[July 11, 2011] Advisor Group Launches Broad Social Media Initiative for Independent Advisors Using SunGard's Protegent Tweet Jul 11, 2011 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- Advisor Group, an independent broker-dealer networks in the nation, announced a new social media effort that will allow its advisors to utilize social media sites for their marketing and networking needs. In a release, the group said that it leveraged SunGard's Protegent Social Media Surveillance offering to develop a solution that will be housed on its proprietary VISION2020 Advisor Portal, a single sign-on website that provides advisors access to client account information, office automation, compliance and marketing tools, the VISION2020 Wealth Management system for fee based advisors, personalized news, alerts and more. SunGard's Protegent Social Media Surveillance will help Advisor Group further support its advisors' use of social media to grow business while remaining compliant with regulatory obligations. "Social media sites have become a very powerful communications tool for today's financial advisors," said David Ballard, Chief Information Officer of Advisor Group. "Last November we set out to create the most flexible, advisor-friendly and compliant social media offering in the industry and we considered many vendors over the last seven months to ensure we built the best solution for advisors. We've been piloting our offering with small focus groups since February and we are eager to launch our offering to all advisors." Advisor Group said that its social media solution will be powered by SunGard's Protegent Social Media Surveillance solution to help enforce internal social media policies and manage supervisory regulatory requirements. Protegent will help the firm monitor and archive advisors' content posted to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Protegent's alerting, reporting and pre-approval workflow will help Advisor Group proactively adhere to FINRA books and records surveillance requirements. "We worked closely with Advisor Group to develop a truly unique social media platform for their advisors," said Steve Sabin, Chief Operating Officer of SunGard's Protegent business. "Our Protegent Social Media Surveillance solution will help Advisor Group support its advisors' use of social media sites while having increased transparency into potential risk exposure." "Whether administrative related posts, securities related tweets, or marketing and communications messages, we will train advisors on how to leverage social media and better market themselves to clients and prospects," said Art Metzger, Vice President, Advertising Supervision, Advisor Group. "Incorporating Protegent's social media offering into VISION2020 Advisor Portal means advisors benefit from single sign-on access to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This allows our advisors to seamlessly make social media marketing a part of their daily routine, without sacrificing the time they need to be spending on other client-facing activities." ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]