Small World Labs

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Scottrade User Summit in San Antonio. These are online trading education events that Scottrade conducts on a fairly regular basis in person at various cities around the country. Scottrade has been a customer of ours for a while so when Scottrade’s community manager, Nina Card, let us know that a User Summit was taking place down the highway, I jumped at the chance to check them out in action. What I saw was a great example of how to effectively integrate an online community into your core business.



I went online and registered for the education and training event. Shortly thereafter, I received a confirmation email with all the particulars about the event (place, times, agenda) as well as a pointer: “Another great way to learn is from other investors in the Scottrade Online Community!” with a link to the community and a benefit statement for joining. Engagement point #1. Nice! Engage with people when they are engaging with you. The telecom and credit card companies figured this out about 10 years ago when they started pitching new services to everyone that called into customer service. Call your credit card company to check your balance, but choose the option to talk to a person. Prepare to be pitched (or shall I say engaged).

So… back to the story. On Saturday, my wife and I drove from Austin down to San Antonio and attended the afternoon session for advanced traders. We meandered through the free coffee, fruits, and brownies; sat down amongst the 250+ person crowd; and looked through the User Summit Agenda. First page was the agenda (surprise). Second page had speaker bios. And on page three was… a “Learn from other investors in the Scottrade Online Community” headline followed by a brief background on the Scottrade Online Community, what you can do in it, as well as a few benefit statements. Engagement point #2!

During the seminar, Kevin Dodson, the Director of Online Trading Platforms, quickly reviewed the morning’s presentation on the Scottrade Website trading platform, as well as ScottradeElite, their customizable, high volume trading platform. Todd Slawson later gave a talk about finding opportunities with Trade Ideas (another Scottrade product) and Marty Kearney followed up with information on options trading. Back in the day, I was an economics major and also used to work in product management at a website analytics company, so needless to say I ate up listening to the guys talk shop about statistics, customizable drag and drop interfaces, and trade strategy analysis. My wife liked the brownies.

Engagement point #3 came during the end of Kevin’s presentation when after summarizing his education oriented presentation he let the crowd know that they could continue the discussion online at the Scottrade Online Community. He also informed the crowd that the community is now the most active (as measured by user activities per day) online finance community on the Internet. Good stuff.



Kevin, Todd, and Marty did a good job of educating the crowd about all the ins and outs of the Scottrade product suite and they left the presentations behind on fancy 2 GB USB pens – good leave behind engagement schwag. Kevin almost got away without twisting his knee mid presentation and finding himself on the floor (hope you’re feeling better, Kevin).

What made all of this so compelling wasn’t just that Scottade weaved discussion of their customer community at several strategic engagement points during the User Summit process, but that the community’s purpose was exactly in line with the activities they were using to promote it – education and knowledge sharing. Scottrade is investing in sending its top minds around the country (these weren’t just the local folks from San Antonio, there were plenty of people from St. Louis and Chicago) to help educate its current and potential customers on the use of its product and its general industry so that these people can become better at what they do. And… in the meantime Scottrade is providing and promoting an online community in which they enable its customers to educate and learn from each other. There is good cross purpose here. For example, one Scottrade product is Trade Ideas, a product that lets you think up a trading strategy and then run it against historical scenarios. That you can even do this is impressive. That you can then go online and discuss the nuances of a trading strategy that you’re trying to perfect with other like-minded folks and compare notes on how you’re configuring the ScottradeElite trading dashboard is even more impressive. All of this makes sense from an ROI perspective because the more Scottrade educates and helps its customers (directly or by enabling them to learn from each other), the better customers they become. This then impacts customer retention and annual revenue contribution per customer, which affect the bottom line.

Until the next post, I’ll be brushing up on my t-statistics and Bollinger Bands.