In the last part of this series, Heather Hunter, Director, Marketing Communications at Safeguard Scientifics, a small-cap company that provides growth capital and operational support to growth-stage healthcare and technology companies, shares her perspective on the SEC release. Heather executes Safeguard’s social media strategy for all IR and business development initiatives.
1. What was your initial reaction to the SEC’s release?
The SEC ruling is positive. It illustrates that the SEC recognizes that social media is a vital evolution of Reg FD and in turn, an essential channel of communication for public …

In the third part of this series, Sean O’Brien, EVP Strategy & Communications at Premiere Global Services, Inc. (PGi) shares his insights on the SEC release. Of note, during this conversation, we talk a bit in detail of the merits of having a dedicated Twitter account (see question #3). We have previously discussed this topic with WWE in a two-part series on our blog:  Part 1. Part 2.
In the research we are doing at Q4, we are finding that while some early adopters of social IR are continuing to strive …

In part 1, we shared an interview with Robert Williams, Dell’s VP of IR.  In the second part of this series, Laura Graves, VP of IR at Polycom, Inc., shares her thoughts on the SEC’s guidance for using social media for IR.
1. What was your initial reaction to the SEC’s release?
I was quite happy to see the SEC release acknowledging that social media can be an effective method for disseminating news … as long as it is used appropriately and in conjunction with other, standard means of dissemination and not …

The SEC’s guidance on using social media for IR has prompted a lot of commentary in the industry. But we felt there was an important piece of the puzzle missing: input from IROs. In our experience and in conversations with our clients and prospects, IROs like to know what their peers are doing. Based on this fact, we reached out to some contacts at public companies (Dell, Polycom, PGi and Safeguard Scientifics) that were early adopters of social media to find out their thoughts on what the SEC’s release means …

Last week, we released Part 1 in a series about some of the most common practices of companies who are using Facebook for IR. This week, we talk about another common trend:
Pulling in RSS feeds from the IR website or blog to populate Facebook pages
Companies are increasingly configuring an RSS feed to populate their Facebook pages, and there seem to be several ways to tackle this from the company’s perspective. Many companies simply add news items and blog posts to their Facebook wall as they are published, but may also …

Based on our ongoing research of how public companies are using social media for IR, we found that Twitter continues to be the most popular channel used to share IR material.  Last week, we shared a best practice case study of how Acciona uses Twitter to augment their online communications.
After Twitter, we have found that Facebook is the second most used channel by public companies for IR. For each report, we take an in-depth look at some of the most common practices of the companies who use Facebook to effectively …

The SEC release supporting social media has created many opinions from our industry regarding the validity of using social media for disclosure purposes. The overall response being that social media is now one of a number of channels that companies may use to announce material news to the market.
For companies looking to use social media as a channel of disclosure we are happy to announce our new Social Media archiving feature in Q4 Web: 3.8.2. Now, all social media published through Q4 Web will be archived along with our industry …

Since 2009, we have been sharing best practice examples of public companies that have been using social media for IR while staying within the boundaries of Reg FD. Unsurprisingly, like many others in the IR space, we feel that the SEC’s recent guidance regarding social media was a natural evolution of the marketplace. Not too long ago there were similar considerations when the website was becoming an increasingly important medium to communicate with shareholders. At that time, online investor communication was still developing and not every company had an IR …

In our look back at companies that helped paved the way in best practice use of social media for investor relations, we would first like to highlight a company who is an early adopter of using Twitter. Our research has revealed that Twitter is the most widely used social channel for interacting with investors. Considering that now, it seems like a natural space for companies to reach out to investors.
The structure of Twitter allows for users to easily follow a company’s activities in many ways:

Using the custom lists option …

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with a friend who runs a hedge fund and got a hands on look at Twitter inside of Bloomberg. My first impression was that the integration is very straightforward, with Twitter featuring all of the same capabilities as any other news source in Bloomberg. It’s a very slick integration in that it’s exactly what Bloomberg users would expect.
One of the things that caught my eye was Bloomberg’s introduction of the Twitter service. It highlights both the SEC and the growing use of Twitter by …