A quote from the author Esteban Contreras:

There might be saturation, but social media has changed the way we live. And this means social media is no longer a question for marketers. Companies of all sizes have accepted and even embraced the importance of social media. Investments are starting to increase and companies are now building teams to tackle the new risks and opportunities that social media has created.

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The primary change that we made to Q4 Web to make these Widgets possible is to move to JSON feeds for the delivery of all investor and financial content (news, events, presentations, reports). Previously, content would come from the Q4 Web CMS and be displayed using a module and HTML. Q4 has always been the anti-template solution, offering a high degree of flexibility and customization. We have now taken this to an unprecedented level among IR focused providers

Now with JSON feeds, all of this content is pushed out of Q4 Web as a structured data feed – which means web designers can use any aspect of this data and create new ways to display it for the desktop, mobile, apps, etc. In addition, because the content all comes in a JSON feed, clients continue to be able to easily manage everything from the Q4 Web CMS.

JSON feeds + Widgets provide total flexibility with design combined with complete content management control – a perfect combination.

Using JSON Feeds as the source, we then created a JQuery Widget Library that is completely extensible. Which allows our web design partners to create and share new and interesting Widgets for all types of corporate website content.

Our initial release includes Widgets for Financial content such as news, events & SEC filings and social content such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. You can also just use an external RSS feed. This is only the beginning, as each time a new widget is created, they are added to the JQuery Widget Library and made available for use by all clients and designers!

Finally, we made Widgets embeddable not only on the company website, but also on 3rd party sites like blogs. Controlled entirely by the company, the embed code for any widget can be shared and used to embed on any other website or blog. We’re very excited about this and look forward to our clients’ widgets being embedded across the web. With all content being all controlled from their Q4 Web CMS instance.

Check out the Live Demo on the earlier post or the new Widgets page on the Q4 product website.

We’re super excited about this release and look forward to working with our many web design partners and our clients in 2012!

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Thanks to the fine folks at Aimia for their tremendous work and their agency, Interbrand for the fantastic design. We look forward to helping evolve the site over time. Have a look at the video below or visit the site at http://www.aimia.com/ and let us know what you think!

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Outside of some technical problems I had with the laptop, I think the session went really well and there were some great takeaways. The full one-hour webinar is embedded here, followed by what I consider to be the highlights.

The Highlights

When considering financial blogging the first thing to note is that the majority of institutional investors now read blogs and a third of them do so on a weekly basis. And even though only 9% cite Twitter as an information source, 66% of financial bloggers (who’s blogs they are reading) say Twitter is a primary news source. So the key thing to understand is the information “food chain” in financial content.

Rather then provide a complete transcript of the session I thought I would share some of the most insightful questions and answers:

Is the universe of financial blogging growing and if so, why?

Howard – Yes I think it’s definitely growing in size. I think financial blogging has been revised because of Twitter and StockTwits. When I first looked at Twitter I thought “sharing stock ideas would make a lot of sense” ….. The key of blogging growth comes from the fact that people on Twitter and StockTwits can test their ideas.

Well, if you write you become a better trader. Period, End of story. If you read you can become a better trader -not for sure, but if you follow really smart people in an ambient way as I have done for years and I make my own case study and my results have been proven by a thousand percent. Not because I’m a better trader, but because I have better habits. That comes from learning from people that repetitively do things.

Has the universe of coverage increased the number of companies being covered?

Zack – I agree with Howard in that the pie has certainly gotten bigger. A few years ago at Seeking Alpha there was coverage on about 3000 companies, not all with the same rigor, as a sell-side analyst would have, but certainly coverage and ideas. Blogging definitely brings companies to the forefront that could never see the light of day before, because there was no liquidity in the stock. But today things are very different, and because of this I think there is a bull market in financial content now.

In regards to the buy-side, things are totally different. Social media is about two components; one as a communication medium and the other as a learning medium – which is the tradesteam (that Howard was referring to).

The key thing with the buy side is that they are going to go anywhere they can get good information, including the web, blogs, social media, etc. We have a liquid market of information online right now. The buy side is not only consuming information but they are also producing it.

I think (financial content) is a great place to be right now.

How do you see the Yahoo message boards of yesterday as different from the financial blogs of today?

Mitch – People are a lot smarter and there is much more transparency. You don’t always know who the blogger is (in fact many great articles come from anonymous sources). It’s a question of the quality, you have an extremely diligent short position on a blog or something that has been built up over time on StockTwits and points to a longer form of research. There is no ignoring that. If you’re a company that takes your reputation seriously and care about investor relations then this is something you need to take seriously. I think that’s the difference.

Zack – I think we’ve gotten a mix of people trying their hand at it and certainly more people doing it. However, it’s really a long tail concept and there is going to be a lot of junk out there. That cesspool that was the Yahoo! message board attracted most of that, but tools like StockTwits, Seeking Alpha and other social media technologies are helping us to bubble up better people now, than previously.

What is the motivation for why financial bloggers blog?

Howard – it comes down to 4 main reasons: 1. Money 2. Fame 3. Build their brand 4. To push stock (I think there are a lot of fakes out there). On that note, I think people that talk about very small kept stocks are people that cannot be followed on the web. If you were going to talk about small kept stocks then I would say that your reason for doing this is truly not scalable and I have a problem with it.

So why are bloggers doing it? You’re either doing to sell a subscription, for fame, or to build your brand – and some people do it to move stock. People used to use email and 50 cent moved a penny stock because he had a few million people following him on Twitter. There are people that have really sneaky intent. People have to use these filters to sort the good from the bad, but the reality is that it’s ‘buyer beware’.

Was Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings right to respond to a short sellers post on Seeking Alpha?

Mick – I think it was great. A hedge fund manager comes out and presents a rigorous case raising serious issues against your company’s stock. And what Hastings did was a great way to respond. I think it was a model for how other CEOs could respond to intelligent and critical writing about the company.

Zack – He took a lot of flack by traditional media that Hastings responded this way. Originally at Seeking Alpha we brought CEOs in to have a discussion with investors. Providing access to CEOs to smaller investors that they typically wouldn’t have. This venue creates that access which is a good thing for the market in general.

Are investors interested in hearing direct from company CEOs and Executives?

Mick – Smart investors always want access to management and given the opportunity they will certainly look for ways to interact.

Zack – If you look at it as a level playing field in terms of the discourse, institutional investors get access to mgmt. You pick up the phone and get Reed Hastings on the phone and he’ll tell you why Tilson is wrong. With the blog post it provides this level of access to all investors.

Is it true that investors don’t want to access content direct from companies due to spin?

Zack – in general smart investors are interested in hearing all different opinions. Social networks help to bubble up the good ideas. Good investors want to hear from the shorts and the long positions as well as directly from the company. This helps investors to make informed decisions.

NovaGold’s approach to dealing with a short position post on Seeking Alpha. Rather than commenting or posting into Seeking Alpha directly, they posted on their own site and focused on the same topic. Do you think that this tactic is effective? Or should they have commented or linked back directly?

Mick – anytime you respond to something online you should link to it. If you don’t, acknowledge you’re missing the point. I don’t think companies should be afraid to do it on another platform. Today’s web is open, real-time, real-voice. Companies need to be on the platforms as much as their compliance department allows them. To get into discussion mode, the reason why it could be damaging is because it raises real issues about the company. Then deal with it head on and jump in with both feet.

If the post has errors then address them. If there are open questions then state them. “We have other questions and smart people working on them”, etc.

Zack – I agree with Mick. It seems like there is a legacy issue of the wild west and Yahoo! message boards. Where you had trolls ready and waiting to be negative on everything. So I think a lot of issuers still feel the need to control the conversation.

I guess that’s the fear and I agree with Mick that at some point, for everyone’s benefit we need to get over that fear. You can still control the message and who can keep the bad information out and keep everything controlled. More than everything you have to let go a bit and that can be damaging, ultimately the conversation should work out.

Is it possible for companies to improve coverage they obtain through financial bloggers?

Mick – it’s a tough thing to always obtain positive coverage. The first step is to start using these channels. Start sharing content and putting the company out there in an aggressive broadcast mode is where to start.

You’ll find that the blogosphere will pick up on that content, if it’s of quality.

Zack – first is you can’t put lipstick on a pig. So first you need to have a good story. There was a great post by James Altucher (a StockTwits blogger) about a small cap tobacco company of which he did some really good research. The company didn’t initiate it. He did it on his own. I don’t think the company could have seeded a post like that, it had to be discovered and shared on it’s own.

The above questions and answers are only highlights from the session. I suggest you set aside the time and listen to the complete webinar when you have the time. In addition to the questions I’ve hightighted there is truly some great insights.

I hope you liked it and will join us on our next webinar.

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Share to Facebook
Starting in 2009 a default component of all Q4 websites is the ability to share any page to a number of social networks, including Facebook.  When we first launched this service we thought that email would be the most popular method to share investor web pages.  Turns out we were completely wrong, Facebook was the most popular and continues to be today.

When content is shared from a Q4 website in this fashion a title, summary and thumbnail are shared to the users Facebook page (or it can be sent as a message through Facebook).  This type of sharing benefits the company because their content is now presented to a wider group of users and the chance of attracting new users to the corporate investor site increases.

Like Button
Last year we began rolling out the new Facebook ‘Like’ button on selected websites and pages. The Facebook Like button allows anyone with a Facebook account to share a page with one-click. The button also tells you who of your friends has also shared the same content.

The Facebook like button virtually removes all friction between a user and their desire to share content. A simple click and it’s done. On Facebook this ‘Like’ shows up the users feed and is displayed to all of the users Friends. In a similar way to ‘Sharing on Facebook’ the Like button increases the reach of the corporate website content and attracts new or engages with existing investors and stakeholders.

Like Box
The Like Box is a social plug-in that displays the company’s Facebook page as part of the corporate website. It displays all of the news and updates that exist on the company’s page, along with all of the users friends that have ‘Liked’ the company.  The Like Box also gives the corporate website users the ability to Liked the company with one click, or easily visit the Facebook page.

The benefit of embedding the Like Box into your corporate website is that it exposes your user to your Facebook activities from the conveys of your corporate website, allowing them to sample the activity and see who of their friends have already Liked particular content, thus helping them to Like the company as well.

Recommendations
The Recommendations plugin displays a list of recommended content based on what content Facebook users have shared or Liked on your corporate website.

For an example of a site that has all of the above features, check out the Facebook book page on TVI Pacific’s website as well as their press releases. http://tvipacific.com/Investors/Investor-Connect/Facebook/default.aspx

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In addition to this target, the algorithm change also affected many IR websites in North America. IR Web Report subsequently reported on the incident in this post “Google search change hits investor relations sites”.  Here is a short quote:

“Making matters worse, Google’s algorithm change appears to have dramatically cut the rankings for IR websites hosted by Thomson Reuters, PR Newswire and sites that are hosted on the Shareholder.com domain.”

Upon learning about the incident I quickly checked with our team and confirmed that our sites were not impacted. The reason for this is because the Q4 web platform is simply better than theirs. : ) Seriously, the specific reasons are:

• All of our client websites use the company domain name for their URL (no vendor names)
• All the URLs are in plain English (i.e. company.com/investors/earnings)
• All sites are search engine optimized and easily indexed by Google
• Other secret sauce I can’t tell you about….

I was happy to share Dominic’s post through Twitter and and even happier that he quickly confirmed our sites were not changed:

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HD Version on YouTube

All the best this holiday season!

Your friends at Q4 Web Systems.

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