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One of the questions that stood out to me from yesterday’s webinar was when an attendee asked if we had any samples to show how small cap companies are leveraging the IR website best practices Catherine was speaking about.  Catherine had shown great examples from some larger companies, namely, Nexen and Potash and explained how they have done a great job of conveying their messaging as well as making it easy for their audience to find information quickly.

Although I can’t share some of the examples from the projects we haven’t launched yet, I can say that part of our project process at Q4 is to help clients realize these best practices through using our modules which have been designed with IR best practices in mind.  Throughout our implementation process, we work with our clients to help them improve their IR websites and apply best practices to their site.   In the past we have primarily focused on migrating our client’s websites to our platform when they join the family and applying these best practices is now an additional service included with our implementation process.

Since our Spring 09 release, we’ve added Full-Text RSS feeds for news, presentations and events, Share This social sharing which allows any page to be shared through all the social networks, Investor Briefcase, Page-specific meta data and host of of other improvements to our IR website product – that all our clients receive automatically!

Of course we’ve always had email alerts, stock quotes, press release feeds and all the basic IR required items but we’re taking a different approach and simply using these best practices to not only make the IR section better, but to make the overall website better.

Look for a follow-up in a week or so when we launch some before-and-after shots of what we’ve done for a couple of new clients that are in development.

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I think what I enjoy most about the process for implementing the Rockefeller Habits is that it’s actually very similar to using Agile processes for developing software:

1. Focus on the highest value items first
2. Make progress on those items
3. Have a retrospective
4. Find new (and usually more difficult) problems
5. Repeat 1 – 4 often

For us, seeing a problem as an opportunity for improvement is the key. At the end of each quarter we get together and brainstorm what problems popped up during the quarter and then we widdle them down to which ones we can address the next quarter.

This exercise is usually the most emotionally draining but the mood improves very quickly when those problems are turned into solutions. This is the 4th consecutive quarter we’ve gone through this exercise and it was interesting to see how the complexity of the priorities increased as the quarters went by.

The very nature of Scrum is to constantly improve by having retrospectives at the end of each sprint.  The Team talks about what went well, what didn’t go well and what they want to try during the next sprint. We’ve proven it’s been effective in our development teams so we decided our #1 priority this quarter is to extend the use of Scrum principles to the rest of the departments within the company.

After living with the Rockefeller Habits for a year, I can say without a doubt that the process works.  Everyone rallies around the priorities and collaborates on solutions that help remove waste and increase efficiency across all departments.  I would be interested to hear your thoughts about how you’ve used similar processes in your company or if you have questions about some tactics we use to keep this process running smoothly.

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Anyone who has worked for company experiencing explosive growth can appreciate the difficulties that come with it and the the importance of maintaining focus with respect to corporate objectives.  Chris Jones posted back in July with respect to our adoption of the Rockefeller Habits as well as our re-adoption of Scrum as a way to maintain alignment across the company.

Since Q2 2008, we have been living our values. The single most important value we realize at Q4 is a dedication to constant improvement. 
Lately I’ve been blogging a great deal about Reg FD and social media so I thought I’d switch gears to ring in the new year and post about our corporate culture.

I remember our first initial sessions trying to implement the Rockefeller Habits and there were many long nights, weekends and, ahem, ’spirited discussions’, however, we progressed and improved upon those sessions each quarter.

Our re-adoption of Scrum actually helped the corporate alignment process as we now have company-wide retrospectives to learn about is and isn’t working.  In each retrospective we end up with a set of tangible improvements to make in the next quarter and during subsequent retrospectives we ’scrub’ which of these we were able to implement.  These improvements don’t need to be earth shattering, as  a series of small improvements add up over time.

‘Agile’ seems to be the latest buzzword in software development and many companies are adopting Agile principles to how they develop software – meaning they are leveraging the 4 main values from the Agile Manifesto:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

I won’t go into great detail about these statements, but in general terms they mean that we agree there is value in the items on the right, but we value the items on the left more.  A simple example would be ‘would you rather have a piece of software you can provide real feedback on quickly, or a 200 page spec document that is outdated the second it’s finished and then stuffed in a filing cabinet only to never be looked at again?’

We’ve extended Agile principles to other aspects of our business and each business unit starts the day with their own daily stand-up -  essentially a 15 minute meeting status update – and all department heads meet up once a week for a “Scrum of Scrums” to ensure we are setting weekly goals to track toward our quarterly priority.

Working in short iterations from a business perspective and the frequent quick and time boxed meetings does wonders for productivity.   Our goals and priorities are clear and enforced by creating weekly priorities based on the bigger quarterly and yearly goals.

The key message in how we operate is that we work as a team, we adapt to change quickly and we learn frequently through retrospectives.  This commitment to constant improvement is a recipe for success and I’m looking forward to another great year at Q4.

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FNX Mining

FNX Mining Company Inc. (”FNX”), a Canadian Nickel Company, produces, develops and explores for nickel, copper, cobalt, platinum, palladium and gold in Canada’s prolific Sudbury Basin. FNX optioned five former producing mines from Vale Inco early in 2002 (McCreedy West, Levack, Podolsky, Victoria and Kirkwood). The properties contained extensive historic surface and underground infrastructure, including roads, head frames, declines, power facilities and buildings.

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Barrick also recently went live on our latest 3.5 release which includes a whole host of new features in addition to RSS Feeds.

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Q4 Web Systems is an Agile organization ( using Scrum) and to be considered, the candidates must be able to demonstrate the qualities associated with working in an Agile environment.  You must be able to think on your feet, adapt to change and be involved with defining and implementing solutions to business issues and value.

You may view the full description here or contact us to apply.

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You can read about other features available in our 3.5 release here and stay tuned for more information about our next release coming early in the new year!

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I’ve been following numerous bloggers and Social Media Release (SMR) folks on Twitter for several months now and I don’t think the new Reg. FD guidance will kill the press release.  If anything, press releases will evolve and take advantage of new media technologies such as SMRs.

Reg. FD states that an issuer doesn’t need to release ‘paper friendly’ disclosure, which leaves the door wide open for video, audio and more interactive press releases.  Anyway you slice it, at the end of the day a press release is all about marketing, plain and simple.  What better way to market your company than through a concise press release that includes a 2-minute video or audio clip of the release?

This really hit home for me when I read Overstock.com’s latest press release in SMR format.  Have a look at that link quickly, then come back, it’s ok, I’ll wait.  Great, now that you’ve seen that release, take a look at the text version Overstock.com posted on their site.

Which do you think is more effective?

On the SMR version, you can:

• print it
• email it
• share it through any social network
• comment on it
• watch a short video overview
• get related links
• view press contacts
• see a quick overview of the release
• view images that augment the text

As an investor, this gave me a more favorable opinion of Overstock.com.  Here we go again… praising the distribution power of Twitter, but my network on Twitter brought this to my attention. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known about it.

The rise of SMRs and the use of social media as an IR marketing tool is inevitable given the new Reg. FD guidance.  When presented with a choice of viewing a quick summary and video clip over reading a press release, I would gladly watch the video and jot down notes, while still having the ability to view the full release if I wanted.  SMRs allows both and it’s a much better marketing tool than plain text.

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There is no doubt that social media is dramatically changing the landscape of communication and more and more companies are using Twitter to market their products or services and bloggers and journalists around the world are using Twitter to break news.

Two recent events come to mind that demonstrate the power of Twitter, one involving a recent exchange between GE and an investor and the now Twitter-famous Motrin ad scandal.
Late last week GE and Todd Sullivan exchanged tweets after GE posted some information via Twitter.

GE had announced via Twitter:

“GE’s dividend plan remains unchanged: There has been speculation in the media and among analysts.”

Todd replied with:

“Will Immelt ($ge) make an andrew Liveris ($dow) statement “this CEO will not cut the dividend”?”

GE had responded with:

“the Board of Directors decides on the dividend which they plan to maintain through the end of 2009″

There were more interactions in the exchange, but it was the first such interaction between an IR and an investor according to IR Web Report who Twitted the news.

The second, and greater indication of the reach and power of Twitter came over the weekend when Motrin launched a new ad.    I noticed quite a few of the people I follow were talking about an offensive Motrin ad on Saturday so I checked it out only to find thousands of tweets, blogs and even a You Tube video containing a compilation of outraged tweets from moms everywhere.  All of this within a few hours of the first tweet that expressed outrage about the ad.

This promptly caused Motrin to remove the ad from their site and issue an apology. As of today blogs, tweets and video responses are continuing to flood the web.  In fact, in the 20 minutes I’ve been writing this post, Twitter search has yielded 86 more tweets with the keyword “Motrin”

I was simply blown away by how fast and how far this news was distributed and here we are 2 business days into the week and a google search on ‘motrin ad’ is showing more and more blogs, news clippings and discussions about that controversial ad.  Now that is power of distribution.

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