Investor Relations on the Internet

Investor relations and the Internet

The Internet is revolutionizing all businesses (Hewlett Packard, Amazon books, Walmart)

The following speaker's notes are from a 1997 speech in London.

For communicators the shift is from mass communications theory and practice to one-to-one communications; an inevitability that is counter to recent history and practice. See NAIC and Schwab statistics below.

Some early milestones: CSX/Conrail - instant info to all parties; IBM/Lotus email solicitation in hostile takeover; Reuters - live results meeting on audio with Internet site slides.

Some numbers

- Nearly 80 per cent of the members of NIRI, the 3500-member US IR professional society, say their firms have, or would have, home pages up by August, 1997

- NAIC, the US small investor clubs group whose member portfolios represent 64 billion dollars, says it has 27,615 clubs with more than half a million members, compared to 12,429 clubs and 265,055 members just two years ago.

- Schwab and Co, the US discount broker, said it had over 750,000 on-line brokerage accounts containing more than 50 billion dollars worth of assets at end-March. It is adding at the rate of 11,000 a week.

- Forrester Research was quoted in Fortune magazine recently as saying it expects to see ten million on-line brokerage accounts in five years, compared to a total estimated today at 1.5 million.

Benefits

Cost saving, faster than any other mechanism, fair dissemination, time indifferent, personalized/defined group-all publics choices, two-way contacts, multimedia.

Once apprehended, the technology is simple and extremely powerful, allowing incorporation of any data published anywhere in the organisation or industry.

Closer relations with target audiences, fast feedback in critical situations

Issues

Cost implications in opening this channel and further in using best practices (but how do you respond to an aggressive competitor who uses best practices?)

Higher visibility brings greater accountability

With greater access comes higher responsibility to the relationship

Best Practices

Recognition of Internet / Worldwide Web (WWW) value and especially the coming value needs to be made at the top of the organization, with detail which might otherwise be left to designers reviewed and driven by senior policy makers.

The starting point is determining each intended audience for the site

Research is number one. After deciding who to go after, a complete understanding of the expectations and desires of the site users is a must.

See Appendix I for a list of actions being carried out by the better sites.

Where to Learn More

The National Investor Relations Institute -- Many connections to useful web sites, plus a list of member corporate sites and those of several vendors to the industry.

www.cyberatlas.com for general analysis and summary of the many surveys of Internet and WWW use/activity.

www.webreference.com -- design tips and guidance for everyone from the novice to master webmasters.

www.sun.com -- for an information avalanche of design, style, construction and much more advice on communications and site development. Give the search engine your topic and stand back!

Appendix I

Below is a partial list of best practices in use on top sites. For articles on best practices and on identities of ten top global sites with hotlinks to the sites themselves, see the archives section.

Some Best Practices

-three years of annual reports, either in total or excerpted - but be careful with excerpts of numbers, most serious inquirers are irritated at a summary, they want all the numbers and they want them downloadable, something only a few sites currently provide.

- The latest quarterly or half-yearly reports. Full text and numerical press releases with tables are preferable. Again, down-loadable.

- Other press releases, a list of the last year’s is useful; or you can sample carefully.

- A description of the investment thesis, or story.

- A description of the company, its goals or mission, what it sells, who runs it.

- A site map and simple pointers home or to higher levels on all pages - getting lost is a major frustration.

- Review with your audiences their technical (Internet browser) capability. This bears on frustration levels again. Multiple versions of the site probably are required starting with a basic text version.

-Use light graphics; download time is getting worse and since you can’t fix the net, at least work with it by reducing the size of data files (pages and composition of graphics).

- Making the chief executive available for questions - probably best done by e-mail rather than "chat room,"

- Consider personalizing software which creates information from the site according to visitor-created profiles. Texas Instruments has done this. This is rapidly being supplanted by an advanced method called "push" technology.

Others

- Multiple language versions of the information, pointers to either onsite or offsite marketing and product sections, stock quotes, SEC filings and industry related pages -- several vendors offer turnkey dynamic data to raise the value of your site.

- Texts of speeches and white papers given at industry conferences are offered by such technology companies as Intel and Sun Microsystems. Every company ought to consider this.

Hally Enterprises Inc. provides two specialized services for the IR industry alongside full-service research and logistical support capabilities. They are: