Forbes: "Time For Investor Relations Departments To Go Social"

As the new year begins, it is interesting to see the market start to understand what we do at ProActive. Rather than sell ourselves, let's see what Forbes thinks:

"The benefits of social media far outweigh the risks. By establishing the right guardrails, it can be a hugely rewarding journey.

• Expand breadth and depth of engagement

Companies are communicating with customers, prospects, stakeholders, thought leaders and other businesses worldwide at lightning speed using social engagement tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. By taking advantage of these same tools for real-time, two-way social IR, companies can better understand what matters to investors. And by employing innovative tools like StockTwits, IR pros can pinpoint messaging and target IR engagement, overcoming the primary issue of information glut on the internet. By meeting members of the investment community where they are and on their terms and increasing distribution through a unique set of tools beyond the newswires, companies can expand their reach exponentially as well as monitor their presenceto better understand impact of this engagement.

• Provide accurate, timely information

Investors live and die by the accuracy and timeliness of the information they receive. Precise, timely data is vital, especially in volatile or emerging markets. Initially, companies might be wary of social media due to fair disclosure and other regulatory concerns; but when used correctly, these channels provide a standardized platform and method of outreach. Accurate, relevant information about a company’s performance can be delivered in a timely, cost-effective fashion to customers, prospects and investors alike. Social media is one of the cheapest, fastest ways to disseminate news that matters and still meet the demands of fair disclosure.

• Establish authenticity

Authenticity and investor relations? You bet. Communicating in a thorough, transparent fashion —whether it’s your brand’s mission and values, or quarterly financial results—creates trust. One-on-one, face-to-face meetings are the ideal way to create these relationships and build authentic connections. However, non-deal road trips are highly impractical, time consuming and expensive. I’ve discovered that leveraging video conferencing technology and inviting a personal, human element into all my meetings creates a bond with our investors and stakeholders that truly stands out and builds over time.

At the end of the day, social IR is about more than adopting new technology. It’s a shift in mindset with IR professionalstoward fosteringopen and transparent disclosure with their external stakeholders, while at the same time embracing innovation. It’s about meeting investors how and where they want and need, while carefully following the rules of engagement. Done right, social IR can be a safe and rewarding evolution of your investor relations program.

Full story @ Forbes

Long Tail Keywords for Small-Cap Investors and Prospects

The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases. For example it would evolve like:

• Biotech research
• Cancer biotech research
• Brain cancer biotech research
• Pediatric brain cancer biotech research

As the keyword gets longer, it also gets more specific. These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant targeted traffic that convert well. The long-tail is unlikely ever to exceed searches for a brand name if the brand name is reasonably well established, but the volume of converting traffic these terms can generate by nature of their specificity and relevance is worth investigating. These keywords are very effective because there is little competition for most of these keywords on major search engines.

At ProActive, we would much prefer to get 100 clicks per month for a client landing page for a long tail phrase than zero clicks for the high-volume phrase.

Here is a good video of a perfect sequence of "Long Tail Keyword to Lead/Prospect."

The Science of Social Media - Public Companies and Inbound Marketing by Hubspot

Hubspot has been a leading provider to ProActive Newsroom for over two years, and we are one of the pioneers in using the platform as an agency in the public company market. It takes much behind the sceans manipulation to make their platform work in our market. That said, they are the leader in "Inbound Marketing" and yesterday's on-line seminar gave a good overview:

The Science of Social Media

View more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

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.

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.

'Like' Buttons Follow ProActive Clients

Over on the ProActive Newsroom.com, you will see all of our client news and media articles have "Like" buttons. Here is a good article on why we use them:

"Internet users tap Facebook Inc.'s "Like" and Twitter Inc.'s "Tweet" buttons to share content with friends. But these tools also let their makers collect data about the websites people are visiting.

These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don't click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal."

To determine the prevalence of widgets and how they collect information, the Journal asked Brian Kennish, a former Google engineer, to examine the 1,000 most-popular websites, as ranked by Google's advertising network. Mr. Kennish last year launched Disconnect Inc., which offers software to block data collection by widgets.

Full Story @ Yahoo via The Wall Street Journal

StockTwits IR Suite’s “Social Dashboard” - More data about engagement...

We have been working with Stock Twits for some time now, and they have come out with a very interesting product for clients called the "StockTwits IR Suite", and it includes:

Verified Ticker Pages – These provide companies prominent message placement on ticker pages as well as customizable information panels that can display corporate blog, YouTube channel and SlideShare presentation links.

Social Distribution – This allows companies to disseminate information in real-time across multiple networks via StockTwits through links to other social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as to the sites of StockTwits’ distribution relationships including Yahoo! Finance, CNNMoney, Reuters.com, Bing Finance and Investopedia.

Social Dashboard – This provides companies a powerful central command center that allows investor relations professionals to manage social monitoring and measurement of their social media reach and impact across the entire StockTwits network.

The StockTwits IR Suite is available at no cost for a limited time to U.S. public companies and the social compliance add on is $99 per month.

With an additional solution entering beta this month, we will continue to add products which allow regulated members of the investment community to fully participate in the StockTwits social platform, reach investors across the StockTwits network and maximize scoial media use.

For more information on the StockTwits IR Suite, please contact Chris Bullock, vice president of corporate solutions at cbullock@stocktwits.com or visit stocktwits.com/ir.

For more information, see the Stock Twits blog.

Pitching Well TV Show - Jeff Ramson ProActive Capital Interview

The Pitching Well is a collection of financial communities centered around live financial presentation pitches – focusing primarily on $2 Billion or Smaller in Market Cap. CEO Jeff Ramson of ProActive Capital Resources Group was a guest this past week:

LinkedIn IPO - Behind the scenes @ NYSE

It was a LinkedIn week for sure, and here is an interesting video of the night before at the NYSE: