Every Thursday @ 1:00 p.m. ET I participate in #irchat on Twitter. It is a weekly event hosted by Dan Dykens, CEO of Meet the Street, an online matching network for non-deal roadshows, which electronically schedules meetings between the buy-side and corporate executives.
The session only runs an hour so Dan asks one question every 15 minutes which gives us time for usually about three to four questions. He does a fantastic job of stimulating the conversation by asking thought provoking questions which creates a lot of debate among the experienced IR professionals who participate each week.
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Over the course of 2009, I have connected with a lot of smart, seasoned IR professionals on Twitter. I have met IROs and IR consultants alike. One great contact I have made is Trevor Heisler, an IR consultant at TMX Equicom (a TMX Group company).
With experience as both an in-house IRO and IR consultant, I know the day-to-day challenges that IR professionals face. One newer challenge has been the question of whether to embrace social media as part of the broader communications strategy. Although I am not a practicing IR professional anymore, I was curious to hear how consultants were dealing with this rapidly emerging topic. With that, I asked Trevor to be interviewed with the goal of compiling tips that would help consultants handle client inquiries about social media.
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In early October, I had the honour of partaking in an IR Think Tank session “Spotlight on Social Media” (put on by IR Magazine) in Toronto. It was at this event that I had the pleasure of meeting Tom Liston an Equity Research Analyst and Director of Research at Versant Partners http://twitter.com/VersantPartners, a boutique investment dealer located in Toronto who was also sitting on the panel with me.
Since the think tank, I have had several conversations with Tom and learned how he leverages social media to gain a “first mover advantage” and how he (and other analysts) use Twitter, blogs, facebook and various other channels to gain a more detailed mosaic of the company. I found it quite interesting to learn that in a number of cases Tom has read information on a blog or social network that caused him to dig in further.
Seemed the best way to share Tom’s views was through an interview. Last week we spent about 25 minutes talking about the capital markets, research, investor relations and social media. I encourage you to listen or download the audio file:
Download MP3 File (11 MB)
During the interview you’ll hear Tom’s thoughts on:
- How his daily research activities have been affected by the social web
- How he manages risk when obtaining information on financial blogs and social networks
- Whether the use of social networks by a company influences his intent to cover them
- What kind of content companies should be sharing
- How financial blogs such as Seeking Alpha have changed the financial landscape
Hope you find it interesting. Please let me know what you think.
Recently, I responded to a discussion on LinkedIN entitled “Required skill sets for IR professionals”. The person who started the discussion was a former portfolio manager and head of research who now has his own consulting business that is putting together a training course for IR professionals. He asked “in addition to how the buy-side analyzes company financial statements and announcements, values a company’s shares and assesses corporate strategy what else would an IR professional need when dealing with the buy-side?”
Dealing with the buy-side has been pushed to the top of the priority list for IROs – especially since there has been a slow decline in the number of sell-side analysts over the past few years. This coupled with the spotlight it has been given at this year’s NIRI conference with a panel discussion entitled “How the Buy and Sell Side Trade your Stocks Today” (and the fact that there was standing room only) along with the discussion I outlined above has prompted me to share some ideas for IROs to consider when dealing with the buy-side.
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In a recent edition of IR Alert, Jeffrey D. Morgan, CAE, President and CEO, National Investor Relations Institute cites “the top challenge facing IR now is regulation including moves to have companies become more transparent, governance changes and generally looking at corporate practices. Regulation is one of the key challenges right now. It’s evolving rapidly and where we’ll end up is not quite known.”
What follows is some of his advice to IR professionals for keeping pace in this rapidly changing regulatory environment. He also discusses current challenges and opportunities and ways to address them.
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January always inspires retrospectives on the good, the bad and the ugly of the previous year could you ever run out of content for 2008?
The 2008 Year in Review � Securities Litigation and Enforcement, is the first of a regular webcast series on related topics from Securities Docket(an online publication that tracks securities litigation and enforcement developments on a global basis).
This one hour presentation touches on all the big stories: the financial crisis; Siemens bribery; Mark Cuban and a host of other litigations (both successful and not); the Madoff scandal (could you have scripted it better – that the pronunciation of his name is: Made-off ?); the liability exposure of the major accounting firms; the culpability of the SEC in some of the year’s financial disasters and its need for a makeover…
Kudos to Securities Docket for assembling such an impressive speaker panel, all of whom have very worthwhile blogs – which inspired me to write this post: Read more…
