His Blog post is here
Publicado em Apresentações
Some very smart questions we should ask ourselves
Publicado em Apresentações, Evento, Midia
Might be NSFW (depending were you work. But it’s well worth it.
In this video, Catherine Crofton, Q4′s VP Sales & Marketing outlines 7 specific recommendations that companies can do to use their website more strategically including:
1) More effectively emulating the real conversations and experiences with investors. 2) Marrying what users want to find and what you want them to see. 3) Using your corporate site as your ‘investor’ site. 4) Using your investment story and objectives to drive the site structure, content and features. 5) Addressing the continuum of relationships and consider all audiences. 6) Making the information more interactive. 7) Be where your audiences are and use new tools like social media.
by Darrell Heaps
A Webinar from Q4 Web Systems that focuses on the current trends in social media and investors relations. Learn more at q4blog.com.
Publicado em Apresentações, Midias Sociais
Com a tag Apresentações, Q4, social media, video, webinar
This is not directly related to investor relations, but rather a comment on a subject proposed during the For Immediate Release podcast produced by corporate communications mavens Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. I guess that I can take the opportunity and recommend to the few IR people that care to read this (and the fewer that would consider a recommendation made by me): this is a awesome show and a must for any and everyone interested on business communications, on technology and on the use of tech on biz communications.
Anyway, during episode 534 Neville introduced this service called Fraxion Payments and, as the shows normally goes, discussed it with Shel. Nobody was particular sanguine about it but they apparently saw some worth in it (“nice but not for me” seemed to be the reaction.) They even joked a bit about charging people to listen to FIR past a certain point (just a joke, the show is free.) Well, my personal reaction is that, for the vast majority of the cases, a bad and the most myopic idea I’ve heard on a very long time. And the reason is quite simple: blogging is a social media and social media is, as we’ve been told over and over and over, about the conversation. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready, not just yet, to pay to have conversations.
Just to make my case, consider Shel and Neville’s joke about a paid podcast. Imagine they would have charged for each listener of each 500+ episode they have posted. As a matter of fact, they should go ahead and have charged for each listener comment they’ve aired, just because they are allowing us to have a voice. And they should’ve charged Eric Schwartzman and Dan York for the honor to contributing to the show. And they should also have charged each and every person interviewed by them over the past five years. Of course they should. And they would have collect a few nickels, I supose. But then they would probably not be selling as many books, or getting as many consulting gigs, or giving as many talks on conferences and stuff. They would not be seen as the voices of authority they are. Just because they were not giving anything away for free (and, by the way, this is based on a very funny rant by web celebrity Merlin Mann.)
Yeah, I know, guess you could have a WordPress site that is not really a blog and not really about conversation and where charging would make sense. But then how would this be any different from any other walled garden solutions that are abundant today? It is not.
It is pretty common to see IR practitioners worrying about the 10.000 feet high stuff: the IR program, investor targeting, websites, annual reports and such. IR consultants talk about these things all the time. No arguing here, these are indeed important things to get right.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you’ve done everything right: you have this stellar website that attracts all the attention, your AR is a great starting point and your targeting was on spot. There you are, sitting right in front of this investor that has the mandate and the desire to invest on your company. Here, the cliché goes, the rubber meets the road: you have to make her time investment worthwhile by telling her a good investment story.
Now, if only you would have spend a little more time developing that story, becoming more fluent at telling it and investing a bit of money to present it in a more professional manner.
Many years spend as PM/analyst have taught me two things. First, that presentations are the single most boring business activity there is (and IR presentations are “kill-puppies” boring.) Second, that it is possible to fall asleep at virtually any presentation, even during a one-on-one meeting.
The fact is, it always amazed me how many IR’s did not have a clue to what I, as a PM/analyst found important in their story. They were always trying to explain me their product or showing me picture after picture of their factories in far out locations. The question really is: how far can an IR program go if the story telling at a personal level is relegated to an afterthought? No much far, I would argue.
This rant comes after an absolutely awesome webinar I had the pleasure to attend to today, “Presenting Yourself, Your Business and Your Cause in 15 Minutes or Less,” by @scottschwertly from 3Ethos. He is one of many people that have been changing this presentation biz for good. I mean, have you ever seen a TED presentation? Compare it to your typical CEO / CFO / IRO presentation that was inflicted upon you at the last broker conference you had to so time to spare.
The biz of presenting is undergoing major transformation and IR people must pay attention. If you are interested, I would recommend, besides Scott, a look at Garr Reynolds’ (@presentationzen) Presentation Zen blog and at Nancy Duarte’s (@nancyduarte) Duarte Design and Slide.ology sites.
There is no excuse to have a poor presentation. It is like a tennis player that can’t serve. Much like the tennis player, this is the one situation where you have the most control of all the variables: where to start, how to lead, what the pace is, what to skim through and where to dig deeper. I mean, that’s why you spend all that money and effort targeting, right? Your presentation, including the visuals, printed materials AND delivery, must be top notch. No less. You may not (and probably do not deserve) get a second chance.
At first, Dominic Jones (aka @irwebreport ) just mentioned an article for UK magazine “Communicate” today, on ”What does good reporting looks like.” Then, he said he “liked” it. Being Dominic and being Annual Reports one (THE) pet peeves I have, I thought I would like it as well. No quite. And since it takes more than 140 characters to disagree with Dominic, here it is:
The short version: they are asking too much from a single (and already tired) channel. The ideal report should communicate the entire story in a “joined-up story linking business model, markets, strategy, KPIs, risk and material CR issues.” No less.
The long version: If you go ahead and ask AR professionals (design, consulting, etc) what they think “good” report should contain, you are bound receive the “ideal” report. That’s not even that great, since the AR pros are not users of ARs to begin with, so their “ideal” report is probably something that only other AR pros will be able to recognize and appreciate. See that I not even implying that they have a hidden agenda or anything. It’s probably their best advice and they are, I’m quite sure, all very experienced and acomplished professionals. But the piece completely misses the point.
Moreover, this “good/ideal report” approach dodges the fundamental question: what do you want from the report you are producing? The number of possible answers to this question is as large as the number of respondents, of course. Do you communicate on an ongoing basis, using several (or, at least, a few) channels and maintain a good level of engagement? Well, you report is going to look quite different from the one of a company that keeps it to herself for the entire year. As it probably should.
It validates my own opinion (no surprizes here, really) that Annual Reports are an overglorified and overworked communication channel that has, in its current form, limited usefulness.
Few things in the IR function are, to my taste, a bigger waste of time and resources than Annual Reports. This is one those subject that get me really fired up. I mean, here it is this huge effort to come up with this humongous amount of information, text and numbers an pictures and graphs and what have you, all consolidated into this very nicely and professionally executed document, which is either printed with the best quality materials or put into HTML form in a way few other sites even begin to aspire. And yet, its old, stale information, information that nobody reads or cares for.
So, it is quite interesting to notice this trend of people producing personal “annual reports.” As far as I know, this has started with graphic designer Nicholas Felton, which has been putting his own reports since 2005. In his own words, reports “that collate countless measurements of his year into a rich collection of graphs and maps reflecting the travel, photography, music, food, drink and reading contained in the year.” He recently has created a site for people to collect data and create their own personal annual reports.
If this seems to you like a crazy graphic designer with a lot of free time, well, think again. Here is yet another example, this time from the Lynch family.
All this has made me consider that maybe, just maybe, there is something to the Annual Report process that may be valuable. And this something is lost to current form of Annual Reports companies have been (actually or figuratively) printing.
Then again, may be just one of those Internet fads that happen from time to time.
The launch of the iPad has added yet another difficulties to the already pretty daunting task of designing a useful and usable IR website. Yes, by now we are all sufficiently aware of the implications of social media for all publics and stakeholders of a Company. And yes, your site should not a deposit of pdf files and other regulatory materials. It should ideally be a place that concentrates your presence on the web. So there you go: post your presentations into SlideShare, your videos into YouTube.com, your microblogging into Twitter and what have you. Everything comes together into your IR site, using those nice widgets.
The foundation of most of the social media sites and of the widgets used to embed the social content into the sites is Adobe’s Flash, a technology that I personally never gave much thought (other than an expletive every now and then, for those irritating calls to update) up until very recently. But, as the recent launch of the iPad made abundantly clear, this is some very shaky foundation. If Flash was once a de facto standard, this status is fading away quickly.
So here we are: what is one to do know, facing the redesign of social media enabled IR websites, under a deadline (thus, unable to wait for HTML5 or whatever) and having to make some very tough decisions. Should we design for the vast majority of Flash enabled machines? Can we afford to disregard the iPhone now (and the iPad soon enough) and embrace the blue Lego pieces? Or should we go overboard and port the site to all different platforms, not unlikely we do for different browsers?
