Bookmarks for Investor Relations Officers

A Dozen addresses for every IR Officer’s Bookmark File

Places of reference for Investor Relations officers are widespread on the internet and its graphical interface, the Worldwide Web. But the search can be frustrating for just that reason -- they are spread out.

Taking the traditional route of inquiry via the many search engines only adds to the frustration. A recent effort using the term "investor relations" at Alta Vista is an example -- the response indicated over 30,000 citations. You will quickly discover as I did that the engine picks up every citation of each word, leading to horrible dead ends that cause instant revulsion regarding the whole process.
Keep an open mind. The Internet and WWW are very young - still teething in terms of life span. Therefore the tools like search engines are not at the most user friendly stage.

On the other hand, if you are the intensely curious sort who loves problem solving and mazes, by all means have a go -- follow through the leads. You will, in fact, find things that relate to the subject in addition to, for instance, the names of fellow practitioners whose job title triggered the search engine’s bookmarking. These are often in press releases which bear not at all on the practice of IR.

But in the interest of saving much time and perhaps informing, here are some ideas and locations old and new, obvious and unusual, culled from hundreds of hours of web-wandering.

This little tour includes the rather obvious and better-known, as an introduction for those practitioners just coming up on the subject. Those of you accustomed to the net and IR thereon can skim on to some of the less traditional outposts listed further along in this article. If you pursue each of the topics below, you will probably want to break up your exercise into three or four sessions. What takes only a few moments to introduce to you will take a good deal longer to properly explore.

NIRI, naturally, is a great starting place (www.niri.org). The web wizards there have not only created a very good set of connections to useful web sites, but also give you the chance to look at other corporate sites and those of several vendors to the industry.

On the corporate sites, you can get some ideas on what competitors offer customers and shareholders, as well as have the chance to see the best and worst of practices.

Choosing the next best thing to look at is tough - so much depends on what you are after. The SEC location at www.sec.gov has all around appeal as it both provides current regulatory information and access to the EDGAR database, a utility for which many IR sites have a pointer. Creating a pointer from your site to EDGAR saves having to put all that info on yourself, not an issue for the well-bankrolled, but certainly a concern for the budget conscious.

Some means of getting to understand use of the net is high on the needs list. Take a look at www.cyberatlas.com for general analysis and summary of the many surveys that pop up regularly. They help put Internet and web use in some reasonable perspective; at the very least you will have the statistics in hand to demonstrate just how amazingly fast the Internet medium and its components are growing. Surveys of users, corporate sites, servers in use, browser uptake, etc., etc., all get summarized here. Hotlinks exist to take you to the survey authors and in some cases the full survey results.

Cyberatlas is one of many remarkably valuable sites which can be found at http://marketing.tenagra.com/pubnet/. Steve O’Keefe uses this site to promote his book, "Publicity on the Internet," but it has a tremendous trove of marketing information which is updated regularly.

Next comes design. Getting the design of the website and the IR component right is a challenge, especially so early in the game with so little to go on. Another O’Keefe indexed site on this front is found at www.webreference.com, one of several helpful sites he points to on design. This one is powerful, with tons of information to help everyone from the novice to the master webmasters out there.

Like so many aspects of creating the right site, design is specialized but that doesn’t mean your graphics designers down the street have the answer. For some time, one of the country’s largest companies displayed the result of asking their ad agency to handle website design. They wound up with a home page comprising the front of the annual report - a big bold graphic filling the screen with color and the company name, but with no clue as to what a visiting browser should do next. No buttons, no pointers, no way into the rest of the pages. I suspect most visitors left quickly. The site has been re-designed.

A tip of the digital chapeau to Sun Microsystems, which by the way has one of the better websites, both generally and in IR terms, for sharing with us their design efforts. Indeed few companies share more than Sun does on its site. If you use the upfront search engine, typing in "Web Page" for instance, you will begin to appreciate all that is available. Tips and tales of true experiences for the novice on through to systems engineers are all here at www.sun.com.

What else to look at? I have purposefully avoided vendor and consultancy sites for obvious reasons - we are not here to promote the promoters. You will after all find a list of many at the NIRI site and more are diligently hammering at your door or inserting themselves guilelessly into search engines each day. Do be warned -- many of these sites are little more than brochures, but there are some gems in the rubble. Nelson’s Directories offers one at www.nelnet.com. It contains a raft of information on money managers which can be quite helpful.

NIRI also has pointers to the important exchanges, associations and governmental units with on-line data. So let’s identify a few others you may not have stumbled across.

At Stanford University, where (all affiliations laid bare) I was fortunate enough to spend some time at mid-career studying computer networks and such, the law school has mounted a great resource. It is called the Securities Class Action Clearinghouse. You will be saddened to hear as I have been that the reform legislation aimed at reducing so-called "strike" suits has not yet done so. Therefore, we in IR need to be well-armed in the battle with those who paper the innocent with lawsuits while occasionally nailing a few bad guys.

Stanford law has come to the rescue with http://securities.stanford.edu. The site is chock full of information about judgments, opinions, motions and other legal odds and ends that provide a firm basis for anyone who gets legally naked before the world as a public company spokespersons do regularly.

Another enticing site operated from the world of academe in which the Internet got its first burst of growth is run by the Journal of Finance at Ohio State. Set aside some time to explore www.cob.ohio-state.edu/~fin/journal/jofsites.htm (not to mention some more time just to punch in that address!) They have scores of pointers to sites covering just about every aspect of the capital markets.

On the internal side of our duties, another site -- one carrying indexes to others of the same ilk -- has been set up to cover corporate governance. This material is becoming more and more valuable to the IR person who needs to turn to senior management and the board with information on developments and best practices. You will find news and resource links galore on this topic at www.financenet.gov.

If accounting is your concern, and certainly changes, interpretations and a host of applications can impact every company, then the place for you is at Rutgers University. This labor of love has enough accounting lore to keep you well ahead of the pack, and pointers to various organizations and sites across the globe ( as if the GAAP here wasn’t wide enough...)

Last but not least: the Vice President comes through. I don’t know about you, but Al Gore seems to have found a way to sponsor initiatives and get America moving in just about every part of my life in the last few years. You will be happy to know he didn’t miss IR. Well, he didn’t miss the world of finance, which includes IR. FINancenet was created by Mr. Gore, the site tells us, and has become "the largest financial database in the world," or words to that effect. Help yourself, it has an awesome list of things financial for companies and corporate officers, and lots more -- from the CIA Factbook to Yanoff’s Internet Access List, whatever that is.

[First published in IRQ, the NIRI quarterly.]

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