Based on these findings, on June 14, 2011 Q4 sponsored a Lunch ‘n’ Learn session at the NIRI Annual Conference which sought to answer this question:

‘Is now the time for all companies to adopt social media disclosure and move beyond compliance to a more efficient and effective model of disclosure?’

During the session, Darrell Heaps, Q4’s CEO moderated and asked pointed questions that prompted insightful input from a great panel including: Robert Williams, VP IR at Dell who discussed their success using social media for IR, including Twitter, StockTwits, SlideShare and YouTube as part of their quarterly reporting process.  We also had Chris Bullock, VP Corporate Solutions at StockTwits who answered why their social investing forum is growing so fast and his thoughts on some driving forces behind the increased use of social networks and blogging by the investment community.  Lastly, Dominic Jones of IR Web Report talked about his research comparing the reach of PR wires vs. social media disclosure.

The audio file from the session has been synched to the slide presentation below (a special thanks to the NIRI 2011 Annual Conference organizers for granting us permission for use of the file on our blog):

The Q&A session was also recorded and questions from the audience are fielded after the panel discussion ends.

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There is a great lineup of sessions, but you won’t want to miss ‘Social Media Disclosure – Is Now the Time?’ – a Q4-sponsored Lunch ‘n’ Learn on Tuesday, June 14th at 12:15 p.m. in the Ritz Ballroom 4-6 on the lower level.

Q4’s Co-Founder & CEO Darrell Heaps will be moderating a panel of the web’s most prolific thought leaders on social media and investor relations who will ponder the question: ‘Is now the time for all companies to adopt social media disclosure and move beyond compliance to a more efficient and effective model of disclosure?’ The panelists include Chris Bullock, VP Corporate Solutions at StockTwits, Dominic Jones, Founder of IR Web Report and Robert Williams, Vice President IR at Dell.

For those of you who can’t make it, we will be providing regular updates on Twitter, Facebook and posting on our blog.

Whether you can visit our booth in person or register for a demo here: http://www.q4blog.com/about/contact-us/ you’ll be eligible to win an iPod Nano or iPad until the conference ends on Wednesday June 15 @ 5:30 p.m. EDT.

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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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If you were unable to attend, you can view the presentation and video replay below:

Q4 Webinar – IR Website Best Practices to Optimize your Online Presence from Q4 Web Systems Inc. on Vimeo.

You can download the presentation by clicking here.

You can also download a copy of the complete transcription by clicking here.

In her presentation, Catherine outlined 7 specific recommendations that companies can do to use their website more strategically including:

1. More effectively emulating the real conversations and experiences with investors and use this context as a filter for the decisions when planning a site redesign or making improvements to your existing site.
2. Marrying what users want to find and what you want them to see. For example having a sub-navigation fly-out menu to present the most important or timely information as a highly visible link and summarizing your investment proposition through a ‘Why Invest’ section.
3. Using your entire corporate site as your ‘investor’ site as investors don’t limit themselves to your investor section only.  In fact, if you don’t have a large B2C or B2B play, then conceivably, your entire website may be constructed to layer information for investors as a primary audience.
4. Using your investment story and objectives to drive the site structure, content and features. Many companies have features that don’t serve them well. So if you don’t clarify your objectives and story first – it doesn’t matter what feature you turn on or off.
5. Addressing the continuum of relationships. You have different investor audiences, depending on how long they have been involved with your company and how well they know you.  So you need to consider potential, current and long-term investors.
6. Making the information more interactive. There is many ways to do this, while helping users get to content quickly. For example, using technology like videos of your management team that lets investors get a sense of your corporate leaders in a way that is often reserved for only high value investors.  Your financial information is another area where interactivity can speed access and aid understanding as well and can be achieved through an interactive analyst database that allows users to access this information in a downloadable spreadsheet format.
7. Be where your audiences are and use new tools like social media to expand your online footprint beyond your website.  SlideShare is one way of expanding your reach online with very little effort – and it increases engagement and readership both off and on the site as it is immediately accessible, much more visible and in a format that others can easily share.

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The Buy Side works for institutional stock owners and manages trillions of dollars for every type of investor (individual, pension, corporate, government, museum, hospital, charity etc). Their clients are as global, as is the investment universe and there are many ‘flavors of the buy side (value vs. growth; quant vs. fundamentalists; long only vs. hedge; ‘People’ people vs. ‘Numbers’’ people; ‘deep’ value vs. ‘intrinsic’ value vs. ‘momentum’ players; high frequency traders etc.)

The objective of the buy side is the same as the sell side: to make money for their clients by analyzing information to make informed decisions. The sell side’s client is primarily the buy side. The buy-side’s client is your company’s OWNER.

Victor began his presentation by making a couple of points that really resonated with me.

• He asked the question, “Do you want shareholders or shareowners?” The difference between the two is that a shareholder is not as ‘involved’ with your company. They don’t understand your organization at the same meaningful level and therefore, are not as intellectually/emotionally invested, and will move off your stock more easily when times are not good. A shareowner, on the other hand, is someone who is deeply involved with your company in understanding its unique investment proposition – its strategy to increase shareholder value, the strengths of your management team etc. This type of investor has a longer-term view and is more likely to steer the course during down times.
• He then made the point to “Run your businesses well and investors will own your stock.” (Then of course, the IROs job is to effectively communicate how well their company is being run. They can assist the buy-side by assembling the right information and by providing analytical techniques.)

IROs are faced with somewhat of a conundrum in terms of who they listen and attend to:

• The Buy-side – the people who actually buy your company’s stock
• The Sell-side – the people who influence your company’s stock price (using coded language rivaling the NSA’s, according to Victor)

At the end of the day, companies must make sure that they are providing the right information to both sides in order to facilitate a better understanding of their organization and investment proposition.

Working Well with the Buy Side

Victor had a few tips that I have lifted from his presentation:

1. Return phone calls and emails on time
2. Provide accurate and meaningful financial statements that are the best possible snapshot of reality at a given time
3. Clearly communicate management’s game plan and why it’s different/better than your competitors strategies
4. Define the relevant benchmarks (it’s not all about GAAP). Tell us how you think about your business, your competitors and your industry
5. Help us understand corporate esprit de corps, enduring strengths and weaknesses, and what is important to you
6. Provide access to senior management and give insight into what makes them tick
7. Provide general industry information. Don’t assume that we understand your business.
8. Be accessible and knowledgeable

Throughout the years I have had numerous IROs tell me that Institutional investors are interested in the numbers – the key metrics. Victor’s recommendations make it clear that the buy-side is also interested in much greater context about your organization and its unique strengths, your industry, your management etc. So it’s not just about providing ‘Our Industry 101’ to unsophisticated retail investors – anything you can communicate to facilitate a better understanding of your company and its unique proposition is worth doing for all audiences.

Getting to the Buy Side

In terms of targeting, learning more about who owns your competition and contacting them is well advised. Institutional investors often like to focus on a specific sector/type of business.

Importantly, Victor said that if companies focus on providing the right information and producing the numbers, buy side analysts will ‘find you’.

He said that it’s also important to get management on the road to do one-on-ones and to attend a limited number of industry conferences. (He said that a CEO should be prepared to spend about 2 hours per week in investor-related meetings/conversations. A CFO should be prepared to spend about 8 hours per week. In terms of conferences, a CEO should attend 2-4 conferences per year and a CFO should attend about 8.)

A Few Other Tips

Victor’s presentation was filled with valuable tips that impact the day-to-day role of the IRO. A few other words of wisdom included:

• Get away from focusing on EPS 100%… stress Economic Value Added, ROIC etc.
• Focus on investors first, the sell-side a close second and everyone else a distant third. It’s important not to ignore the bread and butter investor.
• Don’t assume that the buy-side listens to the sell side, because many don’t.
• Provide more clarity around options/compensation structure because this is a chief and growing area of concern for investors.
• Don’t rely solely on an investment banker or outside IR firm to find and develop shareholder relationships.
• Ensure that all types of transcripts are available on major services.
• Don’t go out of your way to ring the bell and chat with the CNBC anchor – although it’s a ‘feel good’ event, that’s not what will impact the buy side.
• Beware of private equity – buy side analysts are wary of them too!

Summary

I was very impressed by Victor’s succinct presentation. He offered a lot of good advice – a ‘play book’ to help IROs better deal with the buy side.

As a final point, Victor felt that consistency in how you communicate is very important.

And making information easy to access, readily available is key as well. He said to consider other channels to help push information out further and faster, such as Twitter, which gets your information out in real time (as an adjunct to any material information you release through traditional channels).

Finally, make it easy for investors to sign up for communications, events, but don’t overwhelm with too many email alerts or your audiences will stop paying attention.

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The program served as a boot camp for new IROs to familiarize them with all things IR: corporate disclosure issues and best practices; corporate governance; investor targeting & IR marketing; media & communications; understanding equity markets; planning and executing analyst days and non-deal road shows; understanding sell-side and buy-side analysts; financial analysis & best practices in using financial info to tell your story; global IR, and developing an IR plan. The program was loaded with great information. Attendees ranged from those new to investor relations to more seasoned IROs interested in brushing up and learning about new best practices.

This same program is held twice annually – September in Boston and January in Santa Monica. I would highly recommend it.

Although I found a great deal of the content interesting, I particularly liked the sessions that addressed how to deal with sell-side and buy-side analysts.  So I thought I’d focus a couple of blog posts on the topic – with this first one dedicated to the sell-side.

Understanding the Work of Analysts: The Sell Side

This session was presented by larger than life Michael Pachter, Managing Director, Equity Research at Wedbush Securities Inc. – the most quoted sell-side analyst on Wall Street. A highly engaging speaker, Michael provided a frank perspective on the role of sell-side analysts, why IROs should care and how they should interact with them.

The function of the sell-side analyst is to help investors make decisions about investments.  The sell-side analyst’s role encompasses the following:

• Making investment recommendations
• Providing price targets
• Supplying research notes
• Company interaction
• Buy-side interaction
• Exposing their recommendations/thoughts through the media

Making Investment Recommendations

Michael’s take is that there are really only two recommendations: Buy or Sell, and that a Hold position is the refuge of an analyst that lacks conviction. Analysts provide recommendations/ratings as an indication of where the sell-side thinks the stock is headed and a ‘Hold’ means that the analyst has no strong opinion.

In Michael’s opinion, ratings given ‘after the fact’ (e.g. following earnings calls) are a punishment. Those given ‘before the fact’ are a gamble and obviously analysts that take this approach leave themselves open to being wrong – and some analysts don’t want to risk this.

The analyst role is not about being a cheerleader for your stock – it’s about being right.  IRO’s should seek out analysts that really care about being right and then help them be right by facilitating an understanding of the company, business, leadership etc.

Providing Price Targets

Michael feels that price targets (an indicator of an analyst’s learnings) are usually worthless and widely ignored, largely because not enough effort or conviction (by the analyst) stands behind the ratings:

• The wimp’s refuge is to maintain a rating and adjust the price target
• The lazy man maintains the price target and does not adjust the rating

Supplying Research Notes

Research notes are generally required before and after earnings. They can also be ‘Industry Updates’ centered on a specific event or a regular interval (such as monthly). Research can consist of ‘Think Pieces’ that focus on the specific industry or initiations (the first research piece written by the analyst, beginning or initiating coverage of the stock.) Many analysts do a couple of reports per quarter – a highly engaged analyst is going to issue many more.  Michael releases several reports per month.

(When an investor wants to talk to a sell-side analyst, you have the power to direct the investor to the analyst that really ‘gets’ your company.)

Company Interaction

Michael has minimal interaction with the companies he covers i.e. he never calls management. They occasionally call him, before he forms and communicates an opinion on something.

Many analysts call management frequently – often seeking approval or ‘inside’ information.

Buy-side Interaction

Buy-side analysts often interact with the sell-side and read their research reports. The buy-side will form their own opinions but may value the research/opinions of specific sell-side analysts – this is turn may impact the compensation of sell-side analysts.

There are two ways that analysts are compensated:

• Voting from institutional clients
• Trading volume

If your analysts get paid based on trading volume, they are more highly incented to create volatility for your stock, which isn’t good for your company. It’s important to understand how your analysts are being compensated – ask them.

Media Exposure

Analysts communicate with the media primarily to establish credibility for their research/recommendations. Obviously this exposure can either help or hurt the covered company, so its management needs to pay attention to the media and attempt damage control where required.

Call the analyst and ask, “Why did you think that?” Try to understand their opinions and help them better understand your company, the situation etc. Try to get to them before they form their next opinion.

Conclusion

IROs can use the sell-side to their company’s advantage. By treating analysts well and being responsive/helpful you can better control analysts. By ignoring the analyst or enflaming them, you can provoke an analyst and worsen the situation.

You should work with your analysts to facilitate a better understanding of your company. And you should foster relationships, for example, go to analyst conferences if you can – rotate them into your schedule so you get out to see everyone who’s covering you over time. (Analysts understand that many of their conferences take place at the same time.)

And finally you need to accept what you cannot change; you can’t change arrogance but you might be able to change ignorance.

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• Their views on sharing analyst estimates and other IR-related content;
• How they synergize the content shared on Twitter with other social networks and their IR website;
• Setting realistic objectives for using the channel as part of their communications strategy;
• Ways they listen to online conversations and how they use the information to refine messaging;
• Whether they are interacting with investors; and
• How success is measured within each of their respective organizations.

If you were unable to attend, you can view the presentation and video replay by clicking here.

You can also download a copy of the complete transcription by clicking here.

Here are a few excerpts of what you’ll read:

Asked how they use Twitter for IR, Andrea explains:

During the last one or two months we’ve seen in Germany that a lot of retail shareholder oriented banks are opening and using Twitter accounts.  And our objective in our Twitter account is to explain BASF and to tell the story, to tell the same story we are telling during road shows, during one on one’s, it’s a capital market story.  And let’s see and wait what time will bring.

Caroline adds:

We view Twitter as another communication channel and from an IR perspective, we want to make sure that we’re being transparent for all of our investors.  Whether or not they’re using it today, they may be using it tomorrow, and we view it as another way to communicate with this very important audience.

When asked how they got started using Twitter and any advice for IROs contemplating:

Caroline stated that:

When we initially kicked off our social media program, we first started listening for a couple of months to see what was going on.  We did some research on all the different tools, so whether it’s Twitter, Yammer, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, we took an audit of all those different tools to see, really, what the activity level was.  And we found that there were some informal groups and some people that were already representing Polycom yet not from a corporate perspective.  So the first thing that we did was put a plan together with recommendations for all of these different tools, in exactly where we should make the investment.

Andrea goes on to say:

When I started with the Twitter account I knew I would like to Twitter all the press releases and then, yeah, I kept my ears and eyes open and every time I find something interesting, I put it on the Twitter account and it developed.  And so that couldn’t develop if you do not participate.  That’s my advice for everybody who wants to join social media, you have to do it and you have to experience it.

Upcoming Q4 Events

We have some exciting webinars in the coming months including how Facebook, YouTube and blogs are being used by public companies for investor relations.  We hope you can join us!  Stay tuned for more details!

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Each week, we tackle three-four questions that address IR-related issues, trends and to generally exchange ideas. The session has garnered quite the following and has become a popular hashtag on Twitter.

Recently, @IR_practice one of the regulars and a great IR resource in general put out an open call to #irchat asking if anyone could share a link on best practices for organizing an investor day.  With experience as both an in-house IRO and IR consultant, I began to look through my files to see if I had anything to offer.  I also put in a few requests to friends and ex-colleagues in the IR profession and was surprised that no one had anything written down.

So in an effort to generate some concrete best practices, I posed this question on #irchat this week.  The question generated a lot of great ideas so I thought it would be useful to compile the output (all I have to say is thank goodness for whatthehashtag).  If you have something to add, please do – as it’ll help all IROs and IR professionals around the globe.

I have gone through the transcript and have broken the conversation down into key areas:

Making the Decision

There are many reasons to host an investor day.  It can be as simple as providing a general corporate update to providing details around a recent event such as an FDA approval or a merger or acquisition.  To be simplistic they can help get the broader story out.  They can also help investors get familiar with the management team (and help them gain confidence in them). Similarly, they can give the management team the opportunity to gain experience speaking in front of investors.

Sometimes, companies may also combine an investor day in conjunction with an industry meeting which is a good time to do so as some key investors may be in town already.

Time of year, Location and Time of Day

The consensus on the best time to host an investor day was to avoid earnings season.  Investors typically cover more than one company so they will have more than company they are following reporting at the same time and will be busy putting out their reports.  Further, an investor day should be held when you have something new to share and if you just reported earnings, it is likely that you won’t have much more to say to them for the time being.

Once you decide when you are going to have your investor day, careful thought should be put into the location.  You should consider where the majority of your investors reside and have it in a location that is central and easily accessible.

In addition to location, the time is also crucial and it was determined that the best day to have an investor event is a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday in the morning or lunch time, with breakfast or lunch served.  Although an interesting point was made in support of having the event on a Friday: there may be incentive for an investor to go (especially if it is out of town) as they could make a weekend out of the trip.

Company Participants

Hosting an investor day can give a company the opportunity to provide access to other members of the management team. For example, having senior managers talk about their division will help generate a better understanding of the business.  It can also help the managers get first exposure to the capital markets.  In general, think about your sector and who internally could help investors gain a better understanding of your business.

In addition to internal members of the company, consider a presentation by an industry expert such as an analyst or economist who can provide a macro perspective.

Preparation

Adequately preparing the team is essential particularly for those who have never or are not exposed to this audience that often.  So a conversation about Reg FD is critical.  Also doing a dry-run of the presentation and having a mock Q&A will help everyone get comfortable and trained in what can/cannot be said.

At this stage of planning, you should post the information on your website.  A great suggestion was made to have a dedicated landing page that will go live on the day of the event.  You should provide where the event is being held and also provide bios of who will be speaking – especially if you decide to have external guest speakers.

You can also broaden your audience by webcasting and recording the presentation. Applied Materials ($AMAT) was referenced as an example of a good investor day as they did a video webcast from New York.  So you should also let visitors know it will be webcast and that a presentation will be made available after the event is over.

You may also consider an interactive discussion whereby investors can call in and ask live questions.  So you will have to consult a webcast service provider to help with the logistics. Note: video webcasts can be costly, so if it’s not in your budget, bare minimum is to webcast and record.  There is great value in doing this, as you can post the links on your website, embed them on SlideShare, YouTube or Vimeo so they can be easily shared by others.

Once you get the website details set up, you should also determine what materials will be made available to participants.  Someone made the point that attendees are leaving their laptops at home and instead using their smartphones.  So if you are using powerpoint, having a printed color copy with three slides to a page with lines to make notes (handout version) will allow them to jot stuff done if they want.

Also more companies have adopted social media so if you use Twitter you should consider live-tweeting the event.  If you do live-tweet, send out a couple of tweets a few days before the event, announcing the details as well as the hashtag that you’ll be using.  Hashtags enable people to follow a conversation about a certain topic in real-time.  Their increased popularity on Twitter has also led to a number of services (like whatthehashtag) which compiles a particular hashtag feed and archives it, so anyone can read the transcript at a later time.

Showtime

You should arrive early the day of the event – you want to ensure that any equipment such as projectors, screen etc. have been set up.  You may also want to do a quick spin through of the presentation to ensure it loads correctly and test the webcast feed to minimize any potential technical difficulties during the event.

If you are live-tweeting the event, you should remind attendees of the hashtag and of your twitter handle or of the person doing the live-tweets.  You should also encourage questions to come over the channel and reiterate that they must include the designated hashtag to ensure it is seen and can be addressed. Lastly, you may also want to set up a separate screen with a laptop so everyone can see the tweetstreeam.

In order to prepare for follow up, it is a good idea to have a table where attendees can sign in.  Someone should be sitting there to greet the arrivals, direct them to sign in and collect business cards.

The IRO should be the host and do the welcome and introductions of the panel.  This helps the IRO gain some visibility as it is more than likely that they have never met any of these investors in person before.

During the introductions, the IRO should establish whether questions will be taken during or left until the end.  In my experience I have seen it done both ways, but IMO I think it is more effective left until the end especially if there are several speakers.

During the Q&A it is always a good idea to get people to use a microphone and have the panel repeat the questions as you want to ensure it can be heard over the webcast.

After the main Q&A is over, sometimes attendees linger around to ask management questions. This is a good opportunity for the IRO to get introduced and let them know they can be contacted directly for any follow up.  It is also good for the IRO to put their face to their name as it will make it easier to contact the investor in the future.

Also if a tough question is being asked of management, by being there, the IRO can ensure that nothing is being disclosed that shouldn’t be.  They can also make a note of the question as it may reveal an issue that should be addressed in the company’s messaging. It should also be noted if an investor wants a softcopy of the presentation sent to them or want a follow up meeting with management.

A Few Things to Ponder

There are a couple of ideas that were touched on during the discussion that I tried to weave into the categories, but I wanted to highlight them to gauge your feedback:

Giveaways

An example was given of a telephone company who offered participants at their investor day good deals on their products/services.   This could be a good way to enable investors to experience your business first hand. By doing so, they can intelligently provide feedback and ask informed questions.

Of note, this company is located in Europe so this may be an acceptable practice there.  I have been to investor days where companies have provided food samples etc.

What are your thoughts on giveaways? Is giving away a service like the phone company or a product acceptable?

Archive

How long should a company archive an investor day on their website? Three months?  Six months?  A year?  Further, if your company has more than one investor day during the year, should all of the archives be kept or should the first one be replaced with the most recent?

I look forward to your feedback!

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3. IR Website Best Practices Webinar – Register Now! Join us on Thursday, April 30th from 4:00 –...

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