Last week, we outlined several observations we have made through our research on how public companies are using social media for investor relations and shared some best practices for live-tweeting investor events such as an earnings call, annual shareholders meeting and analyst/investor day including:

Preparing tweets in advance of the call.
Providing a link to the materials associated with the live event.
Proactively soliciting questions in advance.
Consistent use of #hashtags.
Appending tweets with your ticker symbol.

As I mentioned last week, I thought a separate post on disclaimers was warranted.  So this post is dedicated …

There are some interesting developments in the highly regulated healthcare industry that are taking place – particularly around the sharing of product information on social media by pharmaceutical companies.
In a bid to get a handle on the situation, in late 2009, the FDA issued a Call for Comments on their public notice:  Promotion of Food and Drug Administration-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tool.
In response to the FDA’s call, in March 2010, AstraZeneca responded to the FDA’s notice and asked them ‘to adopt guidance that will enable …

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 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 …

On Friday August 14, 2009 the SEC released Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations regarding Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg.FD). The following post is a direct lift from the SEC website: http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/guidance/regfd-interp.htm
Regulation FD
Last Update: August 14, 2009
These Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations (“C&DIs”) comprise the Division’s interpretations of Regulation FD. Some of these C&DIs were first published in prior Division publications and have been revised in some cases. The bracketed date following each C&DI is the latest date of publication or revision.
Section 101. Rule 100: General Rule Regarding Selective Disclosure
Question 101.01
Question: Can an issuer …

Earlier this week www.uberceo.com released a study on the use of social media by Fortune 100s chief executive officers. The presentation has been included with this article.
Fortune 100 CEOs and Social Media
View more presentations from Sharon Barclay.
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I read an article in today’s ROB entitled ‘Who’s reading insider e-mails? Try the IT guys’ that should send a strong message to issuers regarding their compliance risk management efforts.
Regulators revealed yesterday that an IT analyst with TD Securities Inc. bought shares in Synenco Energy, based on information he obtained while reading the personal emails of investment bankers working on a takeover bid. And of course, the fact that the emails were being monitored was invisible to all participants.
Apparently there have been a string of recent cases in which people …

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 …

As many of you know, over the past several weeks I have been speaking with issuers of all sizes across North America – both U.S. and Canadian inter-listed companies – regarding their transition to a web disclosure model.
Most of the companies I’ve spoken with are intrigued by the potential cost savings of disseminating their disclosure without the expense of newswires. Some of the companies I’ve spoken with are busy putting plans in place to meet the new SEC criteria. Others have been made to fear that adopting this method of …

Darrell and I had an interesting conversation with a securities regulator the other day regarding where legislation is headed as fallout to the financial crisis. (This is a topic of great interest to us and at times I find myself providing armchair observations.) Read a summary of the conversation:
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