Investor Relations and Social Media Study - University of Leipzig

Here is an interesting study "Investor relations 2.0 – An international benchmark study" by Kristin Koehler, M.A. of the University of Leipzig. It includes content analysis of 30 listed companies in the United States (Dow Jones Industrial Average), Germany (DAX), UK (FTSE), France (CAC) and Japan (Nikkei).

IR 2.0 International Benchmark Study / University of Leipzig

View more presentations from Kristin Koehler

Is Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix ($NFLX) using PRISM?

Back in December 2010, Alon Kutai penned a very interesting article on Reed Hastings of Netflix ($NFLX) on the ProActive Newsroom in reference to a short position on NFLX by Whitney Tilson, who is a very well-known and highly regarded professional value investor. "Stop the Presses - Netflix CEO Reed Hastings post on Seeking Alpha" was about Whitney, the Founder and Managing Partner of T2 Partners LLC and his well-articulated and cogent bearish thesis in his article, entitled, “Why We’re Short Netflix.” Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, responded to Tilson’s December 16^th article on Seeking Alpha. As one would expect, each side of “point/counter-point” exchange drew its share of supporters.

Now Ezra Marbach is singing the praises of Hastings on his Blog in an article titled, "Will Netflix CEO Hastings usher in a new era for online finance, investor relations & social media?":

Over the years, Netflix has experienced intense scrutiny especially as its stock price has appreciated. In response, CEO Hastings has been the model of transparency and accessibility. He regularly updates a PowerPoint presentation detailing Netflix’s strategy and future challenges and pens a lengthy shareholder letter after each and every earnings announcement. Hastings also broke with tradition and opened his quarterly earnings calls to all investor questions regardless of their source. Questions are submitted via email and earnings calls are Q&A-only in order to provide for more interaction with the sell-side, buy-side and retail investor communities.

In an even more dramatic move, Hastings went on the offensive recently in response to a critical presentation by a prominent value investor short Netflix. Instead of following the Patrick Byrne playbook of disparaging short sellers, Hastings responded respectfully and diplomatically by submitting a persuasive blog post to an investor site. He also conducted a lengthy and incredibly informative interview with former Merrill analyst Henry Blodget at Business Insider. Hastings was rewarded for his efforts as reflected in his stock’s subsequent move higher.
Like any CEO, Hastings values his time. He chose to target large online networks of engaged investors to deliver his message. And it worked. So why aren’t other CEOs following a similar playbook, especially small-cap CEOs who are typically starved for attention? Clearly Hastings’ methods aren’t rocket science.

The simple answer? Except for StockTwits and Motley Fool, the current group of financial content websites (i.e. TheStreet, SeekingAlpha, Minyanville, Benzinga, etc.) has done little to pursue public companies and their pent-up desire for a social media presence to complement their IR websites. Instead, massive amounts of valuable investor content sits largely undisturbed on predominantly little trafficked IR websites. Furthermore, CEOs like Netflix’s Hastings who have loads of strategic and actionable investor information to communicate (within the parameters of RegFD) have yet to be unleashed online.

Netflix Business Opportunity

View more presentations from Reed Hastings

I try not to plug ProActive here on this blog, but our PRISM product is doing exactly what Reed Hastings of Netflix is doing.

What does the UBS lawsuit mean for Advisors?

Interesting article in light of last week's turbulent market:

UBS Financial Services Inc. is being sued for two patent infringements in a case some experts say could affect the entire financial planning industry.

Wealthcare Capital Management, which serves individual investors, financial advisors and institutions, filed suit against UBS in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York for using what it contends are its own  proprietary processes for financial planning.

The two patented processes involved in the suit assess a client’s long-term financial goals and then use a capital-market modeling technique to determine how these goals can be achieved.

Wealthcare has offered in the past to license the company’s advisory system to UBS, but the Switzerland-based UBS has declined, says David B. Loeper, founder and chief investment officer of Wealthcare Capital Management. Loeper is chairman of Financeware Inc., the parent company for Wealthcare and its intellectual property rights arm, Wealthcare Capital Management LP LLC.

The suit seeks monetary damages and an injunction banning UBS from using the financial advising systems that are part of programs, including MoneyGuidePro.

See the full article @ www.FA-Mag.com

LinkedIn on LinkedIn - The First Earnings Call - $LNKD

Mario Sundar is LinkedIn's "Social Media Guy", and he blogs about social media's how to's for the LinkedIn Marketing and PR teams. Late last week, he put out a blog about the steps of preparation surrounding LinkedIn's call. Please note his focus on StickTwits and Slideshare.

____________________________________________________

Step 1: Start with the Basics / 3 key social media channels

First off, figure out the key social media channels that’ll work best at disseminating information around the earnings to the right audiences (investors, customers, members of your service, etc.), in the right way (share friendly and compliant). This may seem simple, but planning every last detail whether it’s post, tweets or sequence of uploading content well in advance really helps.

Here are the three basic social media channels that we used for our first earnings call yesterday:

1. The LinkedIn Blog – post from the CFO
2. LinkedIn’s Company Page – will link to our twitter page @linkedin  (didn’t want too many tweets, cluttering our homepage there, so we decided to have select tweets that redirect to our Twitter page where I’d be live tweeting the call)
3. LinkedIn’s Twitter Page (real–time updates during the earning call)

In addition, specific to the earnings call – I found the following two channels helpful. More on that in just a second.

1. LinkedIn’s Slideshare Page
2. LinkedIn’s StockTwits Page

This is of course, in concert, with your existing official channels that should kick-start the process (there are mandatory regulations that govern this process; so make sure you work with your legal team on figuring out that order). In our case, right after the press release crossed the wire, and the PDF slides were up on our IR site, the social media component went into play. So, time it well and stick to your schedule.

Trust me, it’s all a blur once the call starts and you start live tweeting – plus, there are so many moving parts that you’ve got to be careful you don’t mess up the ordering or accidentally upload stuff before the official news is out there. Also, don’t schedule stuff for auto-publishing, cos, you never know when things break.

Step 2: Make it easy to share / Slideshare 

I think the biggest advantage that social media brings to the table is the ability to let users – members, investors or other bloggers get a hold of content (like earnings deck slides) and make it easy for them to share. The earnings call (in our case) was an audio webcast and you had to register to listen in. You could also download a PDF deck of slides, but you’d have to email that and there’s no way to tweet that either.

Enter Slideshare.

Not only does Slideshare make it easy for you to upload your slides in private mode (premium feature) so you have it ready to go when the call starts, they also offer customization that lets you feature your earnings slide on your Slideshare homepage. And, of course, it makes sense to add your Twitter and StockTwits widget as well.

Some examples of companies that use Slideshare around earnings: Dell, Amgen, and Pfizer. Here’s the brand new LinkedIn page.

Step 3: Get Compliant / Stocktwits

Finally, the biggest question that companies have about earnings call and social media is staying out of trouble and keeping your blog post/s and tweets compliant with regulations. First off, you wanna work closely with your legal team to nail the specifics around your Safe Harbor statement and Disclaimers, which we used on the blog post. But, what about tweets and 140 chars?

Enter Stocktwits.

If you’re live tweeting your earnings call — and I’d recommend you do that — ideally, you’d want to add a disclaimer to every tweet that contains financial information. Now, doing that manually is one heckuva problem and Stocktwits helped take care of that (premium feature we subscribed to).

They have a system which allows you to add a disclaimer to every tweet (it may be a simple tweet, link to other webpages, a slideshare page, etc.) That does reduce the # of characters for your tweet (from 140 to 117) but from my perspective the premium feature was worth the peace of mind. In addition, they allow you to send this out to your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

Here are some examples of companies that have used Stocktwits in a similar fashion: eBay, Dell, AEP.

And, here’s our Stocktwits LNKD page.

To summarize, the earnings call was like our other recent announcements on social media but the two new components that made the earnings call simpler, were Slideshare and Stocktwits. Here’s how I described it on their official blogs:

As a social media company, it was a no-brainer to use Slideshare to share our earnings call slides on our corporate blog. While Slideshare made it easy for our readers and followers to share this content virally, Stocktwits ensured that our status updates and tweets were compliant; both necessary components for an effective social IR strategy.

LinkedIn’s First Earnings Announcement Deck, Q2 2011

View more presentations from LinkedIn

CEO and Corporate Blogging - $ACTC and Top Ten Tips

We often talk to clients about being "Thought Leaders" in their space. One CEO Blog that we have always used as an example of delivering Thought Leadership in the Stem Cell Research market is Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (OTCBB: ACTC – News). The Chairman's Blog is now written by Interim-Chairman Gary Rabin.

ACTC is a former client that specializes in the development of cellular therapies for the treatment of rare and common diseases that impact millions of people worldwide. The company applies stem cell-based technologies and other proprietary methods in the area of regenerative medicine to bring patient-specific therapies from the lab to the bedside. So why did we lose them as a client? In a nutshell, the former chairman died suddenly in Boston and we are working to re-engage with the new management team. Regardless, The Chairman's Blog at ACTC is a great example of how a company can reachout to their investors, clients, and stakeholders.

Tom Johansmeyer of Social Times wrote his top 10 most important “ingredients” in a corporate blog:

1. Content: Let’s be realistic: you need a lot of content to make your corporate blog effective as a marketing tool. While you don’t need every post to be world-changing for your clients and prospects, roughly one out of five should be. In an ideal world, I’d suggest running multiple posts a day. Do the math on this. You need solid writing and editing capabilities.

2. Perspectives: how many people are contributing to your blog? While you may only have one writer, you do need many sources of information. Talk to executives and experts all over your organization. Ask them to contribute time for an interview, data for a chart or even bullet points for an article.

3. Talent: not everyone is a writer. It’s sad but true. It’s natural for people to want to express themselves, but a corporate blog isn’t a platform for that. Rather, it’s a tool for communicating a message. Remind your contributors and other corporate blog stakeholders of this fact. Hire (or otherwise engage) a talented writer to do the actual writing. This will make your content more accessible to your target market.

4. Accountability: yes, it’s an ingredient. In fact, it’s probably the most important one. There needs to be one person in charge. This person is ultimately responsible for ensuring that objectives are hit and that the process runs smoothly. Communication by committee is stupid. Process management by consensus is idiotic. At the end of the day, there must be a “single throat to choke” (to borrow the indelicate words of a former client).

5. Design: when I got started in corporate blogging, I downplayed the importance of visual impact. In the five years that have passed, I’ve changed my mind (take a look at this piece I wrote late last year). Include lots of visuals. Charts are best, but reality is such that you probably won’t have the resources to produce an endless supply. Photos and videos are great, too. When in doubt, even a closely related video on YouTube can be useful.

6. Editorial plan/calendar: I don’t care what you call it, as long as you know you need one. It doesn’t need to be etched in stone, but you should have a decent sense of when your major stories will be published. You can be flexible, especially with “filler,” but direction is crucial. Remember that you’ll be vying for the time and brain power of busy executives and experts – your editorial calendar will help you give them sufficient notice to contribute effectively.

7. Innovation and growth: your blog should look different every few years (or sooner) – and that includes functionality. If you have text and images now, plan for audio and video in the near future. Maybe you’ll want to protect some content behind a registration wall. Like your editorial calendar for the content side of your corporate blogging operation, you should have an upgrade/new features roadmap that you’ll use to mature the environment.

8. Public/media relations: you need to get the word out about your blog. You want readers, press pickups and so on. PR can help. Make sure you invest in developing the right (targeted) media contacts. The goal is to get them to see your corporate blog as an excellent source of ongoing story material.

9. Advertising: PR will get you only so far. Invest in some advertising on the likes of Google, LinkedIn and Facebook. Experiment with different environments to see where you get the best results. Over time, you’ll be able to modify your approach to maximize value.

10. Marketing integration: no blog is an island unto itself. As the PR and advertising points above suggest, you need to integrate your corporate blog into your broader marketing operation. Make sure everything is sync’ed up!

Full Article @ Social Times

Loyal3's CEO on Direct Stock Sales @ NIRI conference in Orlando

Loyal3 offers a platform that enables public companies to sell their stock directly to customers through a Customer Stock Ownership Plan, or CSOP. Barry Schneider, chairman and CEO of Loyal3, a San Francisco start-up, explains customer stock ownership plans while at the NIRI annual conference in Orlando, Florida.

The statistics behind video according to Pittsburgh.....

Our operations staff in Pittsburgh, PA has been pushing clients more and more to using video in their stories. On the web, video is already a major player in the content arena and is predicted to increase in the coming years making up for 90% of all consumer traffic by 2013. More and more users are choosing to interact and engage with video in ways that were never done before. YouTube users now upload 48 hours of video every minute! This is an incredible amount of video content being uploaded to the web every day. With these kinds of numbers it’s no wonder more and more content creators will be using video as their mode of driving traffic to their site. Currently there are many different ways to engage people through video that can lead to greater traffic, and the data below show why video needs to be part of social media content.

Broker Dealers on Twitter and Facebook - the debate continues

Janet Levaux of Advisor One extends the debate of how and where Brokers and Broker/Dealers can and should use Social Media. Here interview is with Chad Bockius, CEO of Austin-based Socialware who is the vendor to Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. In late May 2011, Morgan Stanley said it would let some advisors use Twitter and LinkedIn. And broker-dealer American Portfolio Services said June 1 that it would soon begin using Socialware to expand its advisors’ use of social media. Research spoke with Bockius about what Morgan Stanley’s announcement and regulatory developments affecting social-media mean for the industry.

How are advisors using social media today?

LinkedIn is the most widely used site, and about 60 to 70% of advisors use Facebook and Twitter. We have found that 40 percent of advisors are violating policy to drive their businesses. Thus, firms can take their time with social media, but advisors are figuring this out on their own.

Prohibition can be policy — but it’s not being adhered to. This also means that FINRA or the SEC could go towards fining firms if their policies are not being enforced. Social networks will be as valuable over the next three years as e-mail has become. Advisors will use it, or they may switch firms to do so.

Full interview at AdvisorOne.

ProActive's Vertical Application @ Hubspot - #Hubspot

Here at ProActive, we have created a "vertical niche" in Digital Investor Relations. Most public companies spend way too much time trying to tell people what their company does and way too little time trying to attract more investors using inbound marketing by creating content that their prospective investors care about.

HubSpot is our platform for www.ProActiveNewsroom.com, and we use Hubspot's "inbound marketing" to attract investors to our clients.

The result of that extreme focus is that we get more web traffic than 99% of ALL WEBSITES and are even higher when referenced against competing investor relations firms.  Hubspot recently made a short, fun, animated answer to the question "What is HubSpot?".

Here are the specifics of how Hubspot is integrated into our PRISM product.

Forbes: Email is Not Dead. The Groupon Update by The Wall Street Journal

As a big user of email, I have been somewhat skeptical of Social and Digital Media communication tools in their platforms. Yes, I am a big LinkedIn user, but I have it configured to that messages in LinkedIn come through my email. This article by Erika Murphy at Forbes confirmed some of my beliefs.

Score One for the Email Side

The Wall Street Journal raised hackles in the email marketing community almost two years ago when it declared email was dead. Technically what it said was that email was fast becoming less relevant and soon wouldn’t be the dominate online medium by which people would communicate, but it might as well have taken out an obituary for the channel based on the fast and furious rebuttals that flew after the article ran.

But in such war of words, events always trump statistics: Like Ben & Jerry’s decision to ditch email marketing in the UK in favor of social media marketing last year.

And, now, like Groupon customers’ apparent helplessness when its service provider’s servers in Las Vegas went dark.

In the old days, business shut down if your phone box went down, now it is email:

“Groupon has a great brand but it is not strong enough to survive without its email subscribers.” Without the email, he concluded, Groupon wasn’t able to generate nearly the same level of sales.

In our experience at ProActive, the same is true of investors. Email is intrusive and you have to react to it. The trick is to use it selectively in sending to investors. Too many emails and they push the "unsubscribe" button. Too few and it means that we are not getting client messages out for clients. As Fobes states:

But undoubtedly the main story line is this: without that email reminder, people didn’t think to go looking for their deal. And that surely will make email marketers smile, even though it was one of their own that made Groupon go dark.

What we try to do at ProActive is to get very selective in what we send. We have 68,000+ emails in our growing database and we have "touched" those people either face to face or via our PRISM platform. The Hubspot platform also gives us a unique database tool that gives us data that can be very important to individual clients as the figure our their "Social Media Strategies."