Q4 Blog

According to a survey by Socialware, over 60% of financial advisors in North America are using social networks to drive new business and build better relationships with customers. The survey consisted of over 30 questions and was completed by a total of 196 financial advisors; 44% of the respondents have an average account size of $300K and more than 53% of them have over 100 clients.

KEY FINDINGS:

Usage:

• In addition to the 60% who are already using social networks for business, 11% more plan on using them in the future.
• Of the 29% with no plans to use social media in the future, 85% of them are prohibited by their firms.
• The average number of social networks employed is 1.8.
• Linkedin is the most popular social network used.

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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.

Q4 Web Systems and MUNCmedia have formed a strategic alliance that gives issuers the ability to deliver their investor relations message directly to over 90 million active investors.

The video below provides an overview of MUNC’s Retail investor communications network:

Engage Investors WHILE they are online looking at your peers from MUNCmedia on Vimeo.

To formally introduce this alliance, Q4 invites you to join us on Wednesday, May 5th from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. EST to hear MUNCmedia’s Frank Lane, VP Client Services as he discusses the important role of a focused – targeted – news distribution campaign to an engaged buying retail investor audience.

MUNCmedia helps hundreds of companies find liquidity by targeting their messages directly to an active and interested financial audience at the exact moment they are online researching current investments and looking for new opportunities to expand their portfolio.

Please register here if you would like to learn how direct outreach to active retail investors has helped companies:

• Improve liquidity to ensure proper cash flow levels for continued operations and company growth
• Increase brand loyalty by increasing the probability of reaching potential new customers
• Stabilize volatile trading in their stock
• Reach an attentive audience of new active investors outside of the “institutional” channel
• Capture interested investor information in real-time

Register today for this free webinar and learn how pushing your news directly in front of engaged individual investors – consistently and frequently will increase investor awareness of your company and bring maximum impact to your company’s messaging.

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.

On April 15th, Google issued an advisory release that instructed people to visit their IR website for their earnings and also included the following statement:

Google intends to make future announcements regarding its financial performance exclusively through its investor relations website.

Google is able to do this based on the SEC guidance from Aug 2008 regarding the use of websites for disclosure. This guidance states that under certain circumstances, companies can rely on their websites and blogs to meet public disclosure requirements under Reg FD.

As we all remember all too well, shortly after this regulatory change the market collapsed and this new channel quickly faded into the background, while most companies fought to survive the worst recession many of us have ever seen.

However, with 2009 behind us and the recovery underway, the first quarter of 2010 has seen the most activity on the web disclosure front yet, with a number of companies testing out new tactics. Let’s take a look at some examples.

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On April 8th, 2010 I presented to a group of investor relations professional in Montreal, Quebec. I was fortunate to present alongside Lorne Gorber, VP, Global Comm. & IR at CGI Group Inc. The following is the deck that I used during the session. It contains updated trends and statistics on the use of social media in the capital markets. I also included a handful of examples of companies that I think are doing a good job at using these new channels. Hope you enjoy the new deck!

On Thursday April 1st, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) – the Canadian equivalent to the SEC, put forth allegations against Agoracom.com an online investor relations forum for seeding fake conversations throughout their investor message board community. The allegations describe a scenario of more than 24,000 fraudulent posts made by 670 different accounts. The papers filed by the OSC go into detail on how employees at Agoracom were required to posts under several different aliases and on occasion, conversed with themselves on the forums using different aliases. Agoracom has denied the charges and says they are without merit.

The founders of Agoracom are set to appear in front of the OSC at the end of April, where we assume we will all hear more details of the allegations and the defense of Agoracom. I, like many others, await more details before passing judgment on what really happened and to what degree fraud was committed (if at all).

In light of this recent situation, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the problems with message boards and the importance of transparency and trust and being successful online.

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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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