Many advisers feel stymied when it comes to adopting social media. But for independent registered investment advisers whose main hurdle has been lack of a low-cost archiving, help is on its way.
BMRW & Associates Inc. has begun a free public beta of its Arkovi.com service. At present, the most compelling feature offered by Arkovi is the ability for users to archive their Twitter posts, thus providing an audit trail for future use.
Unfortunately, the site won't be of much use to registered representatives and brokers who are precluded from participating in social media by their compliance departments or who must have posts pre-authorized.
Advisers who can use the system can also set up Arkovi so that it archives multiple Twitter accounts under one login. What's more, the site allows users of LinkedIn to capture their status updates on that site, if they've set it up to work with Twitter.
Arkovi's archive links are live and clickable and include date and time stamps, as well as the client application (TweetDeck for example), used to send tweets. The archive is also searchable and can be exported to other applications or for offline backup.
In terms of security, Arkovi uses 256-bit secure socket layer encryption known as SSL encryption (evidence of this is the “http” that appears in your Web browser's address window) to connect you to your archive. This is the same level of encryption used by many financial service companies use on the Internet. Passwords are also encrypted within Arkovi's database.
Arkovi has plans for additional features in the near future, including additional search parameters and the ability to export archives to multiple formats including Excel, RSS and others. BMRW also has plans in the work to bundle other features into Arkovi, such as an enterprise dashboard geared for businesses.
The public beta of the service will run through Jan. 31, 2010 and during that time all features will be enabled for all users. At the end of the beta, the company has said that all users will have the option to continue full service Twitter archiving for free (the only proviso being that users continue to follow the site's posts on Twitter itself).
For more information or to sign up for the beta visit
Arkovi online
