Forbes on the Growth of StockTwits.com

Forbes had an interesting article on StockTwits and how LinkedIn is now using them for earnings calls:

The recent wild gyrations in the stock market have been a boon for one start-up. StockTwits, an online platform for sharing ideas about stocks that integrates with Twitter, saw time spent on its website and messages up more than 200% over the last 12 months.

StockTwits pulls in all Tweets about companies that are tagged with the “$” dollar sign and the stock ticker. For example, $LNKD for LinkedIn. The service is used by stock traders to discuss stocks and monitor chatter on the web. In a social media era, investors are no longer just reading articles or charts, they’re also monitoring places like Twitter for real-time information.

StockTwits has recently added new paid services for public companies to manage and monitor messages on StockTwits. Companies such as Dell, BASF, eBay, HP, PepsiCo and Royal Dutch Shell and signed to claim their “ticker page.” Using this, companies can send out Twitter messages that are compliant with SEC regulations.

LinkedIn recently used the service to post real-time messages during its earnings call. The company also used start-up SlideShare to post documents in real-time to the public.

StockTwits is not designed to replace the earnings press release, says Howard Lindzon, CEO of StockTwits. Companies that don’t want to post on StockTwits can also use it just to monitor discussion about the company.

“It’s to amplify what they’re already doing with a really inexpensive tool,” Lindzon says. “It can help them listen and monitor (and post).”

For smaller public companies in particular StockTwits is a way to get information out to the public in a fast way. Messages posted from inside StockTwits also get syndicated to other news outlets such as Yahoo and MSN.

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.

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