Whether they admit to it or not, lots of fellow independent broker-dealers and probably thousands of registered reps are going to monitor how a new social media pilot progresses at Cambridge Investment Research Inc.
The Iowa broker-dealer announced the official start of the project a couple of weeks ago in a press release.
I recently spoke about the project with Julie Gebert, the assistant vice president over compliance at Cambridge (she will also be participating in a webcast this afternoon, see details below).
“We think we are on the front edge,” she said, in relation to other broker-dealers.
“Basically the technology is allowing us to go in and allow or disallow various features according to our policies,” Ms Gebert added, referring to the b-d's implementation of Socialware.
She explained that the way her firm had set up the system advisers first log in through a portal and can then go back and forth from Facebook to LinkedIn or Twitter as they wish.
“Some things will be pre-reviewed and some post-reviewed,” she said.
She explained that the broker-dealer's social networking task force had consisted of eight individuals and represented a mix of home office staff and several advisers.
Cambridge had previously allowed advisers to use LinkedIn, though with some of the features turned off. During recent political campaigning, however, it had not been lost on staff that all the candidates were touting their Facebook pages in their advertising.
“Just being able for them [advisers] to say they are on Facebook is going to be a great way for them to more easily reach a lot of folks, they can now say ‘hey check out my Facebook page,” Ms. Gebert said.
She said that a lot of the credit for getting a pilot underway came specifically out of the broker-dealer's New Century Council composed of advisers under the age 45.
Cambridge president Amy Webber launched the council to help shape the way the broker-dealer accommodates and recruits the next generation of advisers.
If all goes well in the pilot, the folks at Cambridge plan on expanding the social networking initiative to all of its 1,800 reps and advisers in August.
In a separate conversation I spoke with Socialware's chief executive Chad Bockius.
“We're actually an enabling company because these days firms tend to take just two approaches to social networking, they either open the floodgates or completely lock it down,” said Mr. Bockius.
He said he thinks that could be about to change as his company and others start to provide firm's with better ways to control and retain social media. This includes financial services companies too.
“We are working with two of the top insurance companies and one of the largest consumer banks and companies outside of financial services as well that are publically traded companies,” he said.
With the way Socialware is architected, it aggregates, tracks and filters all a client's social media data through its systems, firms need to think of providers like it in a different way.
“That is a key point about what we are doing — it is about being the social middleware and we are showing clients how the middleware layer works,” Mr. Bockius said.
He added that eventually Socialware will open up it's API for developers to access it and transition itself into more of a social developer platform.
While the folks at Cambridge said they had not yet finalized what they are or will be spending on Socialware, the company's supervisory offerings range in price from $110 a month for five users and five Gigabytes of archival storage up to the “Plus” offering for $1,000 a month for 50 users and 100 Gigabytes of storage. Socialware considers firms in need of services beyond this as “Enterprise” customers.
With the full enterprise solution companies get content and workflow features that allow administrators to route content for review and approval prior to posting, message quarantine that allows for the scanning and capture of posts that violate policy, unlimited storage of social media posts, search capabilities for that content, and analysis tools, among other things.
“We're not actually publishing the enterprise pricing yet, but with large enterprises we are happy to look at specific deals and negotiated pricing,” Mr. Bockius said.
Many of Socialware's customers have integrated its service with their existing archiving systems including Smarsh, Symantec Vault, Iron Port, AXS-One, LiveOffice and others. Both LiveOffice and Smarsh have even partnered with Socialware to better integrate each other's respective offerings.
Webcast
Cambridge's Julie Gebert and attorney Erin Reeves will both be participating in a free InvestmentNews webcast this afternoon at 4 pm where listeners will be able to send in questions as well.
Visit the following link for more information and to register:
Compliance-Savvy Ways To Use Social Media
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