Last Friday I returned from NIRI’s ‘Fundamentals of Investor Relations’ Seminar at the swank Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in sunny Santa Monica, CA. (My apologies to all my colleagues who toughed it out in -17 degree snow storms )
The program served as a boot camp for new IROs to familiarize them with all things IR: corporate disclosure issues and best practices; corporate governance; investor targeting & IR marketing; media & communications; understanding equity markets; planning and executing analyst days and non-deal road shows; understanding sell-side and buy-side …

I missed this week’s #irchat.  As I was reading through the transcript (which can be accessed here), I thought I would transcribe the discussion for the benefit of everyone.
Typically, three or four questions are asked.  But this week, the first question dominated the hour-long session. @meetthestreet asked:
Q1: Institutional Investor recently wrote about social media’s role in equity research: http://bit.ly/94w06K. Do you think this has legs?
Here is a snippet from the article:
Bolstered by the low cost of online publishing and the rising popularity of blogs, discussion forums and commenting, a growing …

On September 14, Darrell Heaps our CEO here at Q4, moderated an informative discussion with Andrea Wentscher, Investor Relations Manager at BASF SE and Caroline Japic, VP, Corporate Communications & Customer Marketing at Polycom including:

Their views on sharing analyst estimates and other IR-related content;
How they synergize the content shared on Twitter with other social networks and their IR website;
Setting realistic objectives for using the channel as part of their communications strategy;
Ways they listen to online conversations and how they use the information to refine messaging;
Whether they are interacting with investors; …

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% …

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 …

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 – …

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 …

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 …

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 …