I seem to recall someone praising Barrick Gold for how the company engages with people via Barrick’s Twitter account. So I was surprised to find that there’s a grassroots #NOBARRICKGOLD campaign on Twitter being led by folks in the Dominican Republic who are concerned about what the company is doing to the environment in their homeland. They’re posting pictures like this one on Tweetphoto, which they claim is the result of the company’s activities: And linking to videos like this one: I looked to see if Barrick has acknowledge any of the @s from the group but I didn’t see any. It appears their approach is simply to ignore this campaign. Is that a good strategy? I don’t think so. I’m not saying that this is an easy thing to handle, but handle it the company must. And a good starting point should be for Barrick to provide its side of the story and reach out to the @nobarrickgold camp to find out what their concerns are. That’s the thing with getting into social media. You have to be willing to engage with with everyone, no matter how antagonistic they might seem. As things stand, I see a group of people upset at the company — and the company pretending they don’t exist. Seems rather arrogant for Barrick to continue to ignore them.
This site can be best viewed using IE 4.0 or higher. Well, not really.
You know a website is old when the copyright legend says 2005 and there’s a little “Get Microsoft Internet Explorer” badge on the homepage referring to a version of the browser that’s long dead. The site still works in Chrome, but just barely. The navigation menus are a little wonky. Interestingly, they have a Facebook page for career seekers, but it’s nowhere mentioned on their corporate site.
They promised a “a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.” That got investors and traders excited. Then came the news at 11:00am EST. Huge disappointment, as you can see from the immediate reaction on the chart. By day’s end the stock ended flat. Not what you’d expect from a “significant anouncement.” Next time will anyone care?
The herring came to spawn on Vancouver Island this week, bringing with them an amazing abundance of birds and marine life. The photos don’t do the event justice, you really have to listen to the sounds I captured on my phone from atop a cliff with the birds on the beach below.
Testing investor relations departments’ responsiveness to online questions
I was going through some old website files this week and found a summary of a “mystery emailer” test we did of IR departments’ responsiveness to emails from investors. We sent emails to a bunch of IR departments and tracked the speed and helpfulness of their replies. We sometimes do this on a smaller scale when benchmarking a company’s online IR activities to a group of 10 peer companies. I dislike doing it because it fairly difficult to come up with a meaningful model inquiry that’s relevant to all companies, but the test still has it’s uses. Surprisingly, the results we get today are largely the same as they’ve always been. Here are the responsiveness results from the 2002 test I found:
56% of the recipients replied within 24 hours;
35% of the companies did not respond;
8% took longer than 2 days to get back to us;
The worst took 22 days to respond.
In 1 case, the email address on the company’s IR website was incorrect and our message was returned undelivered.
I’m now thinking that we’ll have to start testing responsiveness to Twitter @s and DMs, Facebook page posts, and turnaround on moderated blog comments. I’m not sure yet how we’ll do that. It’s easy with email because companies can’t see any information about the sender. On social networks and blogs, companies can see a lot of information about the people asking the questions, including IP addresses. It’s harder to be anonymous. Anyway, if you’re interested, there’s more on the mystery emailer test on the IR Web Report blog.
I read the post from which the above heat maps are taken then clicked through to the news release. It says:
“The results revealed some surprising trends: - The consumer group averaged 9 seconds to the first fixation on real-time results, whereas the information foragers took a full 14 seconds.
-The consumer group had 10 percent fewer clicks on the real-time results than their information foraging counterparts.
- And only 55 percent of the participants could easily find the real-time results. ”
Actually, that not surprising at all if you look at where the real-time results are on the search results page.
Yup, they’re at the bottom — the last place people see.
Come to think of it, the story here is actually that despite being buried at the bottom of the page, 55% can easily find them.
I don’t like being treated like a marketing target on Twitter. I suspect I’m not the only one. That’s partly why there’s so much hate for automated direct messages to new followers. They’re inauthentic because no human is actually taking the time to send them. I’m not opposed to all auto-DMs, just the ones used for marketing or promotional purposes. Don’t market to me and I’ll be your friend on Twitter. :-) Recently, however, I’ve been getting irritated by scheduled tweets. These are tweets sent out at predetermined times when the account holder typically isn’t present on Twitter. The idea is to create a continuous stream of tweets throughout the day and night to increase the chances of being noticed and followed. Scheduling tweets to attract attention and followers is Old Skool marketing, and that’s not why I use Twitter. I find scheduled tweets arrogant and rude. It’s like inviting me over for coffee and then leaving me to listen to a tape recording of your voice while you do something else. The account holder isn’t paying attention and might even be asleep. If you want me to follow you and listen to what you’re saying, at least have the good manners to be present. Here’s an example of what scheduled tweets look like from someone I used to follow until they did this. Notice the precise hourly intervals between the tweets.
Detecting scheduled tweeters
Scheduled tweeters are not always easy to detect. In the example above, it was easy to tell because of the obviously improbable timing of the tweets. A little bit of randomization probably would have made the scheduling harder to detect. I also looked at the tweet signature and visited the TweetMiner site, where scheduling tweets is positioned as a major reason to use the service (it has other interesting features, too). Other services like CoTweet and HootSuite also offer scheduling, so looking at the source signature might provide an additional clue if you suspect an account you’re following is trawling for followers by scheduling tweets. However, TweetMiner has introduced custom signatures that will hide the fact that the tweets are being sent from TweetMiner. As Justin Vincent explains in the tweet below, that will make it impossible to tell if someone is scheduling their tweets via TweetMiner. So for the record, I don’t schedule tweets. And every time I send a Tweet from my blogs, Google Reader, Twitter clients, desktop, laptop or phone, I’m actually online and available to respond to you. I’m not doing something else. I want to engage with smart people on Twitter. I want to hear what you think, no matter how disagreeable or judgmental it is. I think it’s good manners to listen to your feedback and respond to you when appropriate. Finally, as with auto-DMs I don’t think all scheduled tweets are bad. They can be useful in certain circumstances, such as when information is embargoed or for synchronizing tweets with other channels, such as for earnings announcements. However, I still think you should make an effort to be available on Twitter when the tweets go out. P.S. The person I was following got pissed off when I called her out for scheduling her tweets. She suggested I was being a jerk for “criticizing” and “judging.” She intimated that calling her out was somehow anti-social media. That might be so among friends, but I am a web communications consultant to public companies and I evaluate service providers of all kinds. My remarks are made in that context. They are not personal attacks, they are professional evaluations. If you sell web communications products or services to public companies, expect me to judge and criticize, and I’ll do my homework. Whether you like it or not, that’s what I do and I’m never going to hold back just because you can’t take it.
CEOs should write their own letters to shareholders
IN this age of authenticity, why do so many CEO annual report letters read like puffy PR copy? While it’s acceptable for executives to want help preparing their presentations, speaking notes and letters, CEOs should never delegate the actual thinking that goes into these.
Even the most famous shareholder letter writer of them all, Warren Buffett, has an editor — Fortune Magazine writer Carol Loomis. But the thoughts and issues are still his own.
It would be enormously beneficial for all CEOs to take the time to write out a draft of their letter to shareholders this year. This will focus their minds on what they want and need to say.
They should also take a tip from Mr. Buffett on how to approach their letter. As he says in the preface to the SEC’s Plain English Handbook (PDF 175KB):
“One unoriginal but useful tip: Write with a specific person in mind. When writing Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report, I pretend that I’m talking to my sisters. I have no trouble picturing them: Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give them the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions were reversed. To succeed, I don’t need to be Shakespeare; I must, though, have a sincere desire to inform. No siblings to write to? Borrow mine: Just begin with “Dear Doris and Bertie.”
If a shareholder letter is any good, then it deserves to be showcased on the web. They shouldn’t be dumped in a PDF where almost no one will see them. They should be provided in HTML as part of a larger HTML annual financial report.
If they are really good, you can do what Mr. Buffett and many Japanese companies do; put them in a main section of the IR website.
Small Investors , Big Business and the Right to Exist — IR Web Report Bits
Social contract between society and business
Although modern society is vitally dependent on the significant contributions business brings to society – from productivity gains to driving innovation to creating jobs – businesses are also dependent on society in terms of the public legitimacy they receive (or not) from the societies in which they operate. This relationship forms the basis of an overarching social contract between business and society: businesses receive a license to operate from society, which is contingent upon companies providing an overall positive contribution to society. In this sense, companies that blatantly ignore public sentiment on environmental and social issues risk making themselves increasingly vulnerable to public sanction.
Public opinion can make a difference
Examples abound of how broad public sentiment can influence corporate strategy. In the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, public perceptions of excessive prices charged for HIV/AIDS drugs in developing countries have pushed global pharmaceutical firms to make these medications more accessible to the world’s poor. Similarly, in the food sector, public concern on obesity (which afflicts 32% of Americans) is resulting in calls for further controls on the marketing of unhealthy foods. And the oil and tobacco (and potentially financial services) industries represent further examples of how changing public perceptions continue to reshape the ways companies do business.
Global companies have global responsibilities
Indeed, today “license to operate” can no longer be taken for granted, as challenges such as climate change, water scarcity, food security and extreme poverty have reached a point at which civil society is demanding a response from business. At the same time, multinationals are often better positioned than governments to deal with some of the global challenges. In fact, of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 63 are corporations, not countries. This growing influence of business in society makes it even more important that profit-maximizing firms do not act against the interests of society. And society is increasingly turning to global businesses as the only institutions strong and large enough to meet the huge long-term challenges facing our global ecosystem.
New media give NGOs more power
Moreover, the proliferation of media technologies and the growing importance of Web-enabled participatory media such as Twitter and Facebook have given NGOs and consumers new tools to encourage companies to integrate more sustainability into their strategic thinking. This is changing the context of business as consumer groups and non-governmental organizations gain broader and more immediate influence in scrutinizing the integrity of the social contract between society and a particular business. Another factor that is changing the context of business is that today’s economic value is increasingly being generated by intellectual capital and other intangible assets such as ideas, brands, reputation, customer service, motivation of personnel, the capacity to innovate, and the quality of relationships with key stakeholders (such as regulators, governments or non-governmental organizations). In fact, according to academic studies, it is estimated that today these intangible factors make up 80 – 85% of a company’s true market value. What this means for business is that the increasing value of intangible factors like a firm’s reputation or its ability to attract top talent make its ability to respond to the demands of society crucial to creating long-term shareholder value.
The “license to operate” concept is why it’s so vital for corporate investor relations and governance professionals to have expertise in public communications.
It’s Big Picture stuff, for sure, but in the long run it’s what matters to the long-term success of any company, industry, country or market system.
Diminishing direct stock ownership by retail investors … dwindling attendance at annual meetings … 5% retail participation rates in annual meetings … 0.5% of retail shareholders actually reading online disclosures …
To me, they all point alarmingly to a growing illegitimacy of North American business leaders and boards of directors in the eyes of the public.
Such illegitimacy saps the business lobby’s influence in public policy and makes our companies less globally competitive and the products and services less acceptable around the world.
Of course, IROs and governance professionals rarely think about such Big Picture things.
And yet, it’s arguably the most important issue for these professions — their license to exist.
New Post: Where’s IR leadership on firms who track investors? on http://ping.fm/FBjnN
Feb 26
How stupid is Google? Very, if you believe the PR wires
Twice today I’ve read articles by PR wire services claiming that the main benefit of including links to your website in paid news release is that it improves your website’s ranking in Google’s search results. On the surface, the claim makes sense because everyone knows that links to a page are a key way that Google determines the page’s popularity or authority. If your paid news release containing a single link to your website is posted on 100 websites, that’s 100 links all pointing to your website, which is great for your PageRank, right? I’m not so sure. You see, Google’s search algorithm isn’t as dumb as that. For one thing, the company is very sensitive to paid link schemes because they’re not based on genuine organic linking by people visiting a page and thinking it worthy of a link. When you think about it, links in paid-for news releases are nothing more than, well, paid links, so I’d be astonished if Google doesn’t downplay their value in some way. The second thing is that Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Since the identical release appears on 100 websites, I have to figure that Google’s algorithm is smart enough to know that the content of the release isn’t organic, so potentially there might be a penalty applied to it. Of course, I don’t have any special insight into Google’s search algorithm. But then no one outside of Google does. But I do know that Google employs far more PhDs than all of the PR wire services combined and I doubt very much that the PR wires offer anything special from a search engine optimization perspective. Here are the articles I’m referring to: Business WireMarket Wire As an aside, it’s instructive to search Google for key words from a headline of a paid news release to see which sites rank highest in the results. Typically, it’s not the website of the company that pays for the release. For example, BioScrip released their Q4 and full-year 2009 results this morning via a Business Wire release. If you were an investor in Bioscrip and searched Google for “BioScrip 2009 Fourth Quarter Results” see which sites appear at the top of the search results (My results are shown in the screenshot below) Yup, the company’s website appears far down the first results page. It’s second last from bottom with the bad “News” page title, which is a consequence of Thomson Reuters, which hosts BioScrip’s IR site, not knowing anything about the web. The bottom line is that BioScrip has paid handsomely today to drive search traffic to someone else’s website, and they can thank Business Wire’s great “search engine optimization benefits” for that.
Bringing democracy to corporations one animation at a time
MoxyVote.com released the following animation on YouTube last night. I love it, and I’ll watching eagerly to see how much traction it gets (currently just 275 views). The only part of it that is a bit of a downer is where they say individuals control on average 30% of the votes in corporations. While that’s probably accurate, it understates the true potential influence of the public. Until there is a way for individuals to also have some say over their much more significant indirect control through mutual funds and pension plans, I doubt corporate boards are going to care about the retail vote. Still, we have to start somewhere…
This is a complicated post, but I know that some people in the IR profession are very interested in this right now. If you don’t really care, go read something else. So let’s get started. First, I am on record on this blog as saying that until Twitter is more secure, investor relations departments should steer clear of using it as news dissemination channel and use it instead only for engagement. Basically, my view has been that if you suggest to investors that they can use your Twitter account for news alerts, then you should expect them to trade on that news — including possibly fake news sent by hackers. But if you instead use Twitter only for engagement and caution investors against relying on your account for news updates, then you mitigate against the negative fallout that will follow if your account is hacked. Now it is very important to understand Twitter’s security history and how that was factored into my views on using Twitter for IR. The service has been plagued with problems, both in terms of availability and security. Twitter downtime is no longer the big problem it once was. In fact, I no longer worry about Twitter’s availability. You can see why here. However, it’s the security of Twitter’s technology that has been my primary concern. I’ve kept track of various security breaches and have documented dozens of separate incidents. The early incidents were what really concerned me because they all related to Twitter’s technology infrastructure being hacked. The worst case in my view was the Mikeyy worm in April last year. In that case, merely visiting the profile of a compromised account on the Twitter website while logged in to Twitter resulted in your account being infected. In other words, it was extremely easy to be hacked, and short of not going to Twitter.com at all, there was no way to protect yourself. In fact, I fell victim to this, the only time I’ve ever fallen prey to something like this. Now, remember that a few months earlier, in January 2009, 33 prominent Twitter accounts, including those of Barack Obama and Britney Spears, were hacked and offensive public messages sent from them to their followers. The hacker exploited a hole in Twitter’s technology to gain access to the accounts. To my mind, Mickeyy coming after the President of the United States’ account had been hacked suggests that Twitter management didn’t really take security of the service seriously between January and April. I mean, what could be more serious than the President’s account being hacked? Surely, they would have pulled out all the stops to plug the holes? And yet, along came Mickeyy in April and made a mockery of Twitter. So, yeah, at that point, there was no way in hell that I was going to put my reputation on the line for Twitter and tell my investor relations clients that it was safe to use Twitter as a news alert channel. Mock me as a philistine in you want, but I’ll never put my clients’ reputations at risk for the sake of seeming trendy. Since April 2009, there have been a number of security breaches on Twitter. Perhaps the most serious was in December 2009 when the site was taken down by Iranian hackers who appear to have guessed Twitter’s password at a third-party service that manages Twitter’s DNS servers. This was not an exploit of Twitter itself, but rather weak security practices by Twitter staff in managing their own accounts on other services. There have also been a number of phishing attacks that have led to Twitter accounts being compromised. In fact, just this week, Intel Corp.’s UK Twitter account was hacked, as was Home Depot’s. In the case of Home Depot, the account is used for investor relations information. The video below explains how these accounts are compromised. Importantly, though, none of the attacks since April have been of the the Mickeyy variety and most have been phishing scams. There’s a big difference between a hacker exploiting holes in Twitter’s code and hackers exploiting human fallibility through phishing scams. While we have no control over Twitter’s code, we do have control over our own behavior, so I don’t worry too much about phishing scams because you can teach people how to avoid them. Given that I haven’t seen anything for months that would cause me to worry about Twitter’s security, I’ve had to revisit my views on whether IR departments should use Twitter for news alerts. I take some additional comfort in the fact that some high profile Tech leaders have recently started Twitter accounts, Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, for instance. I have to assume that they wouldn’t take a chance on Twitter if they thought it wasn’t secure. I now believe that Twitter is secure enough to be used for news alerts,as long as news is distributed on Twitter simultaneously to other channels. You cannot invite investors to follow you on Twitter and then be tardy in updating your feed. Of course, as we’ve seen this week, security risks remain. Scammers will increase their attacks on social networking sites as they become more popular, and it’s possible that official corporate accounts will become prime targets. However, following some basic good practices should minimize the risks. Twitter suggests the following basic practices:
Use a strong password.
Watch out for suspicious links, and always make sure you’re on Twitter.com before you enter your login information.
Don’t give your username and password out to untrusted third-parties, especially those promising to get you followers or make you money.
Make sure your computer and operating system is up-to-date with the most recent patches, upgrades, and anti-virus software.
I’d add one more tip. Use a short URL expander extension in your browser or Twitter client. Since Short URLs mask the actual address of a link, it makes phishing scams somewhat more likely to succeed. Short URL expanders show you the full URL of the link, so you can see where they lead before you click them. Short URL expander extensions are available for Firefox and Chrome (not sure about the others). In summary then, I think Twitter is secure enough for IR news dissemination purposes but remember that nothing is ever going to be 100% secure. And the biggest thing to worry about it not Twitter’s technology but rather you or your clients’ own gullibility.
When should you open a separate investor relations Twitter account?
I’ve learned something from following hundreds of public companies’ Twitter accounts that I thought I’d share. If you have an official corporate Twitter account with a lot of activity that isn’t relevant to investors, you should definitely open a separate Twitter account devoted to investor relations content. It doesn’t matter how many followers your corporate account has, it’s all about the number and nature of the Tweets going out from the corporate account. Too many irrelevant tweets creates a horrible experience for investors. You can’t expect them to follow you if only 1 out of every 20 or 100 messages is relevant to them. I find that over time I just ignore accounts with lots of irrelevant activity.
Most consumer brands need separate IR accounts
In (very) general, smaller and non-consumer oriented companies don’t need separate IR accounts on Twitter. Corporate accounts like @DES_AG, @ChinaWindPower or @BarrickGold are fine because most of their tweets are relevant to investors. However, I think almost all consumer-oriented companies like @HomeDepot, @McDonalds and @Ford desperately need separate IR twitter accounts. They’re just too noisy from an investor’s perspective. But there are no hard and fast rules here. It’s a judgment call and you should put yourself in the shoes of your various audience groups and think about the experience that they’re having following your corporate account. If you do add a separate IR account, there’s no reason to stop sending IR-related tweets from your main corporate account as well. You might send fewer and refer followers to the IR account for more information.
StockTwits twist
There’s an interesting twist to consider here, though. You might not need a separate IR account on Twitter if you follow @StockTwits and send relevant tweets to investors there by adding $(Ticker) to your tweets. Hewlett-Packard Company, which has a busy corporate Twitter account, does this well. Tweets they think are relevant to investors get $HPQ added to them, which sends the tweets to investors who are following HP on StockTwits rather than on Twitter. Of course, not all investors are using StockTwits, so that is something to consider. You can follow hundreds of stock-exchange listed companies’ Twitter activity through the public-companies and public-companies-2 lists. Be warned, though, they can be very noisy, which is why I’ve set up a separate @ir_tweets account that aggregates IR-specific tweets from the two lists.
They’re posting pictures like this one on Tweetphoto, which they claim is the result of the company’s activities: 
And linking to videos like this one: I looked to see if Barrick has acknowledge any of the @s from the group but I didn’t see any. It appears their approach is simply to ignore this campaign. Is that a good strategy? I don’t think so. I’m not saying that this is an easy thing to handle, but handle it the company must. And a good starting point should be for Barrick to provide its side of the story and reach out to the @nobarrickgold camp to find out what their concerns are. That’s the thing with getting into social media. You have to be willing to engage with with everyone, no matter how antagonistic they might seem. As things stand, I see a group of people upset at the company — and the company pretending they don’t exist. Seems rather arrogant for Barrick to continue to ignore them. 
