On the other hand, if your Annual Meeting has a high information quotient, it makes sense to place a video of it on your web site where investors that were unable to attend can view the information presented. Any number of companies now place videos of their entire meeting on their web sites. Microsoft, the computer software company, is one that does just that.

While you can put the entire meeting up on the web site, you don’t really need to.

Annual Meetings break down into three basic segments: the business meeting (the boring stuff), management’s presentation (the interesting stuff) and shareholder questions and answers (the stuff that can be anything, from the banal to the insightful).

Obviously, what investors want to see is the interesting stuff, where management reviews the past year and discusses their outlook for the upcoming year. BASF, the German chemical company, handles the differing parts of the annual meeting in an interesting way. As can be seen in the screen shot, the business part of their meeting is presented in written documents, while their CEO’s speech and accompanying slides are available in video format. (In the case of BASF, I could find no record of any shareholder questions at the meeting.)

However you choose to divide up and present the annual meeting, you should consider placing a video of it in the investor section of your web site. Chances are it contains information investors will find valuable.

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 What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 31: Annual General Meetings

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 received mine? How do I replace a lost check?), and the annual general meeting (When is it? Where is it? Can my Aunt Sophie come too?), but certain other types of calls would occur with great regularity as well.

Around tax time, for example, many calls would come in trying to find out how much the shareholder had received in dividends over the past year as they had mislaid the tax reporting form mailed to them in January. Or the shareholder needed to figure out the tax cost basis of the stock they sold in the prior year. Or they had lost their stock certificate. The list goes on, but I will spare you.

The resulting quantity of calls and letters meant that the investor relations staff was stretched, response times slowed down and shareholders were not given the prompt attention they would normally receive. Authorizing more payroll to fix the problem was not considered a good fix as companies do not staff to meet peak demands. So we muddled through and breathed a sigh of relief when things calmed down.

Fortunately, the advent of company investor websites means that it is now possible to allow shareholders to look up much of this information for themselves. Further, they can do this whenever they want to, as opposed to being forced to call during business hours. Well designed Frequently Asked Questions sections (FAQs) can be very helpful in getting information to shareholders before they get frustrated. Set out below is a nice example of a FAQ section by Kingfisher, the home improvement retailer. They appear to have looked at their incoming questions from shareholders and attempted to design a page that answered many of them. It is a good example of using the web to help shareholders help themselves if they want to, but you will also note that at the very top of the page, shareholders are given a link to company contact information.

A lot of heartburn by both shareholders and investor relations departments can be avoided by following this example.

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 What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 41: Dealing With Shareholders’ Frequently Asked Questions

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 three or four letter combination means. It seems that the more specialized the industry, the greater the number of terms and acronyms get tossed around.

To take a simple example, in retail, comparable store sales, a common measure of sales for stores that have been open for a year or more are sometimes referred to as comps, same store sales, SSS, identical store sales and idents.

In the U.K., the very same measure is often referred to as Like for Like sales or LFL. An American investor looking at a British retail company, or a British investor looking at a U.S. merchant, will often find themselves scratching their heads trying to figure out if they understand what is being referred to.

There is a simple way to deal with this issue, although it does take some effort as it is not something your standard investor relations web site provider is likely to have ready to hand to you off the shelf. Companies with a need to explain their language to investors should create a glossary of terms and include it on their website. Clear and concise definitions can be set forth that will put the investor’s mind at ease that they understand what is being referred to in the discussion of operations.

A good example of how to do this is on the web site for the real estate developer and manager, British Land. Anyone that has ever dealt with real estate people will tell you that they tend to speak a different language. The concepts are the same as in classic finance – cash flow, returns on assets, capital and so forth, but they give everything a different name. So a glossary for the non-specialist is very helpful. And as you can see from the screenshot above, British Land does a nice job setting out explanations for the terms they think you ought to know. More companies should consider incorporating something similar into their IR web presence.

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 What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 30: Help Investors Understand Your Language

At least one of these obstacles can be overcome with the judicious use of an investor relations web site. Shareholder newsletters are a great way to reach out to individual investors, but in the past have been expensive to produce and distribute. The web and some publishing software now mean that almost any investor relations department can produce a shareholder’s newsletter at minimal cost. Time and effort still have to be devoted to writing and editing the newsletter, but you no longer have to write big checks to printers, designers and postal authorities.

Below, I’ve included samples from Total, the French energy company and EADS, the European aerospace company. The two companies take differing approaches with their newsletters, with Total focusing more on descriptions of the company and its employees while EADS spends more space discussing financial results, but the point is that they are both geared towards non-technical investors. They both help individual investors understand the companies.

Both of these newsletters have the look of being professionally produced, but companies with smaller IR budgets than either Total or EADS can also produce good looking newsletters and distribute them via the web and email at minimal cost. The reward should then be a more stable and diverse investor base that supports your company.

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 What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 14: Engaging the Individual Investor

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 in some country you’ve never heard of.

Generally speaking, the economic solution has been to attempt to substitute the use of capital and technology for high cost labor. None of these have yielded optimal results.

It has been the same with shareholders. It can be very difficult and frustrating to get an answer about your stock. And yet most companies wish to have a large component of their shares owned by individual shareholders.

The advent of the internet has allowed companies to attempt to solve this problem by putting access to more information than ever in the hands of shareholders. This means that shareholders can look things up for themselves at the time of their choosing without being reliant on someone to look it up for them. Further, given the bandwidth of the web, web sites don’t have long waiting times during busy periods, such as tax filing time.

The challenge to companies is to design a page that clearly directs shareholders to the information they need to find. One site that does a good job of this is Centrica plc in their Shareholder centre page reproduced below. The page lays out the most common pieces of information sought by individual shareholders in a very easy to follow format. If a shareholder wants to find dividend information, it is clearly labeled. There are clear links to commonly requested pieces of information such as current and historic share prices. In short, the company has enabled the shareholder to easily find pertinent information.

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 What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 17: Make the Individual Shareholder Feel Welcome