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 …

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 …

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” …

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 …

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 …

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 …