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“I think unfortunately it’s very resource-consuming in terms of the time, the money and the systems that you need to capture and review social media,” Runkle says. “The reality is the whole time that we were doing it, ... I don’t recall one issue [at RJFS] we uncovered of any significance through our social media monitoring, which I guess could partly be cause and effect.“Maybe if we weren’t monitoring, no telling what would have been going on. But it does feel like an awfully big commitment of resources for something that doesn’t necessarily give a lot of results in terms of feeling like you’re really controlling it,” Runkle says.While it may be difficult for firms to find value in what is likely to be a substantial outlay, “there is no way around it,” Runkle says. “It’s got to be regulated. ... But you wonder if the firm and the“Twenty years ago, only a tiny handful of firms had email, and the compliance guys wouldn’t let their people use email, right? One day the dam broke and everybody’s using email, and it’s ‘Of course, you have touse it to do business.’ So”advisers are getting the value out of everything that’s put into the social media efforts and all the supervision.”Runkle adds that social media compliance has evolved to where it’s “not as big a deal anymore because once the technology solutions started coming to the forefront, it kind of took care of itself. Everybody knows what you need to do. I think there will still be issues with it, but I think there are bigger issues than social media on the broker-dealer side.”Cyber-security issues were more likely to keep him awake at night than social media compliance, he says.The firm has “gotten better at handling all of the work” involved in social media usage and compliance, Edwards says. To facilitate social media activities, the company uses the offerings of Smarsh, he adds. Heron Financial has been a customer since 2006, when it began using the vendor for email archiving.“When I first started out, I was spending eight hours a week on social media. Now I’m spending 30 minutes a week,” Edwards says. This is in large part because the firm has hired a media coordinator whose top responsibilities include managing social media.Using social media in a tactical way also helps financial services firms attract different age groups in appropriate ways.For instance, prospective clients between 50 and 65 are not likely 13 to spend large chunks of time on Facebook “but they live on LinkedIn. That’s how they find their next employee or that’s how they find their next job,” Edwards says. “I also know that ouryounger clients, 40 and younger, spend a lot of time on Facebook.” The younger prospects “use the Internet exclusively to research their vendors,” he says.Thus, Edwards and his firm are doing what they can to take the top spots in Google search results. The use of social media helps immensely with that. “If you Google David Edwards [with] Heron Financial, there are 102,000 links pointing back to my firm. That didn’t happen by accident. We didn’t generate 100,000 links,” he says. “We generated maybe 1,000 links.”Ongoing multiple postings are having a cumulative effect as his firm is building “validation coming from across the Internet” that Heron Financial is a firm “you want to do business with,” Edwards says.cialmedia is the same way. – David Edwards, president, Heron Financial Group“I just posted a picture of me at a Kentucky Derby party,” Edwards says. “But there are no pictures of me partying excessively, and no pictures of my wife or children. ... When someone lands on that page, they know me, but they know the part of me I want them to see.”Edwards also uses a YouTube channel to provide current and potential clients with recordings of recent seminars and more.“Every time I do a media interview, we record it, capture some photographs through the interview, send it off to our graphics person and have a YouTube video,” Edwards says.He is able to provide a variety of information about himself and the firm. “Some people just want the quick and dirty stuff and some people want to know me in detail, so we provide all of that for them. By the time referrals get in touch with me, they already know 90 percent of what I’m going to tell them, right off the bat.” The converse is also now true as Edwards generally knows “enough about them as well,” he says.FALL 2014 | FTF NEWS MAGAZINE