Earlier this month, Dave Hogan, presented his paper “Reaching Shareholders Online: Trends and Best Practices in Online Communications and Social Media in Corporate Investor Relations” at the 2009 Annual Conference of the International Association of Online Communicators in Washington, D.C.
The focus of the paper is how online communication tools, in particular social media, are influencing the communication practices of corporate IR departments at public companies of all sizes. It also examines the question of why corporate IR departments have been slower to adopt social media communications tools than their marketing and corporate communications counterparts.
Dave currently splits his time between teaching public relations in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Abilene Christian University in Texas and works as Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications for First Financial Bankshares, Inc. (Nasdaq:FFIN).
While I highly recommend that you take the time to view the presentation in its entirety (below), I have summarized some of the key findings.
Read more…
Earlier this week, Darrell Heaps, Q4’s Co-Founder and CEO participated in a panel discussion entitled “Best Practices for Using Social Media to Communicate Material Information”. The event was put on by the Twin Cities NIRI Chapter in downtown Minneapolis and was co-sponsored by the Dorsey & Whitney Law Firm. Other panelists included Jonathan B. Abram and Melissa Krasnow both Partners with Dorsey & Whitney LLP and was moderated by Barbara Doyle, Vice President, Investor Relations at Lawson Software, Inc.
We had intended to write a follow up post that summarized the event, but IR Magazine beat us to the punch with “IR in the age of social media” . Rather than duplicate the post we thought we’d just point you to their blog.
Here’s a quick quote by Darrell:
‘The risk posed by social media for your company … exists whether you participate or not,’ observed Darrell Heaps, CEO of Q4 Web Systems, an IR website and communications firm out of Toronto. ‘If you’ve ignored social media and said there are too many risks, we‘re not going to get involved, then you are putting your company at higher risk … than if you know how to use the tools. The market doesn’t care whether or not you’re there. They’re going to use the channels that are most readily available to them to put their message out.’
Read the full post on IR Mag’s blog “IR in the age of social media”. Thanks to Brad Allen for the great write up.
As usual, there were a lot of great sessions to choose from at NIRI’s Annual Conference from June 7-10 in Florida. The Q4 team attended as many as we could which meant we didn’t always have the time to do write a blog post that day. What follows is an overview of a session I attended on Tuesday, June 9th entitled “Understanding IR Strategies Behind XBRL – IROs Evolving Role”.
Moderator/Lead Speaker:
Mike Willis, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Chairman, XBRL International
Panelist(s)/Co-Speaker(s):
Michael Becker, VP, Global Disclosure & Financial Reporting Services
Business Wire
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On June 10 I attended a panel discussion at the NIRI annual conference in Hollywood Florida entitled The Evolution of Financial Communication, which centred on social media. Michael Nowlan, President & CEO of Marketwire, the event sponsor, did an excellent job of moderating the discussion.
Panelists were: Timothy Carey, Managing Director, Digital Media, ICR, Inc; Ruth Cotter, Director, IR and Treasurer, Advanced Micro Devices; Eileen Cassidy Rivera, Vice President, Communications & Investor Relations, Vangent, Inc., and Darrell Heaps, President, CEO & Co-founder, Q4 Web Systems.
Michael opened the session by asking each panelist to introduce themselves and to describe their involvement /perspective on social media.
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We’ll be live blogging from NIRI 2009 this week and you can follow @darrellheaps, @ccrofton, @q4websystems for updates or via our NIRI Mashup feed.