In the old days, before the internet, investor relations departments operated with the telephone and paper based communications. (You remember getting letters with stamps on them, don’t you?)
If you were a large corporation with a significant shareholder base, this meant that at certain times during the year, the volume of phone calls and letters would spike. Usually these increases would be around the issuance of dividend checks (When are they coming? Why haven’t I … Read the rest
Companies are of two minds about Annual General Meetings of Shareholders; some view them as a necessary evil to be dispensed with as quickly and with as little fanfare as possible; others see it as an opportunity to reach out to their owners and present the Board and management in the best possible light while giving the shareholders a good overview of the company and its goals. If your company is in the first camp, … Read the rest
All businesses have specialized terms that they use in describing their business. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this, as such terms serve as a convenient shorthand and relieve the reader of the tedium of continually having something explained to them that they already know.
Things become a little murky however, when the shorthand terms get further reduced to acronyms and the reader is left wondering what the latest … Read the rest
Customer relations (and I use the term loosely) has undergone a number of iterations over the years as companies have sought to satisfy the ever increasing demands of customers for information in a cost efficient manner. During my lifetime I have seen a variety of solutions attempted, ranging from customer service teams onsite (expensive, and usually with long wait times), touch tone telephone service systems (usually with incomprehensible choices) to banks of operators standing by … Read the rest
When Google speaks, people listen. Whether it is the enormous market capitalization, the global reach of the company’s well-known brand, or simply the expectation that the company will continue to be a worldwide innovator, when Google does something new, it matters to more than just Internet searchers.
Recently, Google released its first-quarter earnings in a manner that broke the traditional mold for releasing financial information. Instead of posting the actual press release and financial numbers … Read the rest
