Q4 Blog

On April 8th, 2010 I presented to a group of investor relations professional in Montreal, Quebec. I was fortunate to present alongside Lorne Gorber, VP, Global Comm. & IR at CGI Group Inc. The following is the deck that I used during the session. It contains updated trends and statistics on the use of social media in the capital markets. I also included a handful of examples of companies that I think are doing a good job at using these new channels. Hope you enjoy the new deck!

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.

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.

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StockTwits is an open, community-powered investment idea and information service built on the Twitter platform. On November 5, 2009 Phil Pearlman posted an invitation to IROs to join the community.  We thought it’d be interesting to dig a little deeper to learn about StockTwits, where it’s headed and how companies can benefit in being a part of it.

Phil Pearlman is an investor in and the Director of Community at StockTwits.  Prior to this, he was a co-founder of Lumina Fund Management, a long/short equity hedge fund which focuses on behavioral and sentiment analysis to exploit under and overreactions in options markets. He is a contributor to Real Money, a paid service owned by TheStreet.com. He currently trades a private account in New York.

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