Today I’m happy to announce, Agnico-Eagle Mines (a long-time Q4 client), has been awarded 2nd place for their investor website in CICA’s Corporate Reporting Awards. 1st prize went to Potash Corp, one of the best corporate sites in the world, and a winner in this category multiple times.
The redesign of Agnico’s investor website started late in 2009, when David Smith, VP of IR at Agnico, came to us with the goal of making their website a best practice award winner. Starting with an audit of their corporate website, we …

Today, we’ll reveal some best practice alternatives for presenting key content in different formats to the usual ways (read: pdf or long monotonous scrolls of text) on your IR website.
SNAPSHOT INFO/RELATIONAL LINKS
We are seeing a lot more companies use ‘Fast Facts’ to help provide a quick snapshot of the organization. This is a great feature to use on the Company index page or ‘About Us’ page. It is especially effective when used in conjunction with some relational links.
For example, Danisco uses the centre panel to provide fast facts …

Today, I’ll be sharing some more best practice examples of how companies are presenting their investment proposition including communicating a clear mission, sound strategy and taking the time to tell investors that the company has the right leadership team in place to execute the strategy.
MISSION
A mission statement is a brief written declaration of the purpose of a company or organization. Ideally, a mission statement guides the actions of the organization, spells out its overall goal, provides a sense of direction, and guides decision making at all levels of the organization.
For …

Last week, we began a blog series about IR website best practices. The first instalment shared ways to attract and keep investors engaged on your IR website. Today, we’ll be discussing some best practice examples to help communicate why a person should invest in your company.
WHY INVEST
More companies are incorporating a ‘Why Invest’ section on their IR website.  It is a very important section/page that should tie together key information and connect the dots on the market opportunity and how your company stands out as a good investment in …

The IR website is a dominant channel for investor communications and companies are looking for ways to do things better. We are seeing a lot of innovative things and this blog is the first in a series where we’ll share some Best Practices for your IR Website.
One of the first things companies should consider is how to make accessing site content easy for three investor audiences: potential, new and long-term.  Each audience is at a different point in their relationship with your company and they have different motivations for coming …

Polycom has whole-heartedly jumped into the social media pool.  They incorporate Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs and LinkedIn into their communications strategy and have several accounts for each channel.  The company prominently displays this information on their website via a dedicated “Connect with Polycom using Social Media” in the newsroom section.

A review of how Polycom uses each channel revealed consistent messaging and current and up-to date information.  Some of the senior management team also regularly tweet and are active bloggers providing additional commentary on an industry-related topic or company specific news. …

Whenever my good friend Dan Dykens aka @meetthestreet is unable to host #irchat, I get the pleasure of stepping in for him.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, #irchat is a weekly one-hour event held every Thursday at 11:00 a.m. EST on Twitter for IR professionals.
Each week, we tackle three-four questions that address IR-related issues, trends and to generally exchange ideas. The session has garnered quite the following and has become a popular hashtag on Twitter.
Recently, @IR_practice one of the regulars and a great IR resource …

We’re thrilled to announce our latest report on the use of social media by public companies for investor relations.  If you’d like to get right to the report you can download it here.
Last year we released two research reports on Twitter for investor relations.  At that point, our sample told us that 35% were using Twitter for IR, in the current report you’ll see this number is now 65%.
However, it’s not all about Twitter. So we expanded our research to include Facebook, Linked, Blogs, YouTube and SlideShare.  Their respective adoption …

We are currently working on our next research report on how public companies are using social media. This research is based on our analysis of over 350 companies and their uses of social media from a corporate and investor relations perspective. We have recently completed the primary research and have decided to share our findings as we go, through a series of blog posts that will highlight various aspects of the report.
To kick things off I thought we’d take a quick look at how companies are promoting their social media …

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.
Over the last couple of years we’ve been successful in working with our clients to create a customized approach that drives IR website traffic, expands content distribution and …