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Business Wire and Edelman Financial Communications & Capital Markets today announce the results of a new study supporting the use of visual storytelling in earnings reporting.
In total, 300 retail investors, more than 20 Wall Street professionals and select financial media professionals were surveyed about how earnings data is consumed, comparing traditional quantitative earnings releases with releases featuring visual, creative assets.
The conclusion was a clear consensus that using visual storytelling as a supplementary tool aids in the ultimate goals of investor relations professionals....
The transition a company makes from a privately held entity to a publicly traded one can be a shock. Strong coordination of the company's image can assist in making a seamless transition from the private to public sector by capturing the interest of investors and industry experts. To do that an entrepreneur needs to work with theinvestor relations and public relations teams. But will they work with each other?
In an ideal world, the two teams would work in harmony, bringing together the perfect blend of brand awareness, product value and differentiation for customers and investors. Yet in today’s quarterly driven economy, the investor relations and public relations teams seldom communicate. This is especially true for small-cap companies. Here are ways to forge closer lines of communication...
Younger investment professionals are more likely to use social media as a source of information for investment decisions, according to a survey of 120 stockbrokers, financial and market analysts, financial advisors, individual traders and fund managers conducted by Marketwired. Overall 40% of the financial professionals surveyed by Marketwired said they are using social media as a source of information, but that number increases to 60% among financial pros under the age of 40. The younger financial pros are also three times as likely as the older cohorts to say that the information they get from social media is generally credible. This generational shift may force firms to change their policies about social media, as 49% of respondents say their companies currently block access to social media sites (forcing 39% to consult them on personal electronic devices during the workday)....
Investor relations doesn’t get quite as much media attention as some of the more colorful aspects of the PR industry, but IROs (investor relations officers) are extremely important to most firms. In many places, IR still runs on traditional paper documents–but quite a few organizations have begun using mobile technology to further empower both IROs and invest0rs. We recently had a chance to speak to Jeff Corbin–an author and PR veteran with 15 years of IR experience whose team created theIRapp to help facilitate IR’s move into the 21st century–about what this development means for the future of the practice....
Some chief executives are getting themselves into trouble over social media messages, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Securities and Exchange Commission may bring suit and a cease-and-desist proceeding against Netflix and its CEO Reed Hastings, because of a Facebook post he wrote in July that said Netflix had exceeded 1 billion hours of video streaming in a month for the first time. The post may have violated rules of fair disclosure for investors, the Journal reports.
In a Facebook post on Thursday, Hastings said that further disclosure wasn’t necessary at the time because he had more than 200,000 subscribers to his Facebook page, making it a “very public” forum. Netflix shares jumped 6.2 percent the day he made the disclosure....
Applying the product lifecycle curve to investor relations to understand how The Street views your company... ...The interesting thing about the product lifecycle is that it has applicability to a number of other things, corporate lifecycles included. Stop thinking about products and substitute corporate development and the graph doesn’t change. Where this is of interest to investor relations professionals is in the type of investors each phase of the cycle attracts. Set out below is the same graph with investor segments sketched in.... [Interesting POV on investor relations ~ Jeff]
Another PR gaffe from a Fortune 500 company, although this one was handled well by the people involved. A PR error this week forced Dow Chemical to release its third-quarter earnings early. According to Reuters, Dow had planned to announce layoffs today, along with its third-quarter earnings, but it scuttled that plan after a draft copy of the press release about the restructuring was accidentally sent to Bloomberg News on Tuesday night. Instead of a Thursday release, the official layoff announcement and earnings report came late Tuesday evening. Dow did not respond to PR Daily's email, so it’s unclear exactly what took place in the company’s public relations or investor relations departments on Tuesday leading to the errant draft press release. A spokesman for Dow told The New York Times, “We had an inadvertent premature release, and we moved quickly to take care of it.” [Bad PR lesson: sometimes a quick response can turn a scrambled egg into an omelette ~ Jeff]
Today, we feature a discussion on activist investors with Marc Weingarten, a Partner in the New York office of Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP. Mr. Weingarten is chair of the Business Transactions Group and a member of the Investment Management Group. His practice focuses on mergers & acquisitions, leveraged buyouts, corporate governance, securities law, and investment partnerships. At the conclusion of the interview, you can find LEVICK’s own communications best practices appended... [The challenges of activist investors ~ Jeff]
SlideShare is fast becoming an important method of communication for public companies reaching out to current and potential investors. While not as widely used as other social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, SlideShare offers a unique opportunity for companies to provide an easy to use and interactive experience with corporate presentations and reports to investors. SlideShare is now an emerging best practice as it offers a more engaging experience for investors rather than just posting a downloadable PDF version of a presentation on the website. Investors are now able to view Presentations and reports as they were intended and are able to easily share the content with their own contacts....
I was asked to mention common pitfalls in IPO presentations the other day. Here are some of my thoughts in random order... [Ten IR and speaking tips worth notingn - JD]
As the story format becomes a popular digital marketing technique, one tool to complement it will be data visualization–as can be seen by General Electric and Visualizing.org's recent project in which they scanned in 6,000 pages of GE’s annual reports to build an interactive visualization of the company’s history. The end result is a history of GE from 1892 until 2011. The image also lets users search via key terms to uncover stories about innovation over the last century. The keywords are listed under 5 categories: "GE", "Moving", "Powering", "Curing" and "Building"....
Private equity has an image problem. What began a few months ago with questions about Mitt Romney's background as chief of Bain Capital has ballooned into a tidal wave of legislative, regulatory and media attention -- and much of it unflattering. Now the industry is working to fight back, as some fear that the bad press could lead to greater regulation....
We have many conversations with IROs and often get asked: how do I get started with social media? What’s the ROI? How much time is needed to keep the channels populated with content? What are the risks? All of the aforementioned are important considerations. A recent article I read posed 6 questions for companies to think about before getting into social media....
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Just last month, Twitter raised 1.8 billion on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to become the second largest Internet IPO of all time after Facebook, overtaking global giants like Google, Yandex and Zynga.
The online social networking service now trades $41 a share, a huge improvement from its $26 initial price issued by lead underwriter Goldman Sachs. LinkedIn shares are reaching record highs, with share prices now at $224.54, from initial price of $45 a share in 2011. For more updates on the share prices of some famous Internet IPOs, check out the infographic below....
IR Smartt examines: How should you incorporate Google Tools in your Investor Relations strategy? Google has some wonderful Social Media tools for IR, including Google+ and YouTube. But today, we’re going to take a look at a few of Google’s other awesome web apps and how exactly they can assist in marketing your public company. Read on for a look at Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Reader, Google Finance and Blog Search....
Trading at the speed of tweets.... Wall Street operates at twitch-level speed, trading stocks on information the moment it comes in over the wire. So it sorta makes sense that Bloomberg, one of the world’s largest providers of financial information, will soon incorporate Twitter, the real-time information service used by 200 million people around the world, into Bloomberg’s international information platform....
As the old adage goes, the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. And with tax season looming near, there is no better time to get your finances in tow. To assist with this task, we’ve ranked the top 50 independent finance blogs in North America. The bloggers range in age, experience and ideology, rendering a well-rounded snapshot of the financial blogosphere. The list was created using Cision’s media database and blogs are ranked based on our Cision Influence Rating. Whether you’re after general market news or personal finance tips, these blogs have you covered with a wealth of information.
The shady individual who put up a faux press release on PRWeb about Google acquiring ICOA, the “neutral host” broadband wi-fi provider, for $400 million, got away with it long enough for several news organizations, now red-faced, to have picked up... ... the fake news release and distributed it. Also, long enough for a short-lived, but significant bump (a fivefold increase), in ICOA stock and for someone to pocket the profits before the stock plummeted again very quickly upon discovery.
In the wake of it all, ICOA said the story was a hoax, Google declined to comment, several high profile news publishers got egg on their faces, among them Associated Press, TechCrunch and The Washington Post — publications that ran the story and later had to issue retractions and PRWeb was forced to issue a mea culpa of sorts, an embarrassing apology after posting false news....
[The challenge of fact checking in a 24 x 7 news cycle ~ Jeff]
It’s time to transform corporate governance. Innovation and technology can simplify and improve board development and management. Virtually every aspect of corporate America has been affected by the adoption of new technology. Social networks and collaboration technologies are revolutionizing and changing the way companies are run, products are made, information is shared and the way employees are recruited.
There is one aspect of nonprofit, private and public companies, however, that has made little or no progress when it comes to innovation — the way corporate boards are recruited and managed.
Corporate America is fully aware that this process is flawed. Most recently, headlines from scandals that have occurred at Best Buy, Chesapeake Energy, Groupon, Wal-Mart and Yahoo have put the spotlight on corporate governance. Besides a general disdain for illegal and deplorable actions, corporate boards have suddenly felt the pressure to fortify their teams with the same virtues they always strived for, with an increased emphasis on personal and professional integrity....
[Maybe a helpful tool, but let's not overstate things ~ Jeff]
I recently participated as the designated “social media expert” as part of a crisis communications case study session at the 2012 NIRI Southwest regional conference. This year’s conference was held in New Orleans and the session centered on a fictitious publicly held bead manufacturing company (apropos for the conference host city) that found itself suddenly facing a major environmental crisis. During the true-to-life exercise, attendees took on the roles of the company’s corporate communications officers and were tasked with implementing all aspects of the crisis response plan. In their new roles, the attendees had to make a number of decisions relating to the immediate actions of the fictitious company, “Beignet Beads & Baubles.” For example, should the company proceed with a press conference with the governor announcing a state grant that afternoon? Should management go forward with a scheduled presentation at a major investor conference in New York the next day? Should a planned announcement of a major plant expansion be delayed? As typically happens with a real crisis, the Beignet Beads & Baubles “crisis team-for-a-day” was given an increasing amount of information to complicate their decision-making process.... [An excellent tabletop crisis PR exercise worth reading ~ Jeff]
The man lives for speed.... Consumers of news demand three things:
- Speed
- Accuracy
- Cheapness.
Suppliers of news, however, face a trilemma, as they usually have to sacrifice one in order to produce the other two.... That last category is occupied most prominently by the Bloomberg Speed Desk, a mindblowing operation that spits out real-time news headlines from all over the world, 24/7 to customers who rent their fabled terminals.
For those unfamiliar with operation, imagine looking at a scroll up-to-the-millisecond headlines covering everything from earnings releases to central bank interventions to Supreme Court decisions and political developments.
Here are some recent examples of its success...
[PR and investor relations people will enjoy this profile and look inside Bloomberg - JD]
In the first part of this IR blog series, we provided some suggestions for incorporating an IR blog into your communications mix. In this post (based on our research), we will discuss what sectors and size of companies (based on their market cap) are the most prevalent users of IR blogs, and what country has the highest adoption rates. We will also include what we consider some best practice examples of companies who use IR blogs to help tell their investment story....
The National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) has just released its third volume of Standards of Practices for Investor Relations. This volume focuses on outlining current best practices in corporate disclosure and is an update from a 2004 version. The updated guideline takes into account the innovations in disclosure practices in regards to the SEC’s guidance on web disclosure, social media compliance concepts and recent case law. While many companies have been quick to hop on board the latest digital and social channels, many have struggled with disclosure; unsure of how to properly control and filter the information they are sharing with investors. Thankfully, NIRI has consistently released insightful and industry-leading papers such as this latest piece, that have become for many companies, the go to reference for best practices in all things investor relations....
Some funds are using social media to find investment ideas. Does it work? Some investors think they have found a way to profit from the most ephemeral of data sources: the Twitterverse. More than a dozen hedge funds and high-frequency traders now make trades guided, in part, by data from social-media sources, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, according to Gnip, a Boulder, Colo.-based company that provides social-media data to the funds. Topsy Labs, a social-media analytics firm in San Francisco, released a white paper in January that claimed to show how its analysis of tweets would have predicted moves in the price of Netflix stock last fall....
Recent coups at Yahoo! and RIM represent the dawn of a new age of investor activism. ...On sites such as proxyexchange.org, proxydemocracy.org, and MoxyVote, small shareholders are pooling their sentiments and their shares to drive reforms at the companies they own -- and their focus extends far beyond financial performance. On MoxyVote, shareholders can foment support for "good cause" proposals on issues ranging from environmental sustainability to fair labor practices. MoxyVote even provides portals by which investors can vote on activist agendas....
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You'd think this would be obvious, but investor relations has rarely innovated nor been effectively creative in its presentations in the past.