SPARE a thought for eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay.
He is the only person on the microblogging service Twitter who live-tweets his company’s quarterly earnings conference calls. That’s partly why I’ve previously called him one of the best corporate bloggers.
However, he has been doing these live-tweeting sessions for the past three quarters without the company’s legal team knowing. But they found out, and recently called him in to discuss.
One outcome of these talks is a new four-part Twitter disclaimer that Brewer-Hay must tweet before he starts each live-tweeting session to cover eBay’s earnings calls:
Tweet 1: “Important information about the nature of this session. Forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. Click here:”
Tweet 2: “This session will contain non-GAAP financial measures.”
Tweet 3: “The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures.”
Tweet 4: “A reconciliation of these measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures can be found by clicking on the following link:”
This is hilarious, but I have to give the eBay lawyers credit for their inventiveness and for going where no securities lawyers have gone before.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which itself is on Twitter, issued new guidance for using company websites and blogs last August, but those guidelines are silent about how to handle disclaimers in 140 characters or less.
There is one other change to how eBay will be blogging and tweeting that is not in the least bit funny. I’ll have more to say about that on Monday.
IRWebReport.com was founded by Dominic Jones in February 2001 to promote best practices for online investor relations communications. In July 2010, the site had more monthly visitors than IR Magazine and IR Alert combined, according to Compete. We would like to thank our readers for their continued support and interest.
Dominic, can you imagine the look on the faces of the lawyers when they first found out about RBH’s live tweets:
JOHN: “Bob, brace yourself, our IR has been on TWITTER!”
BOB: “TWITTER? TWITTER? Holy $%#^, call a meeting and get everyone in here. Marge, call my wife and tell her we won’t be going away this weekend.”
JOHN: “What are we going to do? Do you think the world knows?”
BOB: “I don’t know but we need disclaimers and fast. Long ones. Real long, big ass disclaimers so those Twitter people don’t revolt against us one day.”
JOHN: “I think you only have like a couple of hundred characters, or something. They’re weird in that world”
BOB: “Good god, man. What kind of people are we dealing with. Thank god we’re here to help them.”
END
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Twitter Comment
And a rather amusing piece about the 4-tweet SEC disclaimer eBay need to post prior to any IR weeting. – [link to post]
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[...] SEC disclaimers in the age of Twitter | IR Web Report “SPARE a thought for eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay. He is the only person on the microblogging service Twitter who live-tweets his company’s quarterly earnings conference calls. That’s partly why I’ve previously called him one of the best corporate bloggers. However, he has been doing these live-tweeting sessions for the past three quarters without the company’s legal team knowing. But they found out, and recently called him in to discuss.” [...]
[...] corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay kicked off the day’s back channel with his company’s new made-for-Twitter disclaimer and began relaying bite-sized snippets of information from the meeting room, which he would do for [...]