Tracking your digital footprint
By Thomas Walek, President, WalekPeppercomm
Published: 30 June 2014
Have you Googled yourself today? If you are an executive, portfolio manager, research analyst or trader at an investment management firm, chances are high that you’ve been Googled recently. Current and prospective investors are increasingly flocking to the Internet to vet you and your firm as part of their due diligence process. The only questions are: What do they find, and what can you do about it?
The Internet has completely transformed how people process information. As a result, everyone now has a digital footprint — a trail of data that tells a story about who you are, what you stand for and what you’re doing. Whether you’re active online or not, this trail is only getting longer as people continue to collect and disseminate information about you and your firm.
There have been efforts to curb this behavior, including most recently by the European Union in a monumental ruling that would allow individuals to request that search engines remove links to content about them. But whether or not Google or other search engines honor people’s “right to be forgotten”, the sheer volume of information already out there virtually guarantees that asset managers will never be able to fully remove themselves from the public eye. But why should these managers care?
According to studies by Harris Interactive and Cross-Tab Marketing, 75% of HR executives now research potential employees online, while 70% report having found something that’s caused them to reject a candidate. The relationship between an investor and an asset manager is no different.
Imagine that you are a high-net-worth or institutional investor with money to spend and you have a list of five funds that match your mandate for a specific strategy and risk-adjusted returns. How do you whittle down that list to just one? Recommendations from industry peers and third-party search firms will certainly factor into your decision, as they always have, but that’s not enough anymore. Given how much information is readily available in today’s digital age, the first thing you will probably do is Google the firm or its executives and, if you don’t like what you find, you will immediately cross them off your list.
This happens all the time in the investment management industry. To cite one recent example, the top executive of a large asset management firm was recently embroiled in a messy personal lawsuit that received extensive media coverage. Not surprisingly, any search engine query of the firm or the executive returned negative hits regarding the lawsuit, effectively halting any momentum from investor meetings.
The firm desperately needed to shift attention to all of the great things they were doing for investors, from generating consistently high returns to sharing market insights. And over the ensuing weeks that’s exactly what they did. They began securing multiple top-tier print and broadcast interviews featuring managers talking about the market and related topics. Before long, any investor searching the firm would have to navigate through two or three pages of Google results before finding anything referencing the lawsuit. No firm can just make information disappear, but a dedicated media relations strategy such as the one referenced here can help transform a negative story into a positive one. The data bears this out.
According to multiple studies, search engine users rarely go beyond the top three search results, let alone the entire first page. Of course, the average investor will probably be a bit more diligent than that. But if they see 10 or 20 positive results before they see a single negative result then they will likely conclude that the good far outweighs the bad. That’s the beauty of smart and strategic online reputation management.
Managing your digital footprint
The best investment management firms understand the importance of risk management and utilize a rigorous process for protecting client assets. Yet, when it comes to managing their digital footprints firms tend to choose the path of least resistance—that is, doing nothing.
Corporate policies and compliance rules seeking to prevent any participation in social or traditional media often only exacerbate this situation, with firms rationalizing that it is best just to stay away if they are either unfamiliar with the online sphere or weary of drawing unwelcome attention from regulators, or both. However, by ignoring their online presences altogether these businesses are leaving themselves vulnerable to the dangers of missed information or misinformation.
Instead, asset managers should seize control of their digital footprints and build a positive, powerful and engaging online presence. Here’s how:
- Open up your website. According to an internal WalekPeppercomm study, 96% of the top 100 global hedge funds have websites, but 54% of those firms have websites that are either closed to non-investors or are just simple splash pages. This is unacceptable. Understandably, the first place any prospective investor goes is to your firm’s website, so it is in your best interests to make it as easy as possible to get information. If you don’t, investors may assume that you are trying to hide something. That’s why it is always best to be transparent. Start by redesigning your website to better engage and inform your investors, and make sure you have a page for team biographies.
- Fill out your social media profiles. One of the easiest ways to improve your Google results is to complete your LinkedIn profile. Every employee at your firm should have a LinkedIn page, complete with name, title, company and previous career information. These profiles will almost always come up on the first page of Google search results whenever somebody searches your name or firm. The same rule generally applies to other social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, so if you or your firm uses one of those outlets then make sure make sure that the profile is completely filled out. Additionally, you should verify that the information is consistent across all the platforms so that there is no confusion about where someone works or what their title is.
- Be a spokesperson. News stories and press releases regularly rank highly in search results. Therefore, you can improve your digital footprint by talking to the media about topics relevant to your strategy and your firm. This is especially effective if you are trying to bury negative search results about a lawsuit or poor performance, as in the case study above. Also, it’s important to remember that journalists use Google too when vetting potential sources. If you’ve never done an interview before then journalists may conclude that you’re not worth their time. On the other hand, if you’ve done multiple high-level interviews then journalists may go out of their way to accommodate you and give you more control over the final piece.
These tactics are but a small part of building and managing your digital footprint. As the amount of information in the world grows exponentially, your footprint will only grow larger. It’s up to you to actively shape and shift your footprint and ensure that your business can continue to grow.