Q4 Blog

Best wishes from everyone on the Q4 team for a wonderful holiday season!  We will be taking a short hiatus from our blog and Twitter to spend some time with loved ones.

We look forward to connecting with you in early 2010!

We’re thrilled to release our latest quarterly report on the use of Twitter in investor relations.

In August 2009 we issued a report which analyzed 80 public companies and their use of Twitter during the Q2 2009 earnings season. Today we’re happy to announce some of the key findings from our Q3 2009 report.

Since issuing our Q2 report in August, the growth in the number of public companies who have a Twitter account has grown by 270 or 338%. Of the 270 public companies the number who are using Twitter for IR increased by 77 or 175%. Although still small in terms of the potential universe, this report indicates a clear trend in that IROs are realizing that social networks are an effective medium to reach out and interact with stakeholders.

Here are some other key stats from the report:

• 35% of our sample is using Twitter for investor relations.
• 68% of the companies who use Twitter for IR are located in the U.S.
• 53% provided a link to their earnings release only.
• 48% actively engage with their followers through @replies and Retweets.

Get the FREE report today and you’ll learn:

• Innovative ways public companies are sharing content.
• How companies are engaging with their followers.
• What sector the majority of early adopters are from.
• What country has the most public companies using Twitter for IR.

Fill out the form below and we’ll email you the full PDF report. We will never share your information with anyone.

We’ll be live blogging from NIRI 2009 this week and you can follow @darrellheaps, @ccrofton, @q4websystems for updates or via our NIRI Mashup feed.

I read an article in today’s ROB entitled ‘Who’s reading insider e-mails? Try the IT guys’ that should send a strong message to issuers regarding their compliance risk management efforts.

Regulators revealed yesterday that an IT analyst with TD Securities Inc. bought shares in Synenco Energy, based on information he obtained while reading the personal emails of investment bankers working on a takeover bid. And of course, the fact that the emails were being monitored was invisible to all participants.

Apparently there have been a string of recent cases in which people outside the corporate inner circle have been accused of trading on information that was illegally obtained by reading confidential emails.

Although none of the top dogs knew this was going on, regulators say that firms are responsible for ensuring that critical email is not intercepted.

Had any of the companies mentioned in the article been using Q4 PRESS, nobody could have intercepted their emails for privileged information, because no confidential content is ever included within an email or its subject line.

Q4 PRESS allows internal and external teams to collaborate securely on confidential information – even on a BlackBerry . The Author or point person on the document controls who can be invited to participate  and even controls who can be involved in specific segments of the document. Within each version, the entire process is completely transparent  allowing all participants to view the comments and edits of one another.

No confidential information is ever transmitted via email. Subject lines are generic and even the message related to the document can be made secure.

With Q4 PRESS, everything is tracked in real time and is visible to all participants. The entire process can be overseen by a designated auditor/supervisor. A complete report of the entire collaborative process can instantly be generated viewed in a number of useful ways.

Compliance risk management officers take note – unlike the invisible IT administrator in the Synenco story, with Q4 PRESS there’s nowhere to hide!

I read an interesting perspective on how much executive time can be drained through the avid use of Twitter – ‘ What is the Value of Twitter?’ In this article there was no mention of the benefits the company in question derived and so it’s difficult to determine the ROI of the estimated $72,000 in executive time. I do agree that ‘Free’ is a misnomer when it comes to social media and companies should look at the soft costs associated to their involvement, as with any other communications initiative.

Corporations need a purposeful approach to social media to govern what their people are doing on company time. This begins with understanding how social media intersects with corporate objectives. Having policies in place on the types of conversations most in-line with company objectives as well as who should and shouldn’t be blogging on company time is a good starting point. (The intent here is not to muzzle employees as much as it is to provide focus. One of the key benefits of social media is to bring together like-minded individuals/those with common interests. So if I’m seeking others who have perspectives on issues of interest to me, I can substantially increase relevancy by contributing content on these same topics.)

That said, as in life personality goes a long way and so the more I get a sense of a person – the more engaged I am. 

Social media has been around for a number of years but to most it’s still very new. Before diving in, why not determine why you’re swimming in the first place? Read more…

During the SEC’s meeting today the panel voted 4 to 1 in favor for mandating XBRL for the 500 largest US issuers. Other companies will have until 2010 (likely) to begin filing using XBRL. This article from Dow Jones provides some additional details. 

Chairman Cox Video: The SEC has approved interactive data financial reporting to give investors faster, better, and less expensive information disclosure.

General Electric, parent of NBC Universal, has gained attention in the blogosphere over the last few weeks since the October 22 launch of its corporate blog, ‘GE reports – Your source for what’s happening at GE.’

The response has been both positive and negative. Criticism has primarily focused on the accessibility of information disclosed in this way – although anyone can receive automatic updates through RSS feeds, which take all of 2 minutes to set up. And North America enjoys the highest penetration of internet usage in the world.

What’s important to note is that GE executives say the blog permits them to disclose more information and on a more frequent basis, which translates into greater transparency regarding issues that would otherwise remain internal. “This is a tough environment, a lot of misinformation in the marketplace,” GE spokesman Gary Sheffer said. “This is just a fast and simple way to punch through it and to make sure that you tell your story in a simple and engaging way.”

This immediacy is one of the many positive outcomes of the new Reg. FD governing corporate web sites and blogs. In terms of engagement, I love the fact that GE incorporates video to support many of their blog stories. (Jason’s post on the Q4 blog yesterday sited another great example of this tactic, as employed by Overstock.com.)

Read more…

Darrell and I had an interesting conversation with a securities regulator the other day regarding where legislation is headed as fallout to the financial crisis. (This is a topic of great interest to us and at times I find myself providing armchair observations.) Read a summary of the conversation: Read more…

Yesterday I posted about the importance of the controls over the vehicle in which corporate disclosure is distributed.As I mentioned, it wasn’t supposed to be about plugging our products, but as I was creating the post using Q4 PRESS I took a few screen shots throughout to be able to demonstrate how simple it was.  Read more to see how simple it is to satisfy Reg FD for blog content with Q4 PRESS.

Read more…

I’ve been reading quite a few great and not-so-great posts over the last few weeks about the hub-bub with the new SEC guidelines surrounding Reg FD.  These discussions have ranged from the ‘death of the press release’ (a topic for another day) to investors thinking this means they will have to visit several company websites to get investor information.  Most folks seem to be focusing on the vehicle and not the controls, the way information is distributed on the internet has changed drastically over the last several years so the vehicle is the easy part, the controls behind how content is created is what matters.   Read more after the break. Read more…