Q4 Blog

Last week, I moderated a webinar on monitoring social media for IR.  Our panelists included Richard Brewer-Hay from eBay and Serena Ehrlich from Startup Army – both well versed in the social media space.

Based on the excellent turnout there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that companies are gradually realizing that online conversations are happening whether they are a part of them or not.

Our panelists had a lot of great information to share and as usual the Q4 team tweeted the event, but we wanted to provide a snapshot of the relevant points as it relates to IR professionals (for the most part, the notes that follow will be a combination of all ideas presented in the webinar).

AGENDA

• Why Monitor?
• Where should companies look for conversations?
• What should they be listening for?
• Who should they engage with if anyone?
• How and what tools should they use to monitor and engage?

Why Monitor?

Social networks have enabled anyone who uses them to be an influencer – so just because companies are not listening to the online conversations, doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.

Online conversations can be classified into three buckets:

1) Way it was – one-way flow of information with companies broadcasting to targeted financial and media outlets.   Obtaining print coverage was a key objective and way of showing the effectiveness of a particular press release or success of a product launch or other campaign.

2) Now – conversations are multidirectional and everyone has a voice which makes it difficult to track everything that is being said.  So monitoring is essential as social media is a dialogue, not a monologue. “Unidirectional information flow made it easy to see a storm coming, with the new you can’t” – RBH.

3) Where it is going – eBay in particular wants to create a communications hub so they engage with their stakeholders, and social media is part of their IR plan.

Monitoring will not only enable you to see what is being said about your company, but may help you uncover business trends you can incorporate into the overall business strategy thereby potentially growing your business.  With respect to IR, it will help you manage any misperceptions about your company that might impact your stock price and company reputation.

Social networks can spread information quicker than in the past, so monitoring online conversations in real-time will help you choose to respond to any rumours or erroneous information by proactively correcting the misinformation before the markets have time to react.

Where should companies look for conversations?

In general, if you want to get a sense of what is being said about your company the panel suggested starting with individual platforms.  For example, if you want to see what is being said on Twitter, you can simply type in http://search.twitter.com or go to http://Peoplebrowsr.com.   Richard uses Seesmic desktop – you can save your searches and see them in real-time.  (You can do the same with TweetDeck).

If you don’t find a lot of conversations happening on the platforms you are searching, then you shouldn’t put a lot of time and effort into being on those platforms – Richard borrowed a phrase “Fish, where your fish are” –  which makes sense.  As you need to be familiar with and actively using the social networks that your stakeholders are – as stated earlier, social media is a dialogue, not a monologue.

Other places to look for conversations, especially for IR professionals are financial blogs.  One idea he had was to tweet the company’s upcoming analyst day.  Interestingly, a lot of financial analysts started following him and he followed them back.  He actively engaged with them on Twitter and even met a few of them in person.

Serena stated that some companies who are predominantly held by institutional investors don’t feel they have to use social networks to engage with this key audience.  She rightly points out that if you are not providing information over these channels, they are accessing the information some other places on the web, such as the Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha.

According to Seeking Alpha, they are the largest financial blog aggregator with four million unique users/month (with 25% institutional investors).    This provides proof that this key stakeholder group is using social networks to gain and share information about your company.

What should companies be listening for?

Every company has different goals and this will determine what you want to monitor and subsequently find out from those conversations.   For example, if you discover a blog that has written a negative post you should look at that post in the context of the total body of work.  One way to find out if you should pay attention to this particular blog is by using http://compete.com which provides an overview of website traffic and overall trends of the blog.

The rationale here is if the person/company responsible for the blog doesn’t have a lot of website traffic you likely don’t have to invest a lot of time tracking what they are saying.  The same goes for Twitter – if a person tweets something negative about your company, and they don’t have a lot of followers, then they can be put on the back burner.

On the flip side of this, the size of the audience isn’t necessarily a key indicator of whether a particular person has the potential to damage your company’s reputation.  For example, a person who has a small following on Twitter may have something interesting to say.  So if this information is shared, the speed that this gets carried across the web can mean this can be retweeted to millions of users!

Social media is an emotional investment with credibility of relationships built over time.  The time you invest and personal input you invest engaging on your selected networks will eventually pay off and allow you to discern the credible from the non-credible.

Who should companies engage with if anyone?

With experience as both an internal IRO and consultant, I know all too well that some people just want to speak to a live person to vent about the current price of the stock or the company in general.  The same holds true for those investors using social networks – some of them just want to post their two cents to get it off their chest.

Richard said he engages with anyone on Twitter – although he is careful about responding to everyone who might tweet a complaint. He feels that companies have to be cognizant of the Big Brother element in that they don’t always want to feel that the company is only monitoring the negative comments.  As such, he treats all comments on a case by case basis.  So for example, if someone has posted some blatant misinformation, he will correct them.

I agree with Richard on this front, and IROs should take this advice when dealing with shareholders who have clearly communicated some erroneous information.  Actively engaging in and monitoring online conversations is key.  It will allow you to respond quickly to negative/misinformation and potentially avert any impact on the share price.

Another idea of who you should engage with is to create a program on how you respond to particular comments.  For example, you could use the things that are being said about your company and pick out any trends – that way you can put together statements in advance.  Over time, the list will develop as you come across new things/issues.

How and what tools should they use to monitor and engage?

The tools you decide to implement depend on the objectives of your social media program and what you are trying to accomplish.  For example, do you want increased traffic to your website, increased media mentions? While every company will have different goals and objectives, one way to view your social media efforts is by determining the ROI of your program.
For example, eBay uses the following 7 ways to look at their social media efforts:

1. Increased media mentions
2. Increased traffic/unique visitors
3. Number of views/increased content spread
4. Accelerated message
5. Increased SEO
6. Brand advocacy
7. Reducing costs/expenses

From an IR point of view, you should intertwine your social media efforts into your IR program.  Similar to your existing plan you should set measurable short and long-term goals and objectives, identify target audiences, develop strategic messages and tactics and activities to deliver the program.  Of course monitoring is key to determine the effectiveness of your efforts so the plan can be fine-tuned as needed.

There are a lot of free and paid-for services out there.  If budget is a consideration, Richard recommends setting up search terms through Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alerts. Serena likes http://socialmention.com – it provides sentiment by letting you know if the majority of discussions are positive or negative and best of all it’s free. http://Peoplebrowsr.com does same thing and is great for larger cos./brands. It provides a plugin to download charts which gives you concrete data you can provide to management.

If time is your concern, than you should consider future tweets, as it allows you to schedule tweets to post at a future time.  Serena especially likes this one, as she can input her tweets when she can and then they get posted while she is doing other things.

There are many monitoring services out there and you shouldn’t be afraid to pick up the phone and call the ones you are interested in.  Although before doing so I would recommend you have some goals in mind.   Better yet, send out a message over your social network of choice – you may be surprised by the response you get and you may even get some feedback from a fellow IR professional!

Interesting tips from Webinar:

We had a lot of great questions and excellent input from our panelists.  However instead of providing a list of the Q&A, I thought I would compile some interesting thoughts/ideas that came out of our discussion:

• Try using two monitors on your desk – this is an easy way to manage your time with one being dedicated to social media and the other for your day-to-day work.
• If you are monitoring the online conversations already, you could try amalgamating your stock monitoring services with your social media efforts – Cisco does this, so if they see a web-rumour that might impact their stock, they address it on their blog.
• Stay connected with the other groups within your company – for example, Richard has regular meetings with the IR/PR/Legal team before tweeting each quarterly call.
• Put together corporate disclosure messaging which can apply to all your social networks.  eBay has four standard tweets that precede the earnings releases that links to & refers to disclosure language to address RegFD. Here is a link to eBay’s social media guidelines they created for corporate disclosure: http://bit.ly/1GCqKQ and cautionary language published around earnings and link to Twitter http://bit.ly/yeR7q
• If you decide to live tweet your earnings call, consider preparing the tweets before it starts (you can extract the key elements from the release) which will ensure streamlined messaging.

It is easy to see that social networks have changed the IR profession and the way companies communicate with their key stakeholders.  In spite of this, the role of the IRO hasn’t changed – it is still the conduit between the investment community and management.  So it is important for you to go where the conversations are happening.

As in the past, no analyst is going to cover a company without doing research first.  And the research platforms of today are the web.  Blogs and  social networks are another layer to the research and you can be sure that they are setting up the same search terms you are to find out who and what is being said about your company.  The goal of the IRO is still to make the investor and analyst job easier and you want to ensure that you are a part of those online conversations to guarantee these key stakeholders are getting the correct information.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Monitoring for Investor Relations – A Free Q4 Webinar
2. Webinar Replay – Monitoring Social Media for Investor Relations
3. M.O.M. knows what’s best for IR and Social Media
4. Study Reveals CEO’s Are Social Media Slackers
5. NIRI Cleveland – Social Media and IR Wrap Up – Top 5 Take Aways

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