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 …

Last week, I moderated a webinar on monitoring social media for IR.  Our panelists included Richard Brewer-Hay from eBay and Serena Ehrlich from Startup Army – both well versed in the social media space.
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 …

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 …

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?
Mike McDonald of WebProNews cites an interview with Tarla Cummings, Social Media Manager from Location3 Media from the SMX Advanced Conference recently held in Seattle, WA.
When looking at your social media campaigns, Tarla discusses the acronym M.O.M. which stands for Monitor, Outreach, Measure.
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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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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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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 …

Article from Don Tappscot from the first day of the World World Economic Forum in Davos showed up yesterday. It has an interesting note about transparency that I wanted to share:
One of most insightful for me was with Samuel DiPiazza, the CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers. PWC has been a leader in the next generation of reporting – they call it value reporting – where the financial report is about al lot more than earnings and financial information. XBRL and the Web 2.0 are poised to transform reporting, where the focus will …