On January 14, Catherine Crofton, Q4’s VP Sales & Marketing hosted an IR Website Best Practices webinar. Her presentation focused on how to build investor confidence through effective online communications. The presentation includes a lot of great examples of companies using best practices and how they can be applied to your own IR website.
In particular she outlined some critical improvements to make to the IR website in 2010 including:
Key information to include for potential new investors in this economy.
Using social media effectively to increase your reach (and website traffic) and to protect your share value – with case stories and examples.
New interactive technologies – what kind of technologies increase user engagement and add value.
If we weren’t able to get to your question during the webinar, please feel free to post it in our comment section below or email sherylj@q4websystems.com.
Times have changed but have your web communications kept pace? Today’s more discerning investor is more open to portfolio diversification – which may mean that you need to provide different information than you are offering now.
Join us on Thursday, January 14th at 4:00 p.m. ET as we share top IR Website improvements to meet today’s challenging economic environment. If you’re involved in your company’s IR website, this webinar will show some great examples of best practices from the world’s leading organizations as well as innovative small cap companies and how you can apply them to your own website.
Register now and learn 3 critical improvements to make to your website in 2010:
Key information to include for potential new investors in this economy.
Using social media effectively to increase your reach (and website traffic) and to protect your share value – with case stories and examples.
New interactive technologies – what kind of technologies increase user engagement and add value.
If you have any questions that you’d like us to address please leave a comment below and we’ll be sure to answer during the webinar.
The Q4 team attended the CICA corporate reporting awards (CRA) earlier today at the Carlu in College Park in downtown Toronto. In attendance were myself who has served as a judge for the annual awards in the electronic disclosure category for the past three years, Catherine Crofton our VP Sales & Marketing who has also participated as a judge in the electronic disclosure category for the past seven years and Karen Adams our Client Relations Director.
The CRA is in its 58th year and presents awards for excellence in financial reporting, corporate governance disclosure, electronic disclosure and sustainable development reporting to companies listed on the TSX and to federal Crown corporations. Separate excellence and honourable mention awards are also presented to reports that are judged to be the best, regardless of industry sector, in each of these four judging areas. Lastly, among the industry winners, one company is given the overall award of excellence for corporate reporting.
A lot of the companies were repeat winners from last year and Q4 would like to take this opportunity to extend our congratulations to all of them! Read more…
An article in IR Alert featuring an interview with Q4’s CEO and Co-founder, Darrell Heaps, was issued today. The interview includes Darrell’s commentary on the increased adoption of Twitter by public companies and how they are specifically using it for Investor Relations (IR). He also provides his thoughts on the future of Twitter within IR and other social media developments he foresees on the IR horizon in 2010:
The social nature of the Web will continue. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on will continue to dominate and affect how the Web is used. Looking into 2010 and 2011, we will see more companies and IR departments embrace these tools and drive value from them. Those companies will benefit by taking early steps once the risk side is addressed. We will see a greater adoption rate of these tools, and there will be a lot of companies coming out to provide tools to help companies get the most out of the Web market.
There are a lot of great insights as well as what he deems as the three biggest mistakes a public company can make on Twitter and social media in general. Click here to read the entire article.
On Nov 11th, I had the pleasure to speak to the NIRI Tri-State chapter outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. The topic of the discussion was about social media and investor relations. During the Q&A portion of the session we focused on dealing with rumors and misinformation on blog posts and social networks.
The initial reaction by many IROs is to ‘not engage’ with these individuals and to simply ignore these tweets or blog posts. This approach is based on policies forged years ago related to message boards and chat rooms. The challenge with these boards is selective disclosure. It is difficult to answer one comment and not another because the non-answer may be seen as acceptance. So companies need to either answer all comments, or none. It’s not surprising that companies choose to not respond to any of the messages.
The focus of the paper is how online communication tools, in particular social media, are influencing the communication practices of corporate IR departments at public companies of all sizes. It also examines the question of why corporate IR departments have been slower to adopt social media communications tools than their marketing and corporate communications counterparts.
Dave currently splits his time between teaching public relations in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Abilene Christian University in Texas and works as Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications for First Financial Bankshares, Inc. (Nasdaq:FFIN).
While I highly recommend that you take the time to view the presentation in its entirety (below), I have summarized some of the key findings.
The use of social networks for IR continues to be a contentious issue for public companies. As part of an initiative to provide some light on this subject, we put together and recently issued a report on the use of Twitter for IR.
Social networks are having a dramatic impact in helping marketers and public relations professionals increase brand awareness and build new relationships with consumers. But how have these tools been adopted in the highly regulated world of investor relations?
To answer this question Q4 analyzed 80 public companies and their use of Twitter during the Q2 2009 earnings season. Some of the findings of the report which were issued in a press release today revealed that:
55% are using Twitter for investor relations.
48% are using Twitter to engage with their audience.
34% of the companies were from the technology sector, including Cisco, Dell, Oracle and Sun to name a few.
68% provided a link to their Q2 quarterly earnings release.
Last week, at our second webinar of the year, Darrell Heaps, Co-founder and CEO of Q4 discussed the current trends in social media and investor relations. Social media has been given a lot of attention within the IR arena and Darrell has been an active participant in some of those discussions. For example, he recently sat on two panels on the evolution of financial communication and the evolution of disclosure at the NIRI and CIRI conferences respectively this past June. He also presented to the CICA research group in Toronto on trends in corporate reporting earlier this month.
We had another great turnout and a lot of insightful questions at the end. The team at Q4 did tweet the event, but we thought we would provide an overview of the salient points for those of you who missed it:
Darrell Heaps, Co-founder and CEO of Q4 discusses the current trends in social media and investor relations in the following presentation and video versions of our webinar held on Thursday, July 16, 2009.
Welcome to the company blog of Q4 Web Systems. Here we talk about Q4, Investor Relations websites, web disclosure, IR 2.0, online reporting, xbrl and our products. Subscribe to our RSS feed or email alerts.
On Nov 11th, I had the pleasure to speak to the NIRI Tri-State chapter outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. The topic of the discussion was about social media and investor relations. During the Q&A portion of the session we focused on dealing with rumors and misinformation on blog posts and social networks.
The use of social networks for IR continues to be a contentious issue for public companies. As part of an initiative to provide some light on this subject, we put together and recently issued a 
Last week, at our second webinar of the year, Darrell Heaps, Co-founder and CEO of Q4 discussed the current trends in social media and investor relations. Social media has been given a lot of attention within the IR arena and Darrell has been an active participant in some of those discussions. For example, he recently sat on two panels on