Newswires and IR websites are still important, bur in the social media age there is more to announcing your financial news, writes Richard Carpenter of Merchant
The way companies send out financial news is going through radical change, and if you were one of the investor communications professionals keeping your head down and ignoring the revolution, now is the time for a rethink.
It is not just social media that is changing the way companies release earnings and other news, it is the wider online revolution. The “social” aspect has led to many new ways in which companies can disseminate information and avoid the risk of selective or slow disclosure. But information can also be tagged and labeled in a way that makes it far easier for companies to share financials (see panel on XBRL tagging system on page 63). These new techniques – if they can still be seen as new – are affecting long-established ways of releasing information and, in some cases, threatening the existence of practices and industries that traditionally supported the flow of financial information.
How are companies responding to this changing landscape? Take Hewlett Packard, which reported its third-quarter earnings in August using social media to support its release.
HP continues to use traditional techniques, including a public relations wire service (backed up with a conference call), posting on its website and filing with the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). But it complemented that by putting information on its StockTwits IR account, its Facebook page, providing highlights links on its corporate blog and online newsroom, and posting the presentation slides on SlideShare. If you wanted video content, that wasn’t overlooked either, with access via HP corporate sites or YouTube.
“Our goal is to make information about HP as easy to access as possible,” says Ethan Bauley, Managing Editor at HP corporate news. “The biggest challenge is one of the most mundane, which is synchronizing distribution among multiple channels. There really aren’t any tools that can simultaneously cross-post content to a wire service, Twitter, StockTwits, Facebook and YouTube. HP’s financial information is consistently among the most popular content we publish to our blog, Twitter profile and Facebook page, often outperforming marketing or product messages.”