The following post was written by Darrell Heaps and recently featured on SlideShare’s blog.
Last year Slideshare launched a new category called ‘Investor Relations’. Since the launch, public companies began posting a wide range of investor focused presentations, including quarterly reports, analyst presentations and operational updates.
Many of our clients publish their investor slides on SlideShare and embed them on their websites. The benefit for these companies has been two fold, the first being roughly a 10X increase in the amount of views on these presentations vs. simply posting a PDF to their website. Secondly, bloggers embed these presentations into their posts, which has helped our clients influence the downstream publishing of their news.
A very interesting trend has emerged with companies using Slideshare to announce acquisitions. Most recently, HP’s acquisition of Palm and Symantec’s PGP and GuardianEdge. In each of these examples the slides have been shared many times from the Slideshare site and embedded on numerous blogs. Symantic tweeted about their acquisition slides on April 29th and currently has over 1200 views and has been embedded on three sites. Similarly, HP tweeted about their slides on April 28th and the presentation now has over 9000 views and has been embedded on 28 sites.
When a public company announces an acquisition it’s critical to provide context as to why the deal is a positive one. In both the HP and Symantec examples they have done a very good job at using Slideshare to support their other efforts.
In each case, they include a disclaimer slide at the beginning (compliance requirement) and then go into detail explaining the virtues of the deal using a combination of text slides and visual explanations of the benefits of the acquisition.
As we can see by the views and the number of embeds, HP and Symantec have provided a useful asset to journalists and bloggers to include the presentation in their posts, which in turn is read by investors. A couple examples:
http://mashable.com/2010/04/28/hp-palm-analysis-webos/
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/10037/hp-a-transformational-deal-for-the-mobile-market/
http://www.securityweek.com/content/symantec-acquire-pgp-corporation-and-guardianedge
HP and Symantec are just two of the most recent companies that understand that packaging their announcements in a visual and sharable format (like Slideshare) is an important method in helping shape market and investor perceptions.
I’m sure we’re going to see more of this in the near future.
Communicating directly with shareholders is a vital role that the IRO fulfills within a company; however, shareholders are increasingly bypassing the IRO and going straight to the directors for answers. There are many reasons for this such as the rise of shareholder proposals, “say on pay” initiatives and a push for proxy access.
The Q4 team is back from the 
iPad
We’re excited to announce the release of a number of feature upgrades now available on Q4. We’ve been listening to our clients and are happy to provide this set of improved features focused on the real-time integration of social media both in terms of publishing updates to Twitter and Facebook and integrating content into the site from social media content sites like YouTube.
On April 15th, 
