Icahn joins blogosphere, gets blank stares
BILLIONAIRE corporate raider Carl Icahn launched his long-anticipated blog yesterday, eliciting some rather bemused reactions from some of the blogosphere’s leading writers. By starting The Icahn Report yesterday, the world’s 46th richest man with a net worth of US$14 billion joins the ranks of guys who work long hours for ad clicks, and who get [...]
The real story behind RSS registration
JUST over 70% of the people who participated in this week’s poll guessed correctly when choosing the word I would use to describe the practice of making investors register to access RSS feeds on corporate websites. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for the past two years but never got around to. [...]
10 signs your IR website is *still* bad
BACK in November 2006, I published a list of 10 signs that an investor relations website was in dire need of an upgrade. Reading the list again, it struck me how we still see many companies making the same mistakes. So I thought it would be helpful to post the list again and offer to [...]
Thomson dispenses IR advice via YouTube
SEARCHING for something online the other day, I bumped into Thomson Financial’s channel on YouTube. The channel is a mix of market reports, research updates and — what I thought was nice — advice on investor relations from the company’s Corporate Advisory Services division. Looks like they’ve been posting short videos on YouTube for about [...]
Cool ticker symbol up for grabs
SOFTWARE company BladeLogic, which went public last July, has one of the hippest ticker symbols going: BLOG. But now that the company is being acquired by BMC Software (NYSE: BMC) those funky four letters are up for grabs. One problem, though. The way the US IPO market has been doing so far this year, it [...]
I don't get IR Magazine's US web award winner
THIS is an open invitation to the 2,600 buy-side analysts, sell-side analysts and portfolio managers who, according to the IR Magazine US Awards, selected PF Chang’s China Bistro as having the best investor relations website for small- to mid-cap companies. I don’t get it. What is it about the site that makes it good? As [...]
Is Thomson’s IR/PR business for sale?
I DREW attention yesterday to the fact that Thomson Financial’s corporate investor relations and public relations businesses don’t fit well in the structure outlined in the Thomson-Reuters acquisition announcement. According to the companies, the combined Reuters and Thomson Financial business will be guided by journalistic principles, such as integrity, independence and freedom from bias. However, [...]
Thomson-Reuters: mixing journalism with PR?
EARLY this morning, the boards of Thomson Corporation and Reuters Group PLC announced that they have agreed to combine their companies. Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, 47, will become CEO of the new Thomson-Reuters. Thomson President and CEO, Richard J. Harrington, 60, will retire after the deal closes, which is expected after anti-trust clearances are obtained. [...]
Thomson Financial’s timeliness troubles
TIMELINESS is vital for investor relations websites to remain relevant to investors. A site that contains out-of-date information will quickly lose users to other sources of information. And that’s what may be happening to corporate investor relations websites hosted by Thomson Financial and other large vendors. As I wrote recently, according to the Alexa website [...]
Google Finance adds company events, news RSS
GOOGLE Finance has just been upgraded in the past few hours to add information on company events like earnings call webcasts and upcoming events that integrate with Google Calendar. The screenshot below shows the new Events module on the Google Finance page for Zimmer Holdings, Inc. By clicking on the webcast links, you can access [...]
Traffic to Thomson IR websites slumps
IN WHAT may be an indication that U.S. IR websites are no longer able to attract and hold the interest of investors, traffic to IR websites hosted by Thomson Financial has slumped to all-time lows, according to the Alexa website information company. Alexa, owned by Amazon.com, measures traffic only of people who have the Alexa [...]
What’s wrong with U.S. health care IR sites?
A COUPLE of U.S. health care sector companies in our IR website benchmarking survey are in the process of being gobbled up by bigger companies or are going private, so we’ve been looking for replacements. Usually we just pick companies at random from the S&P 500. However, since the sector has historically had the weakest [...]
Transcripts a sign of transparency
WHY don’t more companies provide transcripts of their earnings conference calls and investor presentations on their websites? Of the 525 large-cap companies whose websites we review, only 12% are currently providing transcripts of their earnings calls on their investor relations websites. It’s NOT because investors don’t want them. There wouldn’t be a transcript industry if [...]
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