SCN Corporate Connect’s Jane Kings speaks with Don Steinbrugge, CEO of Agecroft Partners, to discuss the role that social media plays in the Hedge Fund Industry.
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Don Steinbrugge – The Role Of Social Media In The Hedge Fund Industry
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Essy and corpore connect. I’m John King at the Nasdaq market site in Times Square with me today Don Steinberg the CEO of Age Croff partners and we’re going be talking about social media today and the role it plays in the hedge fund industry. And what’s your overall sense is it valuable to participate in social media in this industry. Well my overall sense is it’s a hedge fund industry is the most competitive industry there is. You’ve got 15000 competitors most institutional investors are being called on by thousands of hedge funds. They’re medium with a couple of hundred doing second meetings with 50 allocating to anything you can do to get a differential advantage over your competition. You need to focus on social media something. Hedge funds weren’t doing 10 years ago. There’s been explosive growth. Most hedge fund organizations have someone using some type of social media a vast majority them have multiple people using social media. So I think there is a lot of value to it. So this is one of the key benefits is enhanced knowledge of investors and kind of what’s going on in the investor marketplace. Yeah exactly. Our firm uses for example linked in all day long. You know when we go to see someone we want to research what their backgrounds are before we meet with them we want to understand you know what their role is in the company where they work before what school they went to. What connections we have in common. All that’s very helpful.
It’s also helpful to help screen you know if we’re going to a conference like one of the top conferences called contex summit. It’s a cap intro event. They have a lot of investors come and not every investor is truthful when they sign up about what they do and we want to make sure that when we go to these conferences we’re setting up meetings for our managers that we’re meeting with high quality investors and eliminating those that are less quality. We also put our own conference on called gaining the edge that 25 percent of the people that register are what I would describe as fake investors and we want to make sure that the fake investors don’t get complimentary registrations for a conference because we limit it to 300. So it’s just a great tool to screen. It’s also a great tool to figure out who the right people are to call the company. You know if you have a lot of connections and you pull up a company and it shows a list of employees you can see how many connections you have in common. And if I see that I’m connected to two or three connections in common with someone they’re probably not the right person if I have 100 connections in common with someone that I know that they’re probably the right person who’s focused on hedge fund research. Now does that improve the probability that you would get a meeting with somebody. So we use it to screen who to target the investors do the exact same thing.
You know if I send an e-mail to someone wanting to have a meeting with them they’re going to go to my profile and if my profiles well-built out and if it looks like you know I have a great bio there’s a higher probability of me getting a meeting than if my profile looks really weak. So yes people are using LinkedIn to evaluate people and determine whether they want to see you. And then what about keyword searches like how do you know and how do you plug those in and know to target exactly what it is that you’re looking for. So the hardest thing in the hedge fund industry is there’s no book you can buy that shows who invests in hedge funds. So let’s say a hedge fund is going to Raleigh North Carolina and they have two meetings lined up down in Raleigh and they have no idea who else to meet with in social media. You can do word searches for family office hedge fund endowment fund and identify who might allocate to hedge funds. And then again you can see how many connections you have in common. And if the people that come up you have a lot of connections in common they may invest in hedge funds if you open up their profile. It shows what their area interest is and it might even say the word hedge fund. You can’t send a presentation into you have a relationships with someone but you can call them up and begin a relationship and then follow up later by sending them information on your. And they are linked in groups you can kind of help you with information and connections. Great source. So there’s hundreds of linked groups folks on the hedge fund industry. There are some for administrators law firms prime brokers marketing valuable information that you can share or gained from going to these groups.
And what about posting information. How often should you do it. What kind of information should it be so posting is by far and away the most powerful aspect of LinkedIn. You know our firm writes a lot of white papers and when we do we want as many people to read them as possible. So the first thing we will do is we will send it to hundreds of reporters and we typically get in most of the head from publications were awful often on Bloomberg Television CNBC. Obviously a lot of people see it through those media mechanisms. But after the media has used this information and next thing we do is posted to LinkedIn and we’re getting anywhere from typically 10 to 30000 views on LinkedIn.
