Analyst Days in the age of Twitter
INTERNET conglomerate eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) held its first analyst day in two three years yesterday — and something big happened that almost no one noticed. For most attendees and observers, there was nothing special about the event. The analysts and journalists showed up at eBay North Townhall in San Jose, CA. The company’s executives [...]
eBay’s lawyers are wrong to delete earnings call information
eBay and other leading tech companies’ shallow earnings call archiving practices raise questions about their transparency.
SEC disclaimers in the age of Twitter
SPARE a thought for eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay. He is the only person on the microblogging service Twitter who live-tweets his company’s quarterly earnings conference calls. That’s partly why I’ve previously called him one of the best corporate bloggers. However, he has been doing these live-tweeting sessions for the past three [...]
Microvision opens up earnings call via blog
SEVERAL months ago, Microvision (NASDAQ:MVIS) IR specialist Tiffany Bradford set out to research how small-cap companies were using blogs for investor relations. She was referred to me by Shel Holtz, ABC, one of the leading advisors on the use of technology in public relations and corporate communications. I didn’t have a lot of concrete examples [...]
Most popular posts Jan. – Feb. 2009
A LOT of regular readers have been buried in year-end reporting and preparing annual reports, so I thought I’d recap the most popular posts on IR Web Report over the past two months in case you missed them. Business Wire’s Double Standards About how Business Wire is attacking cheap notice-and-access releases even while its owner [...]
BGC proves notice-and-access releases work
BGC Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: BGCP), a small-cap inter-dealer broker of financial instruments, yesterday announced its earnings using the notice-and-access news release method we have been advocating for several years. Despite heated hand-waving by one big PR wire service — and some hand-wringing by ourselves — the earnings release process went off without a hitch, even [...]
Why are IROs ignoring 1.5 million potential investors?
RECENTLY in a blog post here and in a discussion in the Investor Relations Executives Group on LinkedIn, I suggested that the time has come for investor relations departments to open up their earnings calls to finance bloggers. My objective in doing the story about President Obama taking a question from the Huffington Post was [...]
Highlights from Merck KGaA’s online annual report
Review of Merck KGaA’s 2008 online annual report, the first HTML annual report of the season by GeBer Nexxar.
My advice to Directors: get out the vote!
EVER since the folks at Risk Metrics asked me several weeks ago to write something for directors about communicating with shareholders, I’ve been struggling to put down my thoughts in some sort of coherent form. The problem, you see, is that I don’t think there’s anything directors can do. Communication is not enough. PR and [...]
The credit crisis in plain English
BEFORE I started IR Web Report and began helping companies use the web to communicate more effectively with investors, I produced plain English materials that made complex financial and investing concepts understandable to the general public. It’s probably the hardest work I have done in my career. You can literally spend hours, days, and even [...]
Investors are monitoring the web. Are you?
WEB monitoring services that help investors track online mentions of companies they follow have become an emerging area of innovation as easy-to-use publishing technologies have brought a flood of influential experts to the Internet. Some of the companies offering “deep web” mining services to investors include FirstRain, SkyGrid and EventVestor, while a much larger group [...]
The SEC’s requirements for online annual reports and proxy statements
SINCE a few people have asked recently about the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) requirements for online annual reports and proxy statements, I thought I’d put them in this post for future reference. Although many aspects of the so-called e-Proxy rules are not being done well, I think the most overlooked aspect is the [...]
Why I’m nervous for BGC and its next earnings release
BGC Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: BGCP), a small-cap inter-dealer broker of financial instruments, is taking the bold step of using the notice-and-access approach with its next earnings release on February 26 — but I think they should reconsider. On Monday, the company issued a news release announcing the following: “In compliance with the U.S. Securities and [...]
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