GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

Social Media inveStor relationS tiPS & diStriBUtion Service

a primer on the norms, opportunities, and limitations of social media ir

Presented by naSdaQ oMX Globenewswire

Social Media ir White PaPer

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

OVERVIEW

Introduction- Birth of the press release - Emergence of the SEO press release

Section 1: SEO Press Releases- How Google News has changed the public relations paradigm- The evolution of press releases and the need for SEO- How Google’s “Panda” algorithm changes SEO press releases

Section 2: SEO Keyword Research Tools- Utilizing free SEO keyword research tools- Utilizing advanced keyword research tips

Section 3: SEO Press Release Writing Tips- Writing a press release - Including SEO keywords in the headline- Including closely related search terms in the subhead- Including your top keywords in the first 100 words- Including long tail keywords in anchor text links

Section 4: SEO Press Release Distribution Service- Why you can’t submit a press release to Google News or Yahoo! News- Why you should use an SEO press release distribution service

Section 5: Press Release SEO Report- Monitoring access and traffic reports- Tracking PR campaigns with web analytics- Reviewing SEO press release success stories

Conclusion- Rebirth of the inverted pyramid

IntroductIon

SectIon 2: SocIal medIa InveStor relatIonS: you’re already doIng It!

§ One-way streets § Communication, not dialogue § Example: the online press-room

SectIon 3: SocIalIzatIon: how to make (more) frIendS and Influence (more) people:

§ Determining what content is appropriate for the medium § Timing and strategizing disclosures § Example: Alcoa

SectIon 4: SharIng and over-SharIng: the boundarIeS of SocIal medIa Ir:

§ Thought experiment: stock ticker as a branding opportunity § Thought experiment: the hype-man § Managing expectations

concluSIon

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

This white paper introduces the present state of social media investor relations for beginners and intermediate practitioners in the field. If you are reading this white paper, you have been forewarned, warned, and after warned by armies of consultants that social media has changed everything, and that your inves-tor relations strategy is now woefully outdated. That’s basically wrong. Your IR strategy likely does want some rethinking for integration with social media, but the world has not been turned upside down.

In February 2012, Jeff Corbin published an updated 2nd edition of his investor relations handbook, Investor Relations: The Art of Communicating Value. His mes-sage: “The communication of a company’s valuation still remains at the core of any successful investor relations (IR) effort.” The goals of investor relations are the same in a social media world; you have simply been given more tools to do your job.

As with any new communications medium, there are pitfalls and summits particu-lar to the social media landscape. This paper will give you the lay of the land in social media investor relations, in terms of the tools at your disposal, the ways in which these tools have the potential to change the flow of information between investors and corporations, and how this all fits into the current regulatory regime surrounding disclosures. Consider this a starting point and a reference point as you develop your particular strategy. It is important to remember that the social media landscape is changing tectonically, and your social media investor relations strategies will necessarily be particular to your situation; this paper will provide examples of good and bad uses of social media for investor relations purposes, and point you towards thoughtleaders in the field for further research.

SectIon 2: SocIal medIa InveStor relatIonS: you’re already doIng It!A lot of ink (both digital and physical) has been spilled in recent years over how social media will change or already has changed investor relations. It is helpful to remember, however, that at the end of day, social media is just another com-munications medium, with its own structuring of hierarchies and norms. So what are these structuring principles, and how do they differ from those of traditional print and broadcast media?

Social media is not, as you have likely been told, a two-way street. Instead, it is more productively thought of as a multifarious tangle of one-way streets, some wider and faster-moving than others. Here is a particularly famous tangle of one-way streets (Click to watch timelapse on YouTube):

This is a snapshot of the 2011 Egyptian revolution as it took place on Twitter, produced by the computer scientist André Panisson. It is also a brilliant visual metaphor for decentralized media. Panisson made the map you’re looking at by tracking the use of the hashtag #jan251. Every dot is a user entering this hashtag, and every connection between dots is another user “retweeting” that user’s message2. One of the most compelling things about this map is its hollow center: the users who make up that core are isolated, and those in the outer rim are quite interconnected. Panisson’s map shows us social media’s most powerful moment to date, but the social network in which it takes place is surprisingly stratified.

If a celebrity is complaining about your product on a social media site, it’s prob-ably advisable to respond in some way or other—even cheekily—if only to show investors and business reporters that you have a social media strategy. If a small group of relatively uninfluential people begin complaining, the situation is worth monitoring, but not necessarily responding to; you want to weigh the upside of appearing to be engaged, against the downside risk of amplifying a complaint. Should you decide that a response is necessary but are uncertain of the stance to adopt, the more conservative course is always to direct your response solely to the issue, not to the individuals who raised it.

Of course, it will come as no surprise to communications professionals, and espe-cially those in IR, that some voices carry farther in the public square, and that not every negative comment on Facebook or Twitter is a three-alarm fire. Traditional media organizations are understandably upset that theirs is not the only voice in the room; but for IR and PR professionals, who make their living by competing to communicate messages and manage perceptions, it is hardly news that current and potential investors have an opinion and want to share it. Far from being at odds, the structure of social media and the goals of investor relations are perfectly suited to one another. The title of Richard Levick and Jeff Morgan’s February 2011 article for Fast Company puts it best: “Social Media and Investor Relations: A Match Made for the Dodd-Frank Era.”

Like many commentators, Levick and Morgan explicitly frame the social media/IR question as one of “two-way” communication, and their approach to integration of social media and IR is a three-pronged one: “monitoring, messaging, and dia-logue”. IR professionals are well-acquainted with monitoring and messaging, and well-equipped to adapt these skill-sets to the social media world, but Levick and Morgan make “dialogue” into a mystical category of organic, two-way communica-tion that is largely unhelpful from a strategic point of view—to put this more bluntly, what is “dialogue” but a finely-tuned strategy of monitoring plus messaging?

Again, we can think of social networks more productively as messy tangles of one-way streets, rather than smoothly-flowing two-way grids. Why? One reason, as we saw in the Egypt example above, is that some people are more influential than others. But the answer goes beyond a simple count of Facebook “friends” about whose tweets s/he is notified.

1 A “hashtag” is a word or abbreviated phrase following a pound sign (#) on Twitter. It categorizes the tweet that contains it (say, as being about the January 25 revolution) and it links to all other tweets that use the same hashtag.

2 A “retweet” is a specific kind of tweet, in which one user repeats another’s words verbatim, with a link back to that original user.

INTRODUCTION

Network Map of #jan25 tweets, via Panisson, using Gephi

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

But the term “friends,” even though it’s used all the way down to Twitter’s techni-cal documentation, is not the right word—instead, the term more symmetrical to “followers” would of course be “leaders.” People shy away from terminology like “leaders” because it sounds too much like a popularity contest, but whether or not it sounds friendly, it’s an honest way of looking at the networks’ structures. Consider Morgan’s and Levick’s twitter accounts. They are both strong users, who have good follower bases, but their networks look very different from one another:

With Morgan only following 14% of his followers, it’s hard to say that social media is a two-way street in this example. Even for Levick, who is a rather generous influencer at 52%, this would be a hard argument. But that doesn’t mean that they’re using Twitter improperly, or that one is using it better than the other. To the contrary, both provide useful information directly to over a thousand people apiece. Rather, we should simply observe that both judiciously pick and choose who they listen to on a regular basis, and that more people listen to them than they listen to themselves. They are strong Twitter users not primarily because they use the medium dialogically, but because they provide relevant, timely information and only secondarily because of their interactions with other users.

Social media, in other words, is not a harmonious flow of ideas between equal parties, but a fast-paced and typically rather unequal exchange of small chunks of information and opinion. Instead of understanding it as an organic dialogue, then, we should focus only on the first two prongs of Morgan and Levick’s model: “monitoring” and “messaging.” Inbound and outbound communications do not have to line up perfectly, as long as your message is influencing the most people possible. Boiling social media IR down to the two principles of listening carefully and speaking carefully, we can see that social media only differs from traditional media in two important ways: 1) its speed, and 2) its directness. Morgan and Levick get right to the heart of these questions when they observe that “[t]he window with which to respond or correct the record is increasingly small. To those who are deaf to what’s being said on social media, that window is shut entirely. Absent real-time social media monitoring capabilities, IR programs enable others to influ-ence their company’s valuation story.” Communications is a game at which you lose by not playing, and IR teams need a social media strategy; but again, they are well-equipped to adapt to it.

As other commentators have suggested, the communication model given to us by social media is not unprecedented. The online press room, for instance, is an important evolutionary link between legacy print/broadcast media and social me-

dia: “It is the corporate website,” Jeff Corbin points out, “where first impressions are made. An investor will look there to learn about a company and its financials, get a flavor of how a company presents itself, and learn how management views the importance of investor relations and providing information that investors view as important.” Similarly, “Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are, simply, communica-tions channels. so, too, are ‘blogs.’ … Social media provides an opportunity for both individuals and businesses to create communities relevant to their industries and interests and to share information to further their particular cause or mission.”

Investor Relations is the art of communicating your company’s valuation, and so-cial media multiplies your opportunities to practice this art. Facebook and Twitter are tools in your valuation communication toolbox, in much the same way that your corporate IR website is. Just as we would never see it as a threat for a reporter to download a quarterly earnings PDF from a website, neither should we see conver-sations in social media as a loss of control over our messaging. Both are signals that should inform the crafting of our message.

Microsoft’s IR Portal

An IR portal allows you to communicate asynchronously with reporters and po-tential investors, with a finely-tuned, coherent message. And while it is true that Twitter and other social media platforms demand responses of a very different time-scale and tone, this is only a problem if you try shrinking your earnings reports to 140 characters. Social media is the perfect medium for taking your investment community’s pulse, for communicating non-critical information directly to jour-nalists and your community, and for instantaneously pointing users to critical, time-sensitive information. We have seen in general how IR’s basic principles are still good guides in the social media world; we will now deal more specifically with the question of how to align your message with the medium.

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

III. SocIalIzatIon: how to make (more) frIendS and Influence (more) people:“Social media,” argues Jeff Corbin, “should not only be used to ‘repurpose’ news.” Rather, it “provides a mechanism through which a company can connect the dots of its story, demonstrate how each news release it issues relates to the big pic-ture plan the company is executing against, and ultimately ensures that investors recognize the value and opportunity the company presents.” In other words, the differences between traditional and social media demand that we distinguish be-tween communications strategies for them. Above, we downplayed those differ-ences somewhat, in order to emphasize the strong continuities of principle even as the media landscape shifts: communications professionals find themselves in a familiar place, in their competition to achieve recognition and acceptance of their message. Social media is best understood as an increase in the opportunities to communicate, rather than a threat to one’s control of the message. Now we will flesh out some of the ways these opportunities manifest themselves, and how they relate to the patterns of those tangled networks.

Your social media IR strategy should be able to answer 2 basic questions; the purpose of this section is to help you do this:

1. What content is appropriate to the medium? Does the medium support several different kinds of message, and if so, do these demand different strategies?

2. When and how do you intend to release this information? What tools will you use, and what does the workflow look like for composing, approv-ing, and releasing these?

What content is appropriate to the medium?

Social media typically comes in bite-sized chunks. Twitter has a limit of 140 char-acters, and Facebook will only give a user so much vertical space for a single post on his/her friends’ news feed. On either site, links disappear from rapidly-updating content feeds so quickly that on average they receive half their total clicks in the first 3 hours.

Short Posts (L.A. Times Haiku)

Short lives (excerpt from bit.ly blog)

These limits, however, do not make its content any less meaningful. We saw in the last section that much of the anxiety surrounding corporate communications in social media attaches to the notion that large organizations sometimes have a bad habit of either being tone deaf because they are not paying enough attention to these channels, or deaf full stop, because they are paying no attention at all. But this is often less a matter of an organization lacking coolness or awareness than not attempting to explore the full potential of the medium. The difficulty of discovering the sweet spots in your corner of the social web is that there is no general formula for doing so, because each community has its own specific quirks; but we can lay out a few principles as to how one gets a feel for one’s community, with respect to its members and its structure.

Twitter is the poster child for everything empty online. Nick Carr, in one of his more famous rants, from 2007: “Like so many other Web 2.0 services, Twitter wraps itself and its users in an infantile language. We’re not adults having conversations, or even people sending messages. We’re tweeters twittering tweets.” And he’s right, if you have eighty thousand followers who are not interested in what you’re saying so much as that you’re saying it. But if you have a collection of followers whom you’ve sought out and developed relationships with on the basis of a match between their interests and your content, then it’s a very efficient way of send-ing a small nugget of relevant information to the relevant people--faster than a phone call, shorter than an email. But who would be interested in your Twitter feed?

A disproportionate number of journalists are registered on Twitter as compared to the general population, and they also tend to be opinion leaders in the medium. As we saw in the first section, social media is not flat, but is organized around opinion leaders whose large subscriber base increases the chances that any given

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

message they send out will receive a good deal of user interaction. This of course holds in business communications as well. But it is not simply a matter of a large follower list that makes a writer influential. Their content must be trusted, either on the basis of their personality or expertise in the subject area in question. In 2010, Duncan Watts, a researcher at Yahoo, began to question the value of certain big-name social media deals he was hearing about, like Kim Kardashian receiving $10,000 per sponsored tweet. “[I]n looking at influencers, wrote Edmund Lee in AdAge, “Mr. Watts found that it’s incredibly hard to predict who will be a major factor on Twitter …. [C]close studies of social platforms reveal that influence is spread more efficiently and more reliably when done through many-to-many connections, rather than through a few highly connected individuals.”

It’s unlikely that you’ve considered paying thousands of dollars for a sponsored celebrity tweet in order to get timely news out to the investment community. But the point here is that the business columnists who cover your sector are still very valuable contacts in this medium: generally speaking, they are individually influen-tial, and they constitute an identifiable community that can be targeted in order to get your message out to current and potential investors both on and off of Twitter. They are influential social media users on their own, but even more so as a group.

Consider a 2010 social media campaign run by Piper Aircraft to promote its new personal aircraft, the “PiperSport.” The marketing firm DigiNovations put together a campaign in eight days across Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that folded existing communities into its new social media presence, through careful messaging and targeting of influential writers. By the end of their targeted campaign, the company had grossed $480,000 in sales directly attributable to the social media blitz; and nearly all their pre-identified aviation journalists had become followers, and the online aviation community had gathered to their sites en masse. Targeting groups of influential experts on social media increases the chances that they will pass on your information to their followers directly, or perhaps give you some good press off of Twitter or Facebook. (Click to watch video on YouTube.)

In addition to enthusiastic post-sale congratulatory follow-ups to general users, they posted photographs, videos, and links to press and the FAA certification announcements, as well as to their own site. A different campaign would have a different kind of messaging, based on precisely what its goals were and whether or not it targeted a broader or even different target audience than one’s usual. But the content would include not only press release headlines, but links back to favorable coverage in other publications, links back to blog posts or thought

pieces by prominent company officials, and other news items of mediocre in-dividual importance, which taken together over time paint a rich portrait of the company and its relationship to its customer base.

The final content’s style, then, was determined by the target audience (aviation sector journalists on Twitter), and the target list was determined in large part by what information Piper’s communications department had at its disposal. This feed, built for the purpose of targeting journalists, became a sort of satellite press room, feeding out a rapidly-updated list of information beneficial not only to their sales but to their appearance in investors and business writers in their sector. Building out such a list of influencers can be a dreary process, and targeting them can be painstaking. It is typically best to start with a core group of known influ-encers (typically journalists from your contact list), and to see which of them are on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. From there, follow the connections to see who they are listening to; if these people seem to fit your target profile as well, add them to your list of contacts; and keep track of the topics they write on. All of this can be done by hand on Facebook or Twitter, and much more easily with some basic coding through Twitter’s API. The goal is to build as comprehensive a picture of the community that your known influencers reside in; it is very likely you will discover new influencers, but even if you do not, you will be bringing yourself and your message closer to your known influencers by establishing a series of second- and third-degree connections with them.

When and how will you disclose this information?

How can social media sync up with your existing IR strategy, both in terms of your message calendar, and real-time response? This question is a difficult one to answer because of social media’s relatively short time scale generally makes it harder to plan ahead. Coupled with this short response time is the medium’s di-rectness of communication between speaker and audience, which together can make unscripted communications in social media a relatively high-stakes activ-ity. Because it is impossible (or at least wasteful) to plot for every contingency in any media environment, and especially given social media’s mercurial nature, the solution to planning social media communication is largely a question of organiza-tion rather than content. In this section, we will consider how social media can complement your existing messaging schedule.

It is more than likely that most of your tweets or Facebook updates or blog posts will be pre-planned and serve as complements to your traditional channels, but even these require the establishment of a workflow in order to make sure the right message is broadcast in the right medium at the right time. Some social media utilities will allow you to pre-load and schedule basic actions like status updates. For outbound messages, this gives you the ability set up a workflow in which the various tasks of campaign planning, writing, reviewing, and final authorization can be efficiently delegated, while still leaving room for top-down interventions in the case of emergency communications.

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

Establishing workflows, chains of command, and checking procedures before-hand is also a way of gaming out what potential responses might be in difficult situations, as well as how one might keep track of whether information being released by the company is appropriate. The SEC is, of course, taking very seriously such inappropriate disclosures; in 2009-2010 they brought multiple fair disclosure actions against companies and individuals (Office Depot, Christopher Black, and Presstek, Inc.); Office Depot’s was brought for having leaked, merely implicitly through a coordination of talking points, earnings forecasts in order to manage expectations prior to official earnings reports. When designing your workflow and determining what different staff can and cannot post to social media sites, one should consider the legal dimensions of possible communications. Referring to the 2010 settlement, the blog at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Gov-ernance and Financial Regulation offers this pragmatic advice: “If you can’t say it, don’t imply it.”

But on a more mundane level, establishing workflows will save you valuable time. Social media is powered by hundreds of millions of people, it never sleeps; and as a result it is the easiest thing in the world to waste time responding (or fretting about whether you should respond) to minor emergencies that might better be left alone. The more work you do on the front end, in terms of delegating tasks and defining what kinds of messages demand what kind of attention, the less of your own time, and your staff’s time, you will waste as you integrate these channels into your overall IR strategy.

And social media must be integrated into the larger IR program; an isolated social media campaign will wither for lack of good content, and for the authors’ feeling that they are not authorized to say anything of importance. But what does a good scheduling protocol look like? Dominic Jones presents a strong case study of Alcoa’s 2011 second-quarter earnings report on his blog, IR Web Report. Alcoa used its Facebook page and Twitter stream to communicate directly with an in-terested audience. This does not mean that they pasted their earnings report’s

text onto their accounts, but that they used both accounts as a clearinghouse for relevant information. Jones provides three models for this integration of social media and IR.

First, we see Alcoa using Twitter as a secondary channel to broadcast their message:

Alcoa tweet with CEO pull quote

In this example, social media is more or less just subordinate to the more traditional conference call: the above tweet is just repurposed content, which appears 3 hours after the (2pm) conference call, and sporting a useless self-reference (“@Alcoa”). That said, this is a great quote that has been a major takeaway (1800+ Google hits) from the conference call, and it fits nicely into Twitter’s 140-character box; there is nothing at all wrong with using social media to repurpose existing con-tent, as long as it is not seen as wholly subordinate to more traditional channels.

This brings us to Jones’s second example, in which Facebook and Twitter are used to drive traffic to Alcoa’s site, and to troubleshoot with users in real-time as they attempted to connect to the conference call. Social media is nominally subordinated to the traditional channels here, but we see it doing something that those channels cannot do, in Alcoa’s real-time response. Jones highlights the following Facebook conversation:

Alcoa’s Facebook account used for feedback (see also IR Web Report)

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

Social media here is not producing any new, lasting content independently of the traditional outlets, but it is invaluable in the short term for the same reason that it has very little long-term value: its value is a question of highly-contextual relevance.

Third, they used social media more independently, by posting their earnings report’s Power Point presentation on SlideShare, a social media presentation sharing site, and by integrating social media “share” buttons onto their site directly, above their press release. Here, we see Alcoa using new media to promote their content without building a new microsite or fancy introduction in Flash, but instead just by opening their doors a bit more. As Jones points out, their site’s hosted press release got much more social media traction than the traditional wire service’s hosted version. As Jones points out, the release on Alcoa.com has received many more tweets (11 vs. 7) and Facebook “likes” (17 vs. 0) than its wire service counterpart’s:

The socialization of the company’s website appears to be taking better hold than the socialization of the traditional wire release. Jones draws a conclusion not justified by the evidence, though, when he declares the traditional press release dead: “This suggests that Alcoa may be wasting its time and money distributing full-text earnings via [a press release distribution service] when people appear to be accessing the company’s releases mostly from its own website. Alcoa probably could save a bit of money and boost traffic to its website by shifting to an advisory earnings release.” The conflict between classical earnings releases and advisory earnings releases is very specific and very central to efforts at social media/IR integration, and we will get into this in more detail in our final section.

For now, we will simply point out that without access to the press release distribu-tion service’s web analytics, Jones’s advice borders on irresponsibility. His conclu-sion, that the wire service release is superfluous, assumes that the company’s target audience is uniform in its internet habits, and that all the important users will seamlessly migrate to the new medium, without feeling ignored or slighted. Investors are much more internet savvy than the population at large, but given the general demographic differences between the social media and investor com-munities, Jones is still taking a big leap of faith:

Sources: Pew Internet, June 2011; ICI Research Perspective, Oct. 2011

Such an incautious approach to social media IR directly contributes to the broader perception that social media is a threat to traditional IR practices. Dogmatists on both sides of the social media IR debate share this curious flaw, of perceiving social media as the prelude to a narrowing, rather than an expansion, of the communica-tions tools available to IR professionals.

We have seen how social media can work in tandem with traditional IR efforts to deepen your connections with existing contacts and extend your reach to new ones. And in the above examples, the social media component of the campaign was typically subordinated to outreach conducted through more centralized channels. We did, however, see Facebook, Twitter, and SlideShare used in ways that took advantage of each platform’s unique capabilities, especially the empha-sis on real-time updating; if you’ve just fixed a confusing link on your site, you can send a quick message with the corrected information to thousands of people in an instant. What you won’t do, however, is restart the conference call or scramble a press conference or post the contents of your presentation to Facebook a day before you address the public. But where do we draw the line, and when do the pos-sibilities of real-time, direct, mass communication tip over into becoming practical and even legal liabilities?

The above examples show a carefully synchronized integration between social media and traditional IR, in which the new channels are largely subordinated to the old. But it is one of the defining characteristics of the internet in general, and social media in particular, that we are able to engage in radically asynchronous communication that upsets old hierarchies. With relatively little effort, we can dig up articles from several years back, and connect our followers to them, and their authors to our followers as well. We will now consider the limits of social media IR, by exploring its potential as a radically independent medium for investor relations.

Iv. SharIng and over-SharIng: the boundarIeS of SocIal medIa IrIt has been a primary goal of this social media / IR investigation to clarify the defining features of social media as a communications medium. For corporate communications professionals, and IR professionals particularly, social media differs from traditional print and broadcast media not in being a two-way street (communications was always thus) but in being a faster-paced, more direct, and more diverse medium. As we saw early on, this tangle of one-way streets can oftentimes act like a series of two-way streets, but it is not the same thing.

So how far can we take the concept of social media IR integration, and how far should we take it in practice? Let’s consider this problem through two interesting thought-experiments.

a. Stock tIcker aS brandIng opportunIty (vIa HOWARD LINDzON)Howard Lindzon is the co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, a tool for social media IR that allows users to monitor and post to a variety of different platforms in real time. In a December 2011 post to his blog, Lindzon discusses how his team is attempt-ing to rethink IR in the domains of “workflow, amplification of existing messages, unique and additional distribution, … compliance, analytics and reporting.” Some of these examples (i.e., compliance, reporting, amplification) appear to bring social media into contact with existing IR practices; but others (i.e., unique distribution, analytics) would seem to go in the other direction, developing a new kind of IR for this new medium.

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

He provides a compelling, radical example of how social media might create a new opportunity for IR:

Another big opportunity involves ticker awareness. Any forward looking CEO or CFO must recognize that the ticker IS a product. The customers are on the web and they are using your product and have no idea they could own a piece.

Have you heard of PF Changs? I think so if you live in the United States...but did you know their ticker symbol is $PFCB? Every day, thousands of investors pack PF Chang restaurants. You can follow PF Changs on Facebook and Twitter, but the compnay has not yet fathomed the idea of their OTHER brand...their ‘ticker’, [which is] the same ticker that defines who they are to thousands of institutions and millions of potential investors.

In other words, potential and actual investors with iPhones who take a business lunch at PF Chang’s are currently a missed opportunity: a savvy brand manager would remind these people that the value they are currently experiencing as cus-tomers translates directly to shareholder value.

Typical “Like us on Facebook!” and “Follow us on Twitter!” signs tell social media us-ers how to extend this customer experience; Lindzon makes the brilliant observa-tion that a “Visit $PFCB on Yahoo Finance!” sign would do the same for the investor community. This thought experiment shows us that social media can be much more than an alternative channel for old messages: it offers the investment community a direct and permanently open line of communication to the corporation.

b. hype-man (vIa neal StephenSon)If Lindzon’s example lets us see how social media can extend your IR efforts into investors’ everyday, lived experiences of your company, we suspect this idea of ubiquity could be taken too far. The end-point would be if this form of social media outreach treated investors only as investors, and not as customers as well. In his 1992 bestseller, Snow Crash, science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson offers us an idea of what it would look like, if a company decided that a brand was not simply one of its products, but its only meaningful product. In this scene, the rapper Sushi K sees his audience only as potential investors:

He stares at the crowd, five thousand potential market shares, young people with funkiness on their minds. They’ve never heard any music before that wasn’t per-fect. … Sushi K’s face lights up with a combination of joy and terror. Now he actually has to go up there and do it. …

Start investing now Sushi K stock

It on Nikkei stock exchange

Waxes; other rappers wane

Best investment, make my day

Corporation Sushi K

…

Speed of Sushi K growth stock

Put U.S. rappers into shock

Sushi K has taken the idea of seeing his company’s market valuation as a product, and pushed it to the point where market valuation is his only product. His lyrics

seem only to be about how much money his lyrics are worth. David Bowie has come close to floating his net worth, but he doesn’t sing about it (explicitly).

Why is this a problem? Because Sushi K is not communicating value, but creating it, by seeing his primary goal as the selling of stock. Good IR is about creating investor confidence, not investor excitement; and by setting maximum share price as his primary goal, he is trading away his credibility and therefore his ability to manage any downward movement, for a short-term bump. In other words, social media can help investors to rethink every interaction they have with a company in terms of its ultimate value, but when this capacity for ubiquitous outreach turns every interaction into an attempt to sell a company’s stock, rather than to com-municate its value, then that company will eventually develop a bad reputation amongst investors, for spreading bad information. The moment Sushi K’s songs stop selling stock, his share price will crash precipitously.

managIng expectatIonS:So where should the line be drawn in social media IR, between vigorous outreach and hype? In terms of legal implications, the answer is both encouragingly and annoyingly open to interpretation. The SEC, in 2008, published its “Commission Guidance on the Use of Company Websites,” whose stated purpose, in “provid[ing] additional Commission guidance specifically addressing company web sites,” was “to encourage the continued development of company web sites as a significant vehicle for the dissemination to investors of important company information.” In other words, the SEC has positively embraced the utility of company websites as communication tools for the investor community. This builds upon previously-issued statements in its Fair Disclosure ruling from 2000, which more tentatively accepted that websites could serve a purpose in disseminating relevant informa-tion faster, to a wider audience, so long as these channels “achieve[d] the goal of effecting broad, non-exclusionary distribution of information to the public.”

But if the SEC has been warming over the last decade to the acceptability of com-pany websites as a means of making public disclosures of material information, the debate over what constitutes “broad, non-exclusionary distribution” online has been heating up. When Google released its second quarter earnings in 2010 on its website, without publishing a press release, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a scathing article in the New York Times, decrying a lack of transparency: “The S.E.C. passed Regulation Fair Disclosure— known as Regulation F.D. —in October 2000 to combat selective disclosure of market-moving information so that certain inves-tors wouldn’t be able to trade ahead of others. But this latest disclosure trend may undermine some of that.” In the influential article, Sorkin argued that major news outlets (and their readers!) had not been expecting this company-website-only disclosure from Google, and so while the disclosure was not an act of favoritism towards a group of insiders, it was certainly less broad and inclusive than it might have otherwise been.

Others see it differently. US News & World Report Money, for instance, argued that the year 2000 Fair Disclosure ruling had leveled the informational playing field, and that the internet was an important part of that. After all, everyone can “google” Google’s quarterly earnings, on their site. Dominic Jones, in fact, lays out a step-by-step guide for how to move from a full, expensive earnings report by news wires, to what is called an advisory release, which states a summary and links back to the company website. Jones and others see this as a way for companies to cut their costs and retain control over their information, and if sufficient notice is given

GlobeNewswire, a NASDAQ OMX company, is one of the world’s largest newswire distribution networks, specializing in the delivery of corporate press releases, financial disclosures and multimedia content to the media, investment community, individual investors and the general public.

Large public corporations, small businesses, professional organizations and PR agencies rely on GlobeNewswire to broadcast their most market moving news to a worldwide audience in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.

in enough channels, they argue, then the information will spread quickly enough so as to not give anyone an accidental advantage. In effect, they argue that the internet allows any corporation of sufficient size to turn itself into its own media outlet, and that if the corporations do a good enough job in this new role, there is only value added for the investor.

They are right, of course, that it’s hard to call a release of earnings data partial when it’s posted to an almost universally-accessible platform, and listed under your own name. And the fuzziness of the two documents above creates some room for such interpretations. The Fair Disclosure ruling in which the original guidance on websites appears was written out of concern that the disclosure of “important nonpublic information, such as advance warnings of earnings results” to selected parties, allowed those parties to be “able to make a profit or avoid a loss at the expense of those kept in the dark,” such as the general public. But even in this early document, the determination of what constitutes proper disclosure online is very much left up to context: “As technology evolves and as more investors have access to and use the Internet, however, we believe that some issuers, whose websites are widely followed by the investment community, could use such a method.” Technology has indeed changed, and nearly all investors are online, but the general public is not entirely online, and not every company’s website is “widely followed by the investment community.”

Google’s decision to forego the traditional press release earned it a disappointed wag of the finger from the New York Times, but no more; the SEC was clearly of the mind that people knew how to find Google’s website. But even so, it’s hard to say that Google’s decision was a good move from an IR perspective. Google of course has a stake in the internet being the single dominant channel of communication, but it also has a stake in showing its investors that it is making every effort to be as transparent as possible; being told off in the New York Times is not the best way of going about this. Moreover, you are not Google. So while cutting corners on your disclosures process could save you money and is much less likely to invite a high-profile business column on your misdeeds, it also violates expectations that much more, for you to break from the conventions surrounding communications important to investor relations. And as we have seen, the SEC does factor the public’s media habits and capabilities into its determinations of what constitutes fair disclosure.

v. concluSIon:This white paper has introduced the basic concepts and debates over what over the last few years has come to be called social media investor relations. The inte-gration of new media platforms with traditional IR that this term names is viewed in some quarters as dangerous and incoherent, and in others as an unprecedented revolution in the ways that corporations communicate with current and potential investors in the hopes of achieving price stability and steady growth.

We saw that both of these positions, strangely enough, see social media as somehow wholly opposed to traditional investor relations because this channel is viewed as a two-way street for communication. But social media networks only resolve into two-way streets at a level of abstraction that has little meaning to informing effective strategy or tactics. Instead, social media networks should be thought of as a series of rapidly-paced one-way communications that can be filtered and added to, using traditional principles of listening and intervening only when useful.

Finally, we saw how social media could in fact introduce some new ways of thinking about communication for IR professionals, namely by transforming one’s company more and more into an independent reporting operation. If used responsibly, social media has the potential to allow companies to provide more relevant information to more actual and potential investors, and to do so much faster than even traditional media outlets. But turning oneself into an independent media outlet puts all of one’s credibility eggs into a single basket. The more one arrogates the privileges of a media outlet, the more of a burden one has (both to investors and often in proxy the SEC) to keep one’s information clear, informative, and factually unimpeach-able. For companies that can make responsible use of this new medium, there are definite advantages to an IR strategy, both in the enhancement of old practices, and the development of several new ones.