Earlier this week, Darrell Heaps, Q4’s Co-Founder and CEO participated in a panel discussion entitled “Best Practices for Using Social Media to Communicate Material Information”. The event was put on by the Twin Cities NIRI Chapter in downtown Minneapolis and was co-sponsored by the Dorsey & Whitney Law Firm. Other panelists included Jonathan B. Abram and Melissa Krasnow both Partners with Dorsey & Whitney LLP and was moderated by Barbara Doyle, Vice President, Investor Relations at Lawson Software, Inc.
We had intended to write a follow up post that summarized the event, but IR Magazine beat us to the punch with “IR in the age of social media” . Rather than duplicate the post we thought we’d just point you to their blog.
Here’s a quick quote by Darrell:
‘The risk posed by social media for your company … exists whether you participate or not,’ observed Darrell Heaps, CEO of Q4 Web Systems, an IR website and communications firm out of Toronto. ‘If you’ve ignored social media and said there are too many risks, we‘re not going to get involved, then you are putting your company at higher risk … than if you know how to use the tools. The market doesn’t care whether or not you’re there. They’re going to use the channels that are most readily available to them to put their message out.’
As usual, there were a lot of great sessions to choose from at NIRI’s Annual Conference from June 7-10 in Florida. The Q4 team attended as many as we could which meant we didn’t always have the time to do write a blog post that day. What follows is an overview of a session I attended on Tuesday, June 9th entitled “Understanding IR Strategies Behind XBRL – IROs Evolving Role”.
Moderator/Lead Speaker:
Reporting from the NIRI conference – it’s been incredibly busy since we arrived so finding time to write has been impossible. Attendance is down about 30 – 40% but delegates seem very engaged so I’m glad we’re here!
The conference kicked off yesterday with a lively presentation by Todd Buchholz, renowned economist and best-selling author of “New Ideas from Dead CEO’s: Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office”. His presentation was entertaining and his stories were a lesson in the value of common sense. (Some great stories regarding A.P. Giannini, the founder of The Bank of Italy – which is now The Bank of America. Too much to cover here but you might want to buy the book.)
Live from NIRI ’09 – Session: How the Buy and Sell Side Trade your Stocks Today
The weather is hot in Florida and so are the sessions here at the NIRI ’09 conference.Yesterday I tweeted live from the “IR Emerging Issues and NIRI Advocacy” session. The second session entitled “How the Buy and Sell Side Trade Your Stock Today”, was so hot, that I decided to put together some notes and compile for this blog.
This session was designed to help IR professionals understand what happens behind price and volume.Here is an overview of what was said:
We officially launched our Summer ’09 release from the NIRI National Conference in FL, which introduces Social Media and XBRL capabilities to IR websites. This latest release offers different ways for investors to find, subscribe and share content through social networks.
Q4’s web platform continuously evolves with market and regulatory trends that keep the IR website on the leading edge of companies’ investor communications.Q4’s latest IR website products create viral IR content, which means they can be shared, disseminated and republished across the web to millions of retail and institutional investors.
Customers can now:
Embed and distribute presentations, videos and documents through SlideShare, YouTube and Docstoc,
Aggregate all social activities on the IR website with inbound RSS feeds.
We also announced from the NIRI National Conference, that our Q4 web platform now delivers a highly accurate real-time rendering of XBRL-tagged SEC filings.
This new product enables users to view XBRL-formatted financial statements in an easy to read display on IR websites while helping public companies meet the new SEC XBRL regulations which require them to post financial statements in interactive data formats.
To respond to this mandate Q4 now offers US-based filers:
XBRL financials with real-time rendering on your website – once your XBRL filing is accepted by the SEC, within minutes your website is updated with the complete filing displayed in HTML,
Multiple report formats for enhanced financial analysis and reporting by investors, analysts and the financial media, and
Ability to view and download XBRL reports, or share embed codes through social networks.
If you’re interested in learning more contact us todayand we’ll setup a live product demo.
The Q4 team is off to the NIRI National Conference in Hollywood, FL from June 7-10. For those who are attending we are looking forward to meeting with you, so stop by booth #504 to:
• Find out why social media is now a key aspect of investor relations in lowering capital costs, why it doesn’t need to be difficult and how to responsibly get involved.
• Learn about XBRL filings that can be viewed in an easy to ready display on your website.
For those of you, who can’t make it, we will be providing regular updates on Twitter and posting on our blog.
I attended an interesting CIRI (Canadian Investor Relations Institute) round-table luncheon yesterday, and the topic of discussion was Understanding how the buy-side makes decisions . The format of the session was great; it was almost entirely Q&A and provided the opportunity for participants to openly dialogue with the speakers. The panelists were Stephanie Griffiths, Lead Portfolio Manager for Mackenzie Ivy Enterprise Fund, and Craig MacAdam, Portfolio Manager with the Aurion Capital equity team. Both were frank and concise in their answers, and while much of the information they provided was fairly intuitive, I did find some of their comments surprising and interesting. Read more…
CIRI Ontario opened the fall season at the Albany Club yesterday with a presentation on ‘Using Advanced Technologies Effectively. Speakers included Michael O’Connor Clarke, VP of Thornley Fallis Communications; Natalie Johnson, Manager of Social Media with General Motors and Parker Mason, Web Content Specialist with the CNW Group. (More info on event/presenters . Michael O’Connor also blogs about this event)
Attended by approximately 60 people, the topic was focused specifically on blogging and so the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and YouTube were largely omitted.
For the uninitiated, the presentation provided an introduction on how to start using corporate blogs as an effective communications channel. Here’s a brief synopsis of the presentation with a few other helpful bits added:
The folks over at zu.com were doing interviews with some of the vendors that were at NIRI this year. They just posted a video on their blog that contains an interview with Darrell Heaps. Darrell gives a quick overview of the company and a short demo of Q4 Press. There is a great reference to Darrell’s twitter activity and the FriendFeed room that Dominic Jones setup for the conference.
If you weren’t able to make it to NIRI 2008, or if you’re there wanting to keep tabs on what is up with Q4, you can get updates from Darrell on Twitter. http://twitter.com/darrellheaps
You can also subscribe to updates using this ATOM feed. Stay tuned, more to come from NIRI ‘08!
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.
Earlier this week, Darrell Heaps, Q4’s Co-Founder and CEO participated in a panel discussion entitled “Best Practices for Using Social Media to Communicate Material Information”. The event was put on by the Twin Cities NIRI Chapter in downtown Minneapolis and was co-sponsored by the Dorsey & Whitney Law Firm. Other panelists included Jonathan B. Abram and Melissa Krasnow both Partners with Dorsey & Whitney LLP and was moderated by Barbara Doyle, Vice President, Investor Relations at Lawson Software, Inc.
As usual, there were a lot of great sessions to choose from at 
Live from 
The Q4 team is off to the 
I attended an interesting 
CIRI Ontario
