Tweeting Tips from an MBA Graduate and M&A Banker
Investment bankers might be a likely audience within social media, but unlikely broadcasters. Matt Rudnick bucks this trend. He’s an investment banker with MHT Partners in Boston, Mass., an MBA graduate from the Boston College Carroll School of Management and an early adopter of social media. In an interview with VisionPoint Marketing, Rudnick explains why he has had up to four twitter accounts and how he uses Twitter through his work.
Will we offend anybody by saying investment bankers aren't prolific with social media?
Not at all —investment banking is perceived as a secretive industry. Because mergers and acquisition (M&A) deal with proprietary information, bankers might avoid using social media, mostly due to regulation and competition within the industry. The real benefits I see are not in sharing information, but in gathering it. Banking industry leaders are often quite vocal and have also been early adopters of Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn. They must stay on top of trends. Twitter and (increasingly) Google+ are the best forums to do just that.
But you still find ways to use it?
I do. The opportunity I see is using Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as educational platforms. These forums also allow us to connect with industry leaders or to promote MHT events. I think people will increasingly have more than one Twitter account per industry or customer segment. For example , events in CleanTech may be Twitter spam for a group focused on Cloud Computing in Life Sciences. For creating buzz, Twitter is succinct, free and time-saving, as opposed to time-wasting as many perceive, in the broader business community.
Is there a way to write on investment banking and tweet on it later?
I see virtue in writing about what investment bankers, venture capitalists and private equity professionals do and educating those interested in this field on some of the general concepts. There are ethical, hard-working people in our industry who do excellent work for their clients, but the very secret nature of our work prevents the word from getting out. Few CEOs I’ve spoken with for instance, know the difference between a sell side advisor and a buy side advisor. Few people know whether to use friends and family to generate initial revenue or whether to go the venture capital route? When I’m at scale, do I sell to a strategic, do a majority or maybe even a minority re-cap with a private equity firm? Or, do I continue to grow because there are no overwhelming threats to the business? Entrepreneurs especially would benefit from a simple education on these things.
Are you doing anything differently on Twitter since joining it three years ago?
Honestly, lately I’ve been mostly un-following people. Google+ allows us to re-invent our circles of influence and how each of us views our own network. We simply don’t have time to read what everyone wants to say. When disseminating information too few people put themselves into the reader’s mind. If you are reading on your phone, it's hard to digest much of it. In the last four minutes I see 300 tweets. Who has time to follow that? I think we’ll always struggle to separate information ‘wheat from the chaff.’