Harness Twitter Power for Investor Relations
August 11, 2009
We have discussed what Twitter is, where it came from, and how it evolved into a useful platform for business.
Next, we talked about who is using Twitter right now. What companies have official Twitter accounts, companies using semi-official accounts, and how those relate to Investor Relations.
And now, the part you’ve all been waiting for.
Benefits of Twitter for IR
Twitter is a communications tool. Of course, your website, all those emails you type, your newsletter, your annual report, your press releases, your executive’s presentations, and all of those appearances by company bigwigs on CNBC are all communications tools too. Why add one more?
Because, what Twitter brings to IR communications is unique.
There is a lot of noise about what Twitter can and can’t do. There is even more noise about how big of a role Twitter will play in the future and what that role will mean for other forms of communications, electronic and otherwise. For IR Departments operating in the real world trying to hit measurable metrics, it is best to ignore these often overheated discussions. In the business world it doesn’t matter what Twitter is, what Twitter will be, or what Twitter won’t be.
All that matters is that Twitter brings one thing that you can’t get anywhere else.
What makes Twitter valuable to investor relations groups, and business in general is that it is proactive. That is, with Twitter, you initiate the contact with investors and prospective investors. The IR website, those presentations, and even those appearances on television all require that the people you want to communicate with come to you for information. In other words, you have to wait until people come to you to tell them what you need to say. That puts you at a disadvantage when time is of the essence, or when you want to determine the speed at which people know about certain data.
Being proactive does not make Twitter unique. There are numerous forms of communication all of which can be instigated by a business or investor relations department. Easy examples include mail, phone calls, email, newsletters, and so on.
What makes Twitter unique is that it the only form of proactive communication in which frequent use is not only acceptable but respected.
Consider the standard email message. Send one email full of critically important information to thousands of investors and potential investors and you will quickly be labeled a spammer, regardless of whether people opted in or not. While a single piece of regular postal mail might be accepted or even welcomed, multiple mailings will not only be expensive, but will quickly become regarded as junk mail. And, don’t even start with phone calls. Demands to be removed from your calling list, name calling, and questions about your motivations will be the least of your worries.
But, with Twitter, things are different.
Start up a corporate Twitter account and then send out “only” three tweets a month and watch the complaints roll in. Imagine the different response if you sent out three emails a month to your email list.
In order to receive any of messages, or tweets, a Twitter user must “follow” another Twitter account. That account can be a friend – real world or online – or a business or corporation, or anything in between.
Following is a manual process. That means that each and every user who follows your company’s official corporate Twitter account has declared a willingness to receive the messages you send. This is also not unique to Twitter.
What Makes Twitter Different – Unique Power of Communications
What is unique to Twitter is the complete and total control of the user receiving the communications.
In every other situation, except other social messaging platforms, the control over communications ends the moment the user gives another party their contact information. From that moment on, the end user is at the mercy of the third-party to honor their wishes. Whether it’s phone calls, emails, or postal mail, the minute a user hands over their phone number, email address, mailing address, or whatever other means of receiving communications they have, the recipient has the ability to use that data anyway they see fit, including giving or selling that same information to others, who inherit the same abilities.
Not surprisingly, this situation has been widely abused, and users no longer trust that their wishes will be honored in the future, or even that their wishes are being honored right now.
With every additional communication a business or corporation sends, the user grows more confident that the communications being made are too frequent in number and that the sender is no longer respecting their time or privacy. Each additional phone call brings your earnest IR communications closer to being considered no better than telemarketing. Every new email message risks the wrath of spam filters. And, while there are few options to stop regular mail, each envelope that arrives, starting with the very first one, risks earning an unopened trip to the shredder or trash bin.
The only way to prove one’s good intentions is to respond to the user’s request to stop communications altogether. A Catch-22 that leaves the company IR group no method by which to both prove their integrity and continue communicating with investors at the same time.
Whether Twitter users consciously realize it or not, they have come to realize that there is very little downside in signing up to receive the communications of others by following them.
Following another person does not give that person the ability to transfer their ability to send messages to another party, because knowing a Twitter user’s account name is of no use. The user must instigate communications via a follow.
Likewise, a person being followed has no means of continuing communications with a Twitter user who has stopped following them. No follow-up questionnaires, no surveys, no “we want you back” coupons, nothing, nada, zip, zero, zilch.
Additionally, Twitter makes requesting more information almost too easy. With a single click, a user begins receiving exactly what they asked for, no more, no less. There are no forms to fill out, no checkboxes, no “Confirm” button, no pop-up window, no “special offer”, nothing but a single mouse-click. It is the same for everyone, whether it’s mutli-national corporation, or your own grandmother.
Changing your mind and turning off that request is just as easy. With a single click, the user can “unfollow” anyone, even Grandma. The communications cease immediately and completely.
What Twitter Is Then, Is Safe Communication With Business and Others
With a single paradigm shift, Twitter has become the safest, easiest, way to get more information about almost anything. Guy Kawasaki is a business writer and one of the biggest Twitter personalities. The brilliance of Twitter is that you can see what he has to say by following him, and if after a while you decide that he’s more of a tireless self-promoter than business savvy guru, you can unfollow him. You stop getting his tweets, but all those other users keep getting them. Everyone wins, no harm, no foul.
Twitter lets users try a little of everything, or nothing at all. You keep what you like and get rid of what you don’t. Then you are free to sample even more, all with no obligation, no temporary email addresses, and no automated responses to your unsubscribe request. It’s all the information you could ever want, risk-free.
Without trying, Twitter has also become the perfect method for investors, and prospective investors, to get more information from companies they are interested in, and not just via some form letter and a book or brochure that might be several months old. Instead, continuous, updated, data can be theirs for the asking, with no phone calls, no hold-time, no waiting for mail to come, and no temporary email addresses (to avoid all those email problems).
The best part about Twitter is that when the investor’s interest in the company wanes, he need to do nothing more to stop the incoming communications from that company than click a single button.
Thus, an investor looking to make an investment in the oil industry, for example, could begin by following a dozen or more energy companies. As her research (both Twitter tweets, and otherwise) narrows her potential investment choices, she unfollows the companies that no longer interest her. This not only stops unwanted communications, but also focuses attention on those that remain.
The same process could be repeated again and again depending on the investors needs, with a high-volume investor following dozens or more companies at a time, and lower volume trader following just a handful. Either way, the list expands and contracts as needed.
Twitter Tweaks Tricks and Problems
If you can’t wait to sign up for Twitter and start tweeting your way to glory and huge performance bonuses, you need to take a deep breath and pause.
A cursory analysis will leave one worrying about potential legal and regulatory issues, of which there are many. However, that is moot if no one reads your tweets.
With Twitter your real concern is generating a Twitter feed of tweets which not only encourages users to follow you, but also keeps those already following you from hitting the unfollow button. Doing so is far more difficult than staying within regulatory and legal boundaries.
Otherwise, your Twitter endeavor will end up yet another way to spend time and money without acquiring a single new stockholder. Your company’s cheerleaders already own as much stock as they are going to. If your Twitter feed is nothing but a recycled list of your company’s press releases, they’ll be the only ones following, and they already read the releases.
Up Next – >Successful IR Twitter Communications
Twittering Investor Relations
July 22, 2009
Twitter keeps tweeting, should IR be listening?
The business community has been intuitively skeptical of Twitter’s possible utility to companies since it’s inception. The list of reasons that Twitter would be useless to most businesses isn’t short.
The allowable message size is too small. What could anyone possibly say in just 140 characters that would be of any value? Users are primarily younger, technologically savvy teens, and twenty-somethings who don’t like to be “harassed” by the corporate world, and who wouldn’t have any money anyway except for movies, music, and cars. There is no way to monitor and manage the inevitable replies to any message posted by the company.
And, then there is that terminology. Can a serious company really be expected to care if its tweets are re-tweeted on Twitter? The list goes on.
This post is Part 2 in our series. Get Part 1 here: Investor Relations Twitter Difficulties
For Investor Relations groups, the list is even longer. There is no ability to include any form of disclosure in a message that is just 140 characters. Regulatory agencies haven’t given any clear guidance on what is or is not permissible to be discussed on an open forum like Twitter. People using Twitter aren’t the kind of people who invest in stocks anyway. Do Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Miller, or Bill Gross tweet on Twitter? Of course, not.
With a compelling list of business reasons stacked against any serious company using Twitter, why would any Investor Relations department even consider making Twitter part of their communications arsenal?
Perhaps it is because of the media’s incessant coverage of all things Twitter such as the breathless headline where AdAge claims Twitter’s news coverage is worth $48 million each month. Perhaps it is because of attention grabbing publicity stunts like Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN for 1 million Twitter followers (Kutcher won), or Oprah Winfrey’s arrival as a celebrity Twitter tweeter. Perhaps the idea of a full-fledged company blog seems like too much, but surely, anyone could handle 140 characters at a time. Or, perhaps, the official corporate blog has proven itself to be a wide ranging success and something like Twitter seems like a good way to expand on that success. Of all the possible reasons, perhaps none is more true than simply being worried about falling behind while competitors with a head start race off to good fortunes.
Whatever the reason, IR is coming under increasing pressure both internally and externally to address the runaway train that is Twitter. Senior executives want to know what the Twitter strategy is. Investor advocates are vocal about getting vital information to the “little guy” on Twitter and not just to high-floor number Wall Street analysts at industry events and on conference calls. Formally developing a solid, fact-based response to these concerns whether positive or negative is fast becoming a top priority for IR departments. If you haven’t been asked about what you and the company plan to do about Twitter yet, you will soon.
Is That Tweet Official?
One of the biggest difficulties in understanding just what companies are actively involved in Twitter is getting a handle on just who is and isn’t running an official corporate Twitter profile. Just because there is a Twitter account at twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean that it is related to Big Cool Company at all. It may be someone who has no connection to the company and just likes to talk about it, for better or worse.
Often, official looking Twitter accounts are actually just the personal accounts of a company’s employees. The catch is that it can be somewhat less than clear under what circumstances these employees are tweeting under.
All the same, just because a Twitter account isn’t twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean it is NOT the official company Twitter account, like ebayinkblog (more below). Or, do you see where the Corporate Eye Twitter account goes?
Some Twitters have the company’s explicit permission to post on Twitter, but are not endorsed by the company, meaning any postings are the employee’s opinion and responsibility and not the company’s. Meanwhile, some twitter users have either no permission from their employer, or that permission is implicit, meaning that not only are their tweets not the official position of the company, they aren’t even acknowledged by the company.
Corporations Tweeting on Twitter
One of the high profile Twittering companies lately is eBay. The online auctioneer started a corporate blog in April 2008 and within a couple of months, corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay was tweeting on Twitter as well. The Twitter profile is called ebayinkblog, which at first blush may make it seem to be an unofficial Twitter account. However, the “Bio” section of the account clearly states its position as, “The Twitter feed for the official eBay corporate blog…” which is called eBay Ink.
A recent Wall Street Journal article notes how once tweets containing information about quarterly earnings and other financial info began appearing, eBay’s attorney’s showed up and required regulatory disclaimers on some of the tweets. If even a technology savvy Internet based corporation like eBay seems nervous about what goes up on Twitter, what does that say about the chances of a useful IR Twitter account at other companies?
Actually, it turns out the answer isn’t as clear as it might appear. While eBay does have an official, active Twitter account, other technology giants do not. Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Google, EMC, Texas Instruments, and Amazon all have corporate Twitter accounts. There are dozens of IBMers who have Twitter accounts, though there is no official IBM account. Likewise, there is no official Intel Twitter profile, despite how close twitter.com/Intel comes to looking like it is.
Just because a company has a Twitter account doesn’t mean that they do anything with it other than sending out customer offers, responding to customer complaints (usually from other Twitter users), and promoting marketing events. Indeed, EMC VP Chuck Hollis notes in his social media blog (as opposed to his “day job” blog, both hosted at emc.com) that many companies do nothing more with their Twitter accounts than re-post a one-line with links to press releases.
However, Mr. Hollis goes on to note the vast potential of social media sites like Twitter. If this company bigwig gets it, maybe that fear about your competitors taking off and leaving you in the dust isn’t so far fetched after all.
Investor Relations Twitter Beginning Strategy Steps
Without a clear cut path to point to, what should the savvy IR Department group do?
First, make a list of your direct competitors. Twitter is not a zero sum game. Your competitors do not have to lose for you to win and vice versa. However, the world of Twitter is just too big to try and monitor everyone, so start with a short list of your closest competitors.
Monitor what they do with the official Twitter accounts if they have one. Pay particular attention to what they do and do not tweet regarding things like financials, analyst meetings, conference calls, regulatory findings and so on.
Next, start Tweeting; not as a company official, but as a private citizen. Use your name or a pseudonym, but leave out your connection to your employer. You want to be able to practice your tweets. There is a whole world of etiquette and terminology to learn. It’s best to do that as Joe Public instead of as the official spokesperson of Big Cool Company.
Search out friends, family, and coworkers, then follow them. Read their tweets. Pay particular attention to what they “re-tweet.” Also, watch what, if anything, they blast from other Twitter users. What is considered spam, or rude, or newbie mistakes. Then, start making your own tweets and see what the response is like.
Once you have your feet wet, it is time to make a more in depth analysis about Twitter’s possible future at your company, particularly on the IR Website.
Next up: How To Use Twitter Power for Investor Relations
Grab the Investor Relations RSS Feed to keep up with our whole Twitter analysis.
Twitter and Investor Relations, Why So Difficult?
July 15, 2009
Take a look around in virtually any magazine, newspaper, trade publication, or website and you are bound to find numerous articles about Twitter, like this one here on Corporate Eye about creating value on Twitter. Publications and webpages with a technical audience (and authorship) are likely to proclaim Twitter as the future of all communications, and issue grave warnings that you are already falling behind in this critical new universe. Those resources dedicated to marketing and public relations may be less effusive, but are also likely to be completely on board with all things social media, including Twitter.
On the other hand, media with a legal or regulatory focus are more likely to sternly advise you of the inevitable lawsuits that will plague your company if you even think about Twitter in the wrong way. Mainstream investing publications seem to split the difference, calling on readers to aggressively use and promote a corporate Twitter account, while at the same repeatedly cautioning investment professionals to mind the possibility of violating securities related rules or regulations.
Twitter’s IR Conflict
The difficulty surrounding using Twitter or other social media, sometimes referred to as social marketing, stems from multiple factors. All too often, these intertwined concepts are glossed over, or simply ignored. Unfortunately, in business, ignorance is almost never bliss.
In this multipart series, we’ll take an in-depth look at Twitter and other social media websites like Facebook and see just what they have to offer top-level Investor Relations departments, and what perils the same sites may expose your company and your IR department to. Most importantly, we’ll look behind the opinions and statements and reveal the intricate play between the numerous factors that go into making Twitter such a challenging proposition for even the best prepared IR teams.
Social Networking Basics Guide
Although Twitter seems to attract the most attention these days among those in the Investor Relations realm, it is far from the only social networking site. Twitter was launched in 2006, by then, sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook had been popular for years.
The most common resistance to social networking sites from non-users is that they can do the same thing via phone or email. While both provide the means to communicate with others, they require a continuous selection of who to include on each communication. Additionally, in order to keep certain communication separate from others, many people have multiple email accounts that they check with varying frequency.
Further, it is common to forget just who has and had not been included in previous communications, opening the possibility that people you intended to communicate with were, in fact, not contacted. Thus, the potential for accidental exclusion in any broad conversation is higher. The author actually did not let a favorite aunt (nor more than one client) know when his son was born because he thought the email lists he used had covered everyone while excluding those who would not be interested.
Email,then is best suited for either small or static, homogeneous groups, such as members of a team.
Social networking sites, by contrast, are a way for self-defined collection of individuals to communicate in an open manner. Unlike email which requires the sender choosing to specifically include you on each email, social networking sites provide for anyone who has been previously included to take part in all exchanges. As an added bonus, unlike email, social networking messages need not commingle with other communications because messages can be read online instead of through an inbox.
What Is Twitter? Twitter Explained
Not long ago, whether or not you knew about Twitter was largely defined by your age. Twitter was originally conceived as a way to send short “status updates” to your friends. “Short” was set at 140 characters in large part because this amount would be an acceptable size for a SMS message, more commonly known as a text message, on any US wireless network.
In the early days, Twitter was used primarily by teenagers and twenty-somethings to find out what their friends were literally doing. With Twitter, your friend Dave could tell you what club he was planning on going to. Then, when that location turned out to be lame, Dave could update his status to let everyone know he was moving on to the next location. When he got somewhere he was happy with, he could report that too. Using this information, Dave’s friends didn’t have to worry about showing up at the wrong location and Dave and his friends didn’t have to make dozens of annoying cell phone calls just to find out what everyone else was doing.
Other users found Twitter a refreshing way to text their friends faster and easier than by typing on their cell phones. It was during this initial phase that Twitter earned its reputation as nothing more than a place where you tell other people what you had for dinner and read about what other people had for dinner.
Today, nobody posts an update about what they ate for dinner.
Real Friends and Twitter Friends
One of the difficulties many first time users find with Twitter is the concept of friends. In the real world, friends is a select group of people. Depending on your demographic, it is possible that many of your friends do not have Twitter accounts. As such, you would have only a few friends to follow and only a few friends to follow you. This makes Twitter virtually worthless since other methods are a more efficient way of communicating with small numbers of users.
This may explain why Twitter caught on faster with younger people who are more likely to form and disband ad hoc groups at different times for various events. Consider a single person who begins their weekend as part of a group of ten, all attending the same concert; that becomes a group of fifty people, some the same and some different than the original ten, at a party after the concert, which then morphs into a group of 15 avid bicyclists planning a Sunday afternoon ride.
For this type of situation, the number of friends is significantly higher than the traditional definition and includes not just person friends, but also members of the same groups, both formal and informal. Another cyclist, for example, with no interest in the concert, party, or breakfast, can still stay connected about where to show up.
Investor Relations and Investing Friends?
How, then, can such a concept grow to include Investor Relations? Certainly, IR cannot consider everyone who requests an annual report to be a friend.
Therein lies the possibilities of Twitter. Thanks to its broadcast nature, comments, suggestions, and even the bane of email-based communication, jokes, can all be “sent” in a way that they can be seen and read by “everyone” without being perceived as junk communication.
Indeed, in a real way, Twitter is the “Send to All” button. However, where sending a message to everyone in an email is reviled as spam, Twitter, is the ultimate opt-in campaign.
Ready to get started right now?
Hold on. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
Watch for the next article in our series, or just grab the Investor Relations RSS feed and let it come to you.
Investor Relations Audience Targeting
July 6, 2009
Running an investor relations website is complicated enough. Ensuring that data is posted in a timely manner, but not too early so as to upstage a presentation, or worse, drop into a regulatory spider web of sticky questions regarding public and non-public disclosure. All while keeping both management and shareholders happy and informed.
In the past, we’ve looked at how investor relations provides information for employee shareholders, as well as the need to provide useful investing data to retail shareholders or private shareholders, and of course, no one can forget about institutional shareholders. But, just how does an IR team go about getting all of that information displayed in a compelling and appealing manner on the investor section of a website?
One intriguing idea is being used by UniCredit Group. UniCredit Group has what at first glance appears to be a common enough investor’s landing page. However, in the middle of the page are two tabs, one labeled “Institutional Investors” and the other labeled “Private Shareholders.”
Such a layout acknowledges the difference in the type of data and information each audience might want to see. At the current time it appears to be more of an experiment or a placeholder for a grander future divergence of information considering that one entire half of the Institutional tab’s display is taken up by a share price graph, data any institutional investor will no doubt have in much more detail at their fingertips.
Also, all of the publications, data, and documents displayed in the center tabbed area are also easily accessible via more standard menus. However, what makes the concept so compelling is its ability to highlight specific information based upon the target audience.
For example, a company in the middle of a press storm regarding a trivial matter being blown out of proportion by the media will find much more value in responding to private retail shareholders who may be concerned by what appear to be damaging press accounts, while more savvy institutional investors may be more likely to recognize the issue as nothing more than the whole lot of noise it is.
In this instance, the company could find much more value in highlighting a recent symposium or trade group presentation to the institutional audience instead of having to choose between risking appearing like they are burying the response to the “big news story” or risking that the well received presentation gets missed beneath what institutional investors would recognize as the rote response to a saucy but meatless news story.
Improving on a Good Idea
While UniCredit Group’s center located tabbed division is a clever solution to a tricky problem, one can’t help but imagine even better implementations of a similar concept.
An investor relations page that highlighted the appropriate tab by default for either registered users, recognized by their login information, or even just previous users, recognized by cookies set in the browser based upon which information was accessed on their last visit.
Indeed, one might expand the number of tabs to include not just retail investors and institutional investors, but also employee shareholders, or direct stock purchasers, or participants in DRIP offerings. Numerous scenarios can be envisioned under which each of the groups has as their primary concern a different issue, and the tabs can help ensure that the issue deemed important by each group is readily addressed.
Likewise, there would also be many instances in which the key concern of the day would be the same among all groups. With the tabs already in place, duplicating the same information to each tab would be a minimal effort, and despite the fact that all of the tabs have the same basic data posted on each of them, each shareholder would still feel that they were looking at information targeted specifically toward them.
Investor Relations Website Best Practices
As always, the objective is not to determine which pieces add up to the “best” investor relations webpages, but rather to develop and understand techniques and tactics which can aid in the ultimate goal of an IR department which is the timely and accurate dissemination of information and data to shareholders. The tabbed concept would not be right for all IR groups, but could provide a boon for those looking for way in which to get more into less room.
Additionally, whether using tabs or not, the easy to see split between types of shareholders conveys the impression that all investors regardless of type are important and that the IR department will ensure that users receive tailored information regardless of who they are or how much they will be investing.
And, when you make investors feel like they are cared about by competent and responsive company representatives, you have already gone a long way toward making them feel like your company might be one they would want to be stockholders in.
Bond Investors are Investors Too
June 9, 2009
For many companies, Investor Relations is all about the stockholders. This focus is not surprising. Regulatory filings are generally focused around company stock, and there tend to be more stock investors than bond investors ringing the phones of the IR group.
Stock investors tend to be a more fickle bunch, especially retail investors looking for quick trading profits. Such investors are actually the least likely to ever even see your IR page, let alone examine it carefully. However, longer-term investors, and certainly institutional investors will want to devour as much information as possible about the company and its operations. Often, this research is a quest for information that others don’t realize yet, or that is being misinterpreted by the markets.
If others don’t realize just how strong the company is, or how quickly it will recover from its recent missteps, then buying now in order to wait for others to finally see the more obvious data come in can result in a tidy profit. However, finding such information means wading deep into documents, filings, and transcripts in search of uncovered stones, since just about everyone will be aware of more obvious elements like P/E ratios and earnings statements.
The quest of many IR departments is thus to fulfill the basic legal and regulatory requirements for the majority of visitors, as well as provide data and information to be absorbed by media, analysts, and those investors and potential investors who want ever more data.
What about Debt Investors?
For many years now, the IR departments of many companies have simply outsourced their bond-based Investor Relations to the various debt ratings agencies like Moody’s, Standard and Poors, and Fitch. However, with the financial meltdown came the uncomfortable realization that the ratings agencies don’t always know best.
Still, most debt investors at least start their investment research with the bond ratings provided by the rating firms. Yet, many IR websites don’t even acknowledge the company has bonds outstanding, let alone provide ratings or research. This may be a mistake, especially for companies with solid ratings.
Consider the income investor looking for, perhaps, a dividend paying stock. Maybe, for whatever reason, he decides that while he likes the company, the stock just isn’t right for him right now. But, his attention is drawn to the Debt or Bonds link on the IR site and maybe, he likes what he sees there. Purchasing those bonds would surely keep the company on the radar of such an investor and may result in a share purchase later, particularly if the stock is unfairly beaten down by surrounding events.
Likewise, a potential investor who is on the fence about a stock purchase may have already devoured all of the information provided, but still hasn’t been able to come to a solid conclusion. Upon clicking on the Debt links in the sidebar, the investor notices that the company’s outstanding bond issues are all highly rated. Even better, he notes that the bonds are all issued at low rates suggesting both the consensus opinion that the company is sound, and that it can use the leverage provided by the capital markets if the opportunity arises. Combined with the other “pluses” from the rest of the time spent on the IR site, those bond ratings turn the potential investor into a shareholder.
Providing Bond Information
Certainly, a company’s debt information can confuse an otherwise clean and solid Investor Relations web page. That is why it is often wise to create a sub-site for debt ratings and other bond information.
Old Mutual provides just such information in a clean and classic fashion. On an investor relations site filled with information, a single link is displayed. This serves both to avoid complicating the investment information sought by equity investors and shareholders, and by being the same kind of link in the menu as all the others, it also conveys that debt information is regarded as just as important by the company as the other similarly linked items.
Choosing to title the menu link as “Debt Investors” allows the company to sidestep any negative connotation regarding its outstanding bonds. This section, the title suggests, will not be an excuse for having excess debt, but rather a way to ensure that investors in such products are properly informed.
Once clicked, the bond investor finds themselves on an internal landing page where at-a-glance information is provided in the form of a table. An investor, whether equity or debt can peruse the outstanding issues and their ratings. If further details are desired, links are provided both in the form of sub-menus. Each issue is also clickable resulting in the user being shown the offering circular for that particular issue.
The company also provides its overall ratings, and links to the full company report from the rating agencies. This ensures that the prospective investor will go from here to impartial third-party research rather than a Google search sending them to whatever commentator happens to have chosen the right keywords for their search engine optimization efforts.
Old Mutual goes a step further by providing a dedicated Debt investor contact for users. Any savvy debt investor knows that their is a world of difference between an equity investment and buying a company’s bonds, and it must be reassuring to see that the company understands that as well.
Investor Relations Best Practices
Consider incorporating debt ratings and bond information on your investor relations website as well. Take care to ensure that the additional details do not add to the overall complexity of the IR webpages by segregating them under their own easy to find link or menu option. However, don’t make the mistake of “burying” debt information under other seemingly related links. Bond data is not so common on IR sites yet that a bond investor will look very far to find it. Two levels deep in the menu structure virtually guarantees the user will have left the site before finding what they are looking for.
Regulatorily speaking, providing links to companies like the rating agencies are some of the safest links an investor page can make, as they are already widely regarded as impartial third-party links. However, linking to only one agency with the highest rating would be a mistake. If possible, provide links to all three major rating agencies, in addition to any other provided links.
The investor who finds what they are looking for on your official IR site will find little incentive to go elsewhere, and with the current environment that rewards company criticism over praise, that may be half the battle.
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