On Nov 11th, I had the pleasure to speak to the NIRI Tri-State chapter outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. The topic of the discussion was about social media and investor relations. During the Q&A portion of the session we focused on dealing with rumors and misinformation on blog posts and social networks.
The initial reaction by many IROs is to ‘not engage’ with these individuals and to simply ignore these tweets or blog posts. This approach is based on policies forged years ago related to message boards and chat rooms. The challenge …

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 …