain your personal information, and then lose it ?  Epsilon provides outsourced email service to major corporations, whose names you do recognize.  Their tag line is Marketing As Usual. Not A Chance.™  I suppose they have lived up to it.

Sorry, I know it’s not nice to kick a person – or an entity with corporate personhood – when they’re down.  But I have a very low tolerance for companies that earn fortunes warehousing vast quantities of ‘personally identifiable information’ (PII) and then let that information be stolen.  Of course, no system can be completely secure, but the least we could have expected is that Epsilon segment their customers’ data so that it couldn’t be swiped at one fell swoop.

But here’s the truly troubling part :  Although the Epsilon breach is making headlines because so many large corporations’ customers have been affected, this sort of thing happens all the time.  Almost every day, depending on which research you read.  As the brilliant cryptographer and security guru Bruce Schneier wrote,

Yes, millions of names and e-mail addresses might have been stolen [from Epsilon]. Yes, other customer information might have been stolen, too. Yes, this personal information could be used to create more personalized and better targeted phishing attacks.

So what? These sorts of breaches happen all the time, and even more personal information is stolen.

I certainly do not have the solution for fixing an inherent, global problem with online data security.  But I do have a suggestion for our clients to avoid unnecessary risk :  Think very carefully before outsourcing the storage and security of your proprietary data.  It is not only your data, it is your customers’ data. And you don’t want to make the news for having it stolen.

Sometimes a case can be made for outsourcing services such as bulk email to a company like Epsilon, or ConstantContact, or MyEmma.  But don’t mistake simplicity or inertia for a good business decision.  For most of our clients, we strongly advocate the deployment of a self-administered, auditable email distribution system called phpList.  It does everything most businesses need, and it keeps your data under your control.  Better yet, it is free and open source, meaning that the code is open to scrutiny by anyone.

We take the same approach with statistical traffic data.  Your website traffic logs contain data that can be linked to your customers.  Why turn that valuable property over to Google Analytics in ‘exchange’ for their service, when you can enjoy equal functionality with a truly free, self-administered, community-vetted system like Piwik ?

I will be happy to discuss ways that you can review your company’s data exposures on the internet, and mitigate danger.  Feel free to give me a call at 503.345.4321.