The founders of Agoracom are set to appear in front of the OSC at the end of April, where we assume we will all hear more details of the allegations and the defense of Agoracom. I, like many others, await more details before passing judgment on what really happened and to what degree fraud was committed (if at all).
In light of this recent situation, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the problems with message boards and the importance of transparency and trust and being successful online.
On February 14, Darrell Heaps, our co-founder and CEO, and one of North America’s leading authorities on social media for IR hosted a guided tour of “The Current State of Social Media” webinar in which he walked through a current snapshot of what’s happening in the use of social media for IR and why it’s important to your investor relations program. Here is the full replay of the session and the Q&A, it’s 1hr15mins long:
During the session participants were provided with an interactive demonstration of how social media is helping other public companies mitigate share value erosion, dramatically increase their website traffic and broaden their reach to potential investors. As part of his guided tour he also revealed:
Which social networks are being adopted by companies for IR first and why.
How these companies are using social networks and deriving value from them.
Tips to enhance engagement and streamline quarterly reporting.
Darrell’s presentation was loaded with over 50 examples and case studies of how public companies are using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and blogs to enhance their IR program.
If you’re thinking about if, when and how to integrate social media with your investor relations program, you should watch the video version of the presentation.
I’ll also be providing an overview of the session with lots of links in an upcoming blog post…stay tuned!
They may differ in their size and sector, but Canada Gas Corp. and Barrick Gold both agree there is value in using social media. I recently sat down with representatives from each company to discuss why they have adapted it into their online communications plan, how they use it and some words of wisdom for anyone looking to integrate it into their business strategy. What follows is an overview of those conversations. Read more…
Yesterday Catherine Crofton delivered our first webinar regarding removing the 5 barriers to an effective investor relations website. I come from a web development and media background so I was a bit green to all this IR stuff when I started at Q4 a couple of years ago. Needless to say I’ve been schooled the hard way and have learned internally and from our customers what issuers need to say to their investors.
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. Read more…
Starting this past January we began aggregating the website statistics from our network of client IR websites. We plan to continue aggregating this data and then share interesting slices with our clients and the public. Our hope is that sharing this data will help all companies and their vendors build better websites and utilize web technologies more effectively.
Even though we only have 2 months of data and we’re in beta regarding our methods for aggregating, I wanted to share some initial observations that we thought were interesting. If you have any questions about this data or how we collect it please leave a comment or contact me.
FNX Mining (TSE:FNX.CA) recently launched their website on Q4 Web 3.5. We are pleased to have FNX as another member of the Q4 family! This launch includes all the benefits of our latest platform release including press release RSS feeds.
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.
Barrick Gold (TSX, NYSE: ABX) officially launched Q4’s RSS feed for press releases today. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology that allows you to have updated news from your favorite websites sent directly to your web browser or email.
Barrick also recently went live on our latest 3.5 release which includes a whole host of new features in addition to RSS Feeds.
We are pleased to present our latest client, Canadian Oil Sands Trust (TSX: COS.UN), which has recently gone live on Q4 WEB 3.5. Canadian Oil Sands Trust provides a pure investment opportunity in the oil sands through its 36.74% interest in the Syncrude Project. Syncrude is a leader in Canada’s oil sands industry, operating since 1978 with a productive capacity today of 350,000 barrels per day of light, high-quality crude oil.
BFI Canada became our first client to officially enable our RSS functionality in Q4 WEB. Website visitors can now receive BFI’s press releases in RSS format and we have plans to expand our RSS feeds to include events, presentations and other types of content within Q4 WEB.
Welcome to the company blog of Q4 Web Systems. Here we talk about Q4, Investor Relations websites, web disclosure, IR 2.0, online reporting, xbrl and our products. Subscribe to our RSS feed or email alerts.
On Thursday April 1st, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) – the Canadian equivalent to the SEC, put forth allegations against Agoracom.com an online investor relations forum for seeding fake conversations throughout their investor message board community. The allegations describe a scenario of more than 24,000 fraudulent posts made by 670 different accounts. The papers filed by the OSC go into detail on how employees at Agoracom were required to posts under several different aliases and on occasion, conversed with themselves on the forums using different aliases. Agoracom has denied the charges and says they are without merit.
Yesterday 
Starting this past January we began aggregating the website statistics from our network of client IR websites. We plan to continue aggregating this data and then share interesting slices with our clients and the public. Our hope is that sharing this data will help all companies and their vendors build better websites and utilize web technologies more effectively.
FNX Mining 
We are pleased to present our latest client,