Polycom has whole-heartedly jumped into the social media pool. They incorporate Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs and LinkedIn into their communications strategy and have several accounts for each channel. The company prominently displays this information on their website via a dedicated “Connect with Polycom using Social Media” in the newsroom section.
A review of how Polycom uses each channel revealed consistent messaging and current and up-to date information. Some of the senior management team also regularly tweet and are active bloggers providing additional commentary on an industry-related topic or company specific news. With it increasingly difficult to attract and retain investors in this economy, this sends a very clear message in terms of their transparency and their personal interest in listening to their stakeholders.
We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with Virtua Research to offer analysts and sophisticated investors the Interactive Analyst Center – a new standard of rendering a company’s financial data.
The Interactive Analyst Center was originally designed at the request of Agnico-Eagle Mines Limited with the purpose of providing investors and analysts the most advanced new suite of interactive financials and graphing tools, all embedded in a single, logical location — the investor section of a company’s website.
Some of the KEY FEATURES include:
Excel like Presentation – for ease of use and accessibility
Multiple Annual and Quarterly Data – for simplified, more contextual investor understanding
Export to Excel – statements and data can be exported for simplified model building
Interactive Graphs – build, select and graph interactive operational and financial ratios
Links to Actual Filing Data – right-click any line item to view source documents
Ratio Descriptions – left-click any ratio for more detailed information and formula
There are also many BENEFITS to making this feature available on your company website as it will:
Increase your company valuation with best practices transparent disclosure
Offer the interactivity of exporting to Excel up to 5 years of aggregated financial data
Save time, effort and money educating existing and potential investors
Improve control of your financial message for more consistent investor modeling
Update your quarterly financials in real time for conference call “housekeeping” questions
Provide new methods of visualizing financial relationships with interactive graphing tools
Seamlessly integrates into any corporate or investor website
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post that recounted a discussion that ensued on #irchat regarding one of Rivel’s research findings in late 2009 regarding IR’s role in a company’s valuation.
An interesting discussion developed when Dan Dykens, CEO of Meet the Street and host of #irchat asked “What do you think about Rivel Research’s buy-side survey which suggests that the valuation differential between good and bad IR is 35%?”
This question stirred up quite a debate, especially since no one had access to the methodology or a definition of what constitutes “good” vs “bad” IR. So the responses were based on the information we had.
Shortly thereafter, Brian Rivel, president of Rivel Research Group, the firm specializing in perception research for public companies posted the following comment:
Glad to see that this data sparked such a debate! One of our most popular findings, as you might imagine. Just as an FYI, the study goes on to define what IS superb IR, according to the buy-side. That result can’t be looked at in a vacuum. I would be happy to provide more flavor to anyone who is interested.
With that, I jumped at the chance and contacted him for an interview:
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 with these boards is selective disclosure. It is difficult to answer one comment and not another because the non-answer may be seen as acceptance. So companies need to either answer all comments, or none. It’s not surprising that companies choose to not respond to any of the messages.
Based on the excellent turnout there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that companies are gradually realizing that online conversations are happening whether they are a part of them or not.
Our panelists had a lot of great information to share and as usual the Q4 team tweeted the event, but we wanted to provide a snapshot of the relevant points as it relates to IR professionals (for the most part, the notes that follow will be a combination of all ideas presented in the webinar).
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 ways to address them.
As more companies begin to slowly dip their toe into the social media realm, they are not only trying to figure how it fits into their overall business strategy, but what is the ROI of using it?
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.
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:
Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with John Hughes from Deloitte. John shared some recent findings regarding “Fundamental Investors” that I thought were quite interesting. John said:
All companies make a choice (consciously or unconsciously) in deciding how they will present themselves to the market. The quality of the information provided to the market is a factor that contributes to increasing valuations and lowering cost of capital. This “premium” is not something a company can obtain for itself over night, but even incremental market gains from a long-term investment in building a disclosure “brand” can easily justify the direct cost of that investment.
Recent research by McKinsey, cited in a recent Globe And Mail article, suggests that retail or short-term oriented investors seldom trade enough shares to make a real difference in a company’s long-term share price. The largest shareholders, such as pension funds or mutual funds, also often have little influence over the price of the stocks they hold, because of their emphasis on tracking performance relative to a published index.
McKinsey concludes as follows:
This leaves a group we call “Fundamentals Investors” because they buy or sell stocks based on a long-term perspective of their intrinsic value relative to current market price. They also buy positions large enough to exert influence, as activist investors, on the board and management. These firms typically hold a small number of companies’ stock, and they trade less frequently – but, when they do they trade large enough blocks to affect the stock price.
Fundamentals Investors should be the target audience of a company’s investor relations strategy. Because these investors are more interested in company and industry fundamentals than in short-term performance, communications strategies should focus on the company’s long-range strategy and the industry’s prospects. Investments in growth projects, the pipeline of new products, fundamental profit metrics such as customer profitability, attrition or churn rates, and major market trends are all critical for these investors.
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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.
Last week, I moderated a webinar on 
In a recent edition of 
As more companies begin to slowly dip their toe into the social media realm, they are not only trying to figure how it fits into their overall business strategy, but what is the ROI of using it?
As usual, there were a lot of great sessions to choose from at