THERE are many reasons why investor relations officers and company executives avoid participating in new media such as blogs and social networks, but often the grounds they give are more misconceptions than real barriers.

Take Regulation FD, for example.  In my discussions with companies and other consultants, it’s the main reason given for companies taking a pass on the opportunities available to them to connect with a huge audience of investment professionals and sophisticated individual investors on Seeking Alpha.

But concerns about IROs and company executives selectively disclosing material non-public information on Seeking Alpha are unfounded for two main reasons:

1. You have time to think and review before posting.

No one is pressuring you to post an article or respond to a question on Seeking Alpha. You have ample time to carefully consider what you are posting and even have someone review it before it goes live.

In this sense, participating on Seeking Alpha is much less risky than the common IR practice of meeting pushy professional investors in private. Any executive or IRO who worries about selectively disclosing information on a web service like Seeking Alpha probably should never meet with investors in private one-on-ones because they’re obviously not competent enough to do so.

Additionally, Seeking Alpha users aren’t looking for material non-public information. They’re looking for investment ideas and background information that can help them understand your business and its future potential. While you could use the site to distribute breaking news, that’s generally not why investors use Seeking Alpha.

2. Posts on Seeking Alpha are public.

Even if executives inadvertently provide material non-public information on Seeking Alpha, it’s hard to argue that posts on Seeking Alpha are non-public. Not only are postings on the service exposed to a potential verified audience of up to 3 million investors, Seeking Alpha also uses technology that can distribute the information simultaneously and in near real-time to multiple locations on the web, including to the company’s own website.

In fact, this technology is faster and more open than the PR newswire services that IR departments current rely upon to distribute their material news.

It is getting to the point now that any post or message on the public web can reach any interested investor within seconds of it being made. A post on Seeking Alpha or a myriad of other locations on the web is no longer a proverbial tree falling in the forest. This is because of new technologies that have emerged over the past year, including real-time syndication and search technologies.

When the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued guidance in August 2008 saying that posts on the web can meet the requirements of Reg. FD, these real-time technologies either did not exist or were not widely deployed. Besides, the SEC determined that it was not necessary to use push technology for a website posting to be deemed public. Fast forward to today, and it’s hard to argue that any post that uses real-time syndication technologies and is indexed by real-time search can ever be considered non-public.

The lynchpin in Seeking Alpha’s real-time syndication system is Twitter, the popular microblogging service that in turn can be linked to a variety of other services on the web. By setting up a Twitter account and linking it to your Seeking Alpha account, real-time alerts can be spread automatically across the web to notify investors that a company executive has added content to Seeking Alpha. This can be set up by default so that all your activity on Seeking Alpha is automatically sent to Twitter in the form of a headline and a link to the Seeking Alpha content.

It’s important to understand that notices sent to Twitter do not need to stay on Twitter. You can automatically post your Seeking Alpha notices via Twitter to your corporate website using a variety of free widgets that are simple to embed on your IR homepage. And from your own site, you can include the notices in web feed and email alerts to your subscribers.

You can also send your Twitter messages to other web pages you control, including a Facebook page. And with a little careful writing of your headlines, you can also ensure that your posts will be indexed by services like StockTwits, which tracks real-time conversations around stocks and other securities. All you have to do is follow @stocktwits from your Twitter account and include a $ symbol in front of your company’s ticker in all of your Seeking Alpha headlines and they will instantly appear in the streams of investors who are interested in your company, and potentially even on their Bloomberg terminals.

In essence, with the technologies available today, every executive and IRO can have a personal newswire that connects them to interested investors in real-time anywhere in the world and on any Internet-connected device. Anyone can set this up, and it doesn’t cost a penny.

Indeed, I foresee a time in the near future when legal counsel will consider it reckless for executives not to have such a personal syndication system in place.

Getting off the old IR treadmill

Most IR departments are caught on a treadmill of tired practices that are becoming increasingly ineffective. IROs don’t use the web because the phones keep ringing, and the phones keep ringing because IROs don’t use the web.

But the fact is, participating in social media requires less time, less resources, involves less selective disclosure risk, and can deliver better ROI for each dollar spent than traditional IR activities, which typically reach fewer investors, come with hefty costs per investor reached, and require a lot more of the executive teams’ time in terms of preparation, travel and meetings, not to mention heightened selective disclosure risks.

Meanwhile, various surveys have recently found that investment professionals are increasingly turning to blogs and social media as a source of new ideas. A September 2009 survey of almost 500 investment professionals conducted by Brunswick Group, the international financial communications firm, found that 20% of the respondents reported having invested in a company they first learned about via a blog. And fully 58% of respondents in the U.S. and Europe said they believe new media will become increasingly important to the investment process in the future.

If ever there was a time for IR departments and company executives to start using social media, it is now. And as I survey all of the options available to companies to enter this arena, Seeking Alpha stands out for me as the single best place to start. It has an audience most IR departments will be comfortable engaging with, and the management team there is committed to helping IROs and company executives find their way on to the social web, just has they have done for financial professionals.

This is the last post in my 3-part series on Seeking Alpha. See Part 1 For Investor Relations, Seeking Alpha may be the ideal social network and Part 2 How to get started on Seeking Alpha

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us via email. And if you have any comments about the series, leave them in the comments below.

NOTE: After getting some feedback from readers, I thought it good to make clear that I have no connection to Seeking Alpha other than being a user of the site like anyone else. Long time friends and foes will know that I never shill for *anyone.* Seeking Alpha’s independently verifiable numbers speak for themselves and I steadfastly believe there are huge opportunities available to competent IROs and executives who want to tell their stories.

IN MY previous post, I called attention to the outstanding readership profile of Seeking Alpha, an increasingly popular web service that offers public company representatives an unprecedented opportunity to connect with a highly qualified audience of investors and analysts.

In this post, I’ll explore different ways that investor relations departments can use Seeking Alpha to raise awareness of their companies among the site’s almost 3-million-strong audience of professional and sophisticated individual investors.

Companies that currently have a low profile among U.S. investors, such as thousands of smaller U.S. companies and hundreds of international companies with a U.S. capital market presence, will likely benefit most from building a presence on Seeking Alpha.

There are a variety of ways companies can build a presence on Seeking Alpha. However, the more effort your company is able to invest in the site, the higher the potential rewards. The best results will be achieved by companies that become active and trusted contributors to Seeking Alpha.

1. Advertising

This is undoubtedly the easiest and lowest risk approach to getting attention on Seeking Alpha; create an online display ad and pay Seeking Alpha to run it. If you have the budget, I see no reason why you wouldn’t want to advertise on Seeking Alpha. Of course, advertising costs money and typically isn’t a long-term strategy. However, you could consider using it for a limited time in combination with other tactics.

2. Contributor Outreach

The more information that is available about your company on Seeking Alpha, the better. It looks bad when there’s less information about your company on a site than there is for other companies. A lack of information, even if it is not of your own doing, doesn’t inspire confidence in investors.

Since much of the content on Seeking Alpha comes from its 3,600-odd contributing authors, reaching out to Seeking Alpha contributors with the objective of making them aware of your company is one way to raise your company’s profile on the site.

Some contributors may already be covering your company, your industry or your peers. You can find relevant contributors by visiting the company pages on Seeking Alpha to see what articles and comments have been written about your company and its peers. The Top Authors, Articles, Instablogs, Stocktalks and Comments areas on the stock pages will show you which contributors are active in your company’s industry.

You can identify active contributors that might be interested in your company by reviewing posts and comments made about your peers.

Many contributors have created profiles on Seeking Alpha. These may offer links to contributors’ websites as well as contact information. Calling or emailing contributors to introduce yourself and ask if they’d be interested in learning about your company won’t hurt a bit. If they’re not interested immediately, offer to put them on your mailing list or make yourself available to them if they  need information about your industry. Don’t spam contributors.

Seeking Alpha has a popular earnings call transcript database that is free to the public and therefore widely referenced and quoted by the site’s contributors and other bloggers. Transcripts make it easier for your company’s information to be discovered and increase the likelihood of contributors writing about your company.

Transcripts are currently provided for the highest profile U.S.-listed companies. If your company is not included in the site’s transcript coverage, you can have Seeking Alpha add your company for a modest annual fee. If you are already paying another service to transcribe your calls, it makes sense to switch to Seeking Alpha for the added exposure the service provides.

3. Become a Registered User

Becoming a registered user on Seeking Alpha is by far the best way to use the site. This involves creating a profile on the site, following other site users, contributing content and commenting on other users’ contributions. There is no cost to become a registered user.

Seeking Alpha is currently putting together a pilot program where they are authenticating accounts set up by representatives of public companies. This is a good idea because it helps the site’s users know when they are reading content provided by a verified company representative. Without it, anyone could pose as a company rep and post misinformation to the site.

It’s vital to recognize that you will only get out of Seeking Alpha what you are willing to put in. You have to be prepared to invest the time to become immersed in the site, reading other users’ contributions and participating only when you know you can add value. Treating Seeking Alpha as just another destination for your news releases, or simply pushing promotional materials to the site isn’t likely to get you very far, and could put people off.

It’s also important to recognize that contributors to Seeking Alpha are people, not companies. While you will be representing your company, you are you first and a representative of your company second. Do a good job of presenting yourself and your expertise to the community and that will rub off on your company. If you are good at your job and have a passion for your business, you’ll make a great Seeking Alpha user.

As a registered user, you have access to several important publishing tools. They are:

Your Profile

Unlike most other social networks, Seeking Alpha gives you a lot of room to promote yourself and your company. When you sign up for an account, you can create a personal profile on the site that includes a photograph and biographical information about yourself. You can also add a profile about your company including a logo, contact information and links to your website. The profile area also asks you to describe your investment interests and trading style. Most public company reps will probably choose “Stocks – long” under Interests and “N/A” under Trading Frequency. You can edit and update your profile at any time. Just click the Settings button in the Seeking Alpha toolbar that appears at the bottom of your browser window. Rhonda Bennetto of TVI Pacific Inc. has a good profile on Seeking Alpha.

Rhonda Bennetto of TVI Pacific Inc. shows how to create a good Seeking Alpha Profile.

Follow List

One of the first things to do after creating your profile is to make your presence on the site known to other users. The easiest way to do this is to follow other users. Following simply means that whenever you log in to Seeking Alpha, you will see the latest contributions from the people you are following.

If the people you follow are active Seeking Alpha users, they might follow you back. This is an important point. Not all contributors to Seeking Alpha are active site users. The editors source articles from a large number of finance bloggers and industry experts, but the authors might not be active on the site itself.

To find relevant people to follow, use the tactics I mentioned above under Contributor Outreach, such as following people who have written about your company, your peers and your industry in the past. As a registered user, there’s a shortcut you can use to find relevant people to follow. Set up a portfolio comprised of your company and its peers and every time you visit the portfolio page you will see the latest posts and comments about your portfolio companies.

It’s an especially good idea to follow people who comment on articles and posts about the companies in your portfolio because they are active site users and likely interested in the same things you are. I’ve set up a portfolio of companies that are active in the investor relations business and have found interesting people to follow as a result.

Setting up a portfolio lets you easily monitor activity around your peers and identify people to follow.

Comments

Commenting is an excellent way to make your presence on Seeking Alpha known to other users. Of course, commenting on articles about your company’s competitors can be tricky. Don’t use comments simply to promote yourself or your company — and never bash a competitor on the site. Instead, look for opportunities to add valuable industry context that can help other users. If you disagree with a post or someone else’s comment, say so and back up your argument with facts.

High quality, useful comments are likely to earn you attention from other users. They will likely click on your user name to learn more about you and might start following you as a result.

Instablogs

The Instablogs feature gives you the ability to post full-length articles on Seeking Alpha. Unlike “Articles” which are reviewed by Seeking Alpha’s editors, Instablogs are not distributed to Seeking Alpha’s partner sites, such as Yahoo! Finance. However, you have the option to submit any Instablog to the site’s editors for consideration. You should always do this if you are responding to an editor-reviewed article about your company by another contributor. Seeking Alpha’s policy is to give public company responses equal prominence to the original article you are responding to, including distribution to partner websites.

A big positive with Instablogs is that you have total control over the content, including the ability to edit or delete a post. Conversely, editor-reviewed Articles typically cannot be removed once they have been published, so keep this in mind before you submit an Instablog to Seeking Alpha’s editors for consideration.

Since Instablogs are given less prominence on Seeking Alpha than other content, there’s less incentive for companies to want to use this feature unless they have a reasonable number of followers who will be notified each time they add a new post. However, it’s important to begin adding Instablog content as soon as possible because the posts will help other users determine whether to follow you.

Probably the biggest challenge for public company representatives is knowing what content to provide through the Instablog feature and how to write it. This is not a place to post news releases about material or even non-material events. Instead, posts should provide in-depth, factual background on your company, its products and the wider industry.

As much as possible, write your posts in the first person and link to third-party sources of information and context, including to your competitors. Companies operating in specialized industries likely have the best prospects for gaining traction through the Instablog feature because they can contribute information that is currently missing from the site. Indeed, being a successful Seeking Alpha contributor is very much about finding your niche and building expert status in it.

StockTalks

StockTalks are Seeking Alpha’s version of Twitter messages. You have 140 characters or less for a message. I don’t really see much use for these except for drawing attention to Instablogs you might write. However, Seeking Alpha is giving StockTalks a lot of prominence on the site, so it’s worth exploring ways you might use them. The editors suggest using StockTalks to draw attention to new content you have posted on your website. This might be something worth exploring.

An uneasy new reality for IR

Building a presence on Seeking Alpha isn’t something you should do without thinking carefully about what you want to achieve and how you will manage the many added burdens that come with participating on third-party websites. In my next post, I’ll look at the legal and regulatory considerations of participating on sites like Seeking Alpha in more detail, but I believe they are easily managed and should not prevent you from participating.

Of course, this is all-new terrain for investor relations professionals. There is a lot about it that remains untested. But closing your eyes and ignoring a site like Seeking Alpha with it’s massive audience of prospective investors isn’t a serious option either.

If social websites like Seeking Alpha are where investors are going, then IROs and company executives will eventually go there, too. It’s only a matter of time. When, not if.

BY now you have probably heard the sales pitches from various pundits and salespeople about how your company should be using social media in its investor relations program because investors are increasingly using new media.

And to a large extent, the pundits are right. Investors are using the web and various social media more today than in the past, and they will continue to do so in the future.

The problem, however, is that IR departments can easily find themselves chasing the latest fads or pursuing activities that have poor return on investment.

Consumer services lack focus on investors and IR

Twitter has been getting a lot of attention from some quarters, but the truth is that it’s only modestly useful as an IR tool. The pundits’ next bandwagon will likely be Facebook, which is a slightly better option than Twitter but still nothing to get excited about.

Then there’s a host of document sharing services like SlideShare and Scribd that also are mildly useful, but nothing really groundbreaking.

Don’t get me wrong, you should be using all of these services strategically and tactically, but they don’t really offer anything particularly exciting from an investor relations perspective. The problem is they are general consumer services and don’t focus on the unique needs of investors or investor relations departments.

Seeking Alpha attracts professional audience

If you are seriously interested in reaching out to investors on the web through social media, then the best approach is to focus your efforts on services designed specifically for investors.

And one of the best is a site I have written about several times in the past, and which has gotten even better with time. Seeking Alpha — an investment website, social network, research hub and financial blog aggregator  — offers an unprecedented opportunity for good IR departments and competent CFOs and CEOs to get themselves and their companies in front of a highly qualified audience.

In fact, there is no more intelligent, influential and well educated financial audience on the social web than the people who frequent Seeking Alpha.

Consider the statistics:

• According to Quantcast, which directly measures Seeking Alpha’s traffic, about 2.8 million people visit the site monthly, of which 80% are based in the U.S.
• Seeking Alpha has the highest percentage of financial professionals of any major finance website, according to Nielsen, the audience analysis firm.
• Nielsen reports that more than half of Seeking Alpha’s readers provide frequent advice about financial information, with the closest second being Barron’s, with 28.3% of its audience providing frequent advice about financial information.
• Over 52% of Seeking Alpha readers bought stocks in the trailing 30 days — double the closest second TheStreet.com, at just over 26%.
• A higher percentage of readers are active purchasers of stock mutual funds, money market mutual funds and bond mutual funds than readers of any other site.
• Seeking Alpha has the highest percentage of readers with portfolios over $50,000, $100,000, $250,000, $500,000 and $1,000,000.
• It has the highest percentage of senior management (17.6%) of any major finance website, the closest second being WSJ.com with 15.8%.
• It has the highest percentage of C-Level executives, the highest percentage of business owners, and the highest percentage of readers with graduate or post graduate degrees — 77.2%.

What is drawing this audience to Seeking Alpha? Mostly it’s the site’s rich variety of alternative content and ideas from over 3,600 contributors (see latest stats). This is an audience that is hungry for fresh ideas, that craves different perspectives and which is not afraid to voice its opinions.

Honestly, I don’t think there are any sacred cows on Seeking Alpha, which was founded by David Jackson, a former technology research analyst for Morgan Stanley in New York.

Investor relations and corporate executives invited

Seeking Alpha recently issued an invitation to public company investor relations professionals and C-suite executives to join the website to share their expertise and talk about their companies with Seeking Alpha’s unique audience. Companies should seriously consider the offer because it is an unique opportunity.

However, before taking the plunge you should understand the audience you’re dealing with and familiarize yourself with the tools and services that Seeking Alpha provides to its registered members.

Make no mistake, joining Seeking Alpha comes with real risks for the unprepared. But as any investor will tell you, there is no reward without risk.

And the potential rewards Seeking Alpha offers are really quite exceptional.

More: How to get started on Seeking Alpha

A YOUNGER generation of U.S. investment advisors is pushing employers and industry regulators to allow them to use social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter to communicate with customers and prospects — and new compliance technologies may soon open the floodgates for them to do so.

FINRA Chairman and CEO Rick Ketchum

Speaking at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Annual Meeting in New York yesterday, which was covered by Reuters, Rick Ketchum, Chairman and CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) said that while most securities firms currently prohibit their employees from using social media for compliance reasons, “new technologies … may soon enable firms to archive employee communications in order to comply with supervision and recordkeeping requirements.”

FINRA is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States. It oversees nearly 4,800 brokerage firms, about 172,000 branch offices and approximately 646,000 registered securities representatives.

In his speech,  Ketchum said: “Many registered representatives, particularly younger ones, want to use social networking sites to communicate with friends and potential customers. As currently constructed, these sites would not permit you to easily supervise these communications. For that reason, most firms prohibit their employees from using these sites for their business. Nevertheless, interest in these sites will not go unabated.”

FINRA has formed a Social Networking Task Force to explore “how regulation can embrace technological advancements in ways that improve the flow of information between firms and their customers—without compromising investor protection,” said Ketchum.

IROs may soon be playing catch-up with their audience

From an investor relations perspective, his remarks are interesting because many in the IR profession are reluctant to use social media channels until there is more evidence that investors are using them.

But it’s clear from FINRA’s experiences that there is strong demand among securities industry professionals to use social media, and that compliance with the archiving requirements has been the major barrier to adoption.

However, with technology solutions on the way that will remove compliance barriers for brokerage staff, many IR departments may soon find themselves scrambling to catch up with their primary audiences of industry professionals.

Of course, those that have already taken the plunge on Facebook and Twitter stand to reap the first rewards as legions of financial professionals flock to be their “friends.”

NASDAQ OMX Inc., the world’s largest exchange company, has launched an iPhone application that prominently incorporates content from StockTwits, a service that aggregates Twitter messages by traders and investors about stocks and other securities.

The move is another wake-up call to investor relations departments that they cannot ignore social media or dismiss its role in the investment information ecosystem. StockTwits messages are already included on a limited basis on Bloomberg, while Yahoo! Finance includes blog posts aggregated by Seeking Alpha.

While the NASDAQ QFolio application is currently available only to iPhone users, its launch may be a precursor to wider deployment of StockTwits messages on other NASDAQ Internet properties, including the popular Nasdaq.com site, which attracts 500,000 monthly visitors according to Quantcast.

Unique features likely to make app popular

As it stands, I expect NASDAQ’s app to quickly become popular because it includes features that other free iPhone apps do not, including real-time quotes and pre- and after-market data for all U.S.-listed stocks.

NASDAQ says the QFolio app “is designed for the average novice investor to the active trader.”

In reference to StockTwits, the exchange says in its description of the app: “Want to know what others are thinking about a stock? Read ideas from real investors in real time using the built-in StockTwits feature.”

The StockTwits messages are accessible in the app in main two ways:

1. Via a StockTwits button. This allows the user to view the full StockTwits stream or search for messages about a particular company.

StockTwits is prominent in the app. Touching the StockTwits Button opens the "All" commentary stream.

Users can also search for StockTwits discussion about any company.

2. From the company quotes. For each company, the app provides quote and chart information. By swiping the screen, users can also access the StockTwits stream for the company and pre- and after-market data, as shown in the screenshots below for HP.

The main company pages include real-time quote data and a chart. By swiping the screen horizontally, users go to the next screen, which is the StockTwits stream.

The StockTwits stream for HP, accessed by swiping the screen horizontally from the quote page.

At this point, StockTwits should be on the radar of every company with a U.S. stock market listing. As StockTwits grows, expect them to add more countries and secure agreements with other services and exchanges.

As I wrote recently, the free StockTwits Desktop software provides IR departments with powerful ways to monitor what is being said about them on StockTwits and a wide range of other services.

I’M A little bemused by the IR establishment’s response to the sensational allegations in the insider trading case against Galleon Management and a host of corporate executives and one IR consultant.

NIRI CEO Jeff Morgan’s immediate response was to publish the following in a Tweet: “Following Galleon & is another reminder to NIRI members & all in IR-Reg FD compliance is a must. Train & refresh! http://digs.by/aT0“

He was echoed today by seasoned IR mentor John Palizza who wrote a blog post under the title Lose Lips Sink Ships – What Investor Relations Officers Can Learn from the Galleon Fiasco In it he reiterated Morgan’s advice for IR departments to revisit their disclosure policies with executives and train them on how to deal with analysts.

Sorry, but I disagree, strongly. This case is not about Reg. FD and corporate insiders inadvertently saying more than they should because they’re blabbermouths.

It’s about money changing hands in return for insider information, a classic case of you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours. In one instance, it’s alleged that an executive benefitted by having the hedge fund conduct trades in his personal account. In another, an analyst at a credit rating agency allegedly was paid $10,000 for a tip. And in yet another, an IR consultant allegedly asked for $100,000 to continue providing tips.

To me, the allegations in this case have little to do with “loose lips.” It’s about loose morals, rotten ethics, and plain old-fashioned sleaze.

That’s one issue I have with the IR elite’s response. They’ve missed the forest for the trees. It’s not about disclosure practices.

Old school IR practices need a rethink

The other issue I have is that reinforcing corporate disclosure policies will do little except to entrench old school IR practices that actually make insider trading a lucrative endeavor.

Instead of saying no one should talk to analysts without first clearing it with IR or an IRO being present (yeah, who does that benefit?), we should be turning current practice on its head.

What if it was simply an offense to talk privately to any investor or analyst about your company’s business or financial performance?

To be clear, I’m saying any executive should be allowed to talk to anyone about anything — as long as they do so publicly.

The definition of “public” would be the same as under the SEC’s guidance for the use of the web for Reg. FD compliance. To me, that’s completely workable with the online tools we have today.

Of course, what I’m saying isn’t popular with most in the IR community because it could mean they’ll be cut out of the disclosure loop and lose some of their power.

Investors won’t bother going through the IR department if they can get direct access to the CEO and CFO on Twitter, Facebook, Ustream, Cinch, 12 Seconds or any of a host of public media. That scares IR people, but it also makes information from informed insiders much more freely available to everyone.

Personally, I think such an environment would be a boon to the IR profession. When access to executives is universal, IR will take on a far more strategic role. Instead of being mere gatekeepers and concierges for executives and big investors, IROs will become valued strategic advisors to the C-suite.

Again, I’m sticking my neck out and likely going to upset legions of the IR faithful, but it’s obvious to me that if we’re ever going to rebuild public trust in the capital market system, we need to be thinking about radical changes rather than entrenchment of the status quo.

MONITORING what is being said about your company in the news and on the social web is something every investor relations department should be doing as a normal part of its daily activities.

There are many ways to monitor the web. Some involve big fees and offer the convenience of filtering the signal from the noise. There are also many free tools you can use, but these typically involve checking a variety of services to get a complete picture of what is going on, which can be time consuming and hard work.

But now there’s a free software tool called StockTwits Desktop that can make your monitoring activities much easier. The software, which is designed to help investors and traders monitor everything that’s being said about their holdings, works well for investor relations officers who want to monitor –- and potentially participate in — online conversations about their companies.

StockTwits Desktop is much more than just Twitter

Although StockTwits started out as a service that aggregates conversation about stocks on the Twitter microblogging service, it has grown far beyond its humble beginnings. StockTwits Desktop is the next iteration of the service and has the potential to stand separately from Twitter. If Twitter goes down, which isn’t uncommon, traders and investors can keep tweeting via StockTwits’ own network.

In fact, this is one reason why any investor relations professional that is currently on Twitter should use StockTwits Desktop as their Twitter client. StockTwits Desktop users don’t always send their messages to Twitter, so unless you’re on StockTwits Desktop, you won’t necessarily see their messages, although most copy their messages to Twitter at this time, according Phil Pearlman, head of market research and community development at StockTwits.com.

However, the most powerful features of StockTwits Desktop from an investor relations perspective are the many ways it enables IROs to monitor what is being said on the web about their companies and peers, and all on a single screen.

With StockTwits Desktop you can monitor a wide range of sources, including:

• Investors and traders’ real-time messages about your company on StockTwits.
• General real-time discussion about your company on Twitter.
• Mentions of your company across thousands of news sources.
• Blog posts that mention your company.
• New message board postings about your company.
• Changes made to your company’s profile on Wikinvest, an increasingly popular source of company information.
• SEC filings related to your company.
• Peer news and StockTwits messages about competitors, and
• Blog posts about your company’s industry sector.

Unfortunately, StockTwits Desktop doesn’t come with all of this pre-configured. You have to spend some time setting up your monitoring dashboard and you’ll need to know where to find feeds for various types of information.

In the next sections I’ll show you how to set up your own monitoring dashboard. In the examples, I’ll use Newmont Mining Corp (NYSE:NEM) as the example company. I chose this company at random and they did not collaborate on this story.

Install StockTwits Desktop

The first thing to do is download an install the StockTwits Desktop software. It runs on Adobe Air, so you will be prompted to download this Air software as well if it isn’t already on your computer. To get more out of the Desktop app, it helps if you already have an account on Twitter, but this isn’t essential if you only want to use the software for monitoring.

Rather than spend time explaining how to install StockTwits Desktop, I’m embedding a short video from StockTwits which explains the basics.

Set up tabs and streams

The building blocks of StockTwits Desktop are tabs and streams. A tab is essentially a page that can contain several streams or columns of information. I have my StockTwits Desktop set up with six tabs and each tab has between four and 12 stream columns.

You can add a wide range of content streams to a tab. There are two main groups of streams in the Desktop app: StockTwits streams and Twitter streams.

If you plan to publish messages via StockTwits Desktop, it can be a good idea to set up a tab for StockTwits and a separate one for Twitter. I do this because I interact with different people on StockTwits than I do on Twitter. Having the two in separate streams helps me keep things organized.

However, beyond the basic StockTwits and Twitter streams, there’s a lot more you can do using several other stream options that are great for setting up a monitoring dashboard. We’ll look at these next.

Set up a monitoring tab

Now lets start setting up a tab in StockTwits Desktop that we can use to monitor what is being said on the web about Newmont Mining. The first thing to do is click the plus-sign button to add a new tab.

This reveals the menu of stream buttons. You can also edit the tab label at this point by clicking the edit link next to your new tab. Let’s do this now and call it NEM Monitor.

We now have a blank page or tab called NEM Monitor. It’s time to start filling it with streams.

To add a new stream to the NEM Monitor tab, click on the “Add Streams” button in the top left of the screen. You’ll use the “Add Streams” button a lot when you first set up StockTwits Desktop.

Add a StockTwits Symbol stream

Out of the box, StockTwits Desktop gives you three handy ways to monitor what is being said about your company on StockTwits, on Twitter and in the news.

The first stream I’m going to add is the StockTwits Symbol stream. This lets you add a stream for any StockTwits messages that mention a single company’s ticker symbol.

Click “Add Streams” in the top left and then choose the Symbol button (above).  Add the ticker in the field on the next screen.

In this case, Newmont’s ticker is NEM. Click “load” and the new stream appears in the NEM Monitor tab.

We now have a stream that shows every StockTwits message that mentions Newmont’s ticker symbol. The messages in this stream have high relevancy because they’re all by people interested in the company as an investment.

Add a Twitter Search stream

A lot of messages about companies on Twitter do not flow to StockTwits because people don’t add $ signs in front of ticker symbols or they forget that they have to follow StockTwits on Twitter for their tweets to be indexed by the service.

Since it’s important to know when your company is mentioned on Twitter, we will set up a stream containing real-time Twitter search results for the term “Newmont Mining.” Anytime a tweet mentions Newmont Mining, we will see it in StockTwits Desktop.

Click the “Add Streams” button and then choose the Twitter Search button.

Add your company’s name as the search phrase.

Click “Search” and you’ll have added a new Twitter Query stream to your monitoring tab.

All Twitter messages containing the term “Newmont Mining” will automatically appear in this stream in near real-time.

Add a SkyGrid Search stream

SkyGrid is a deep news and blog search service that originally was sold to hedge funds and other institutional investors on subscription before it was made a free service. I have been impressed with SkyGrid as a standalone product, but with StockTwits Desktop you don’t need to use the standalone service because it can be added as a stream.

There are two SkyGrid streams available in StockTwits Desktop: “All News,” which tells you what the hottest news is on the web, and “Symbol News,” which gives you news mentioning a particular company by stock symbol.

To add news headlines of stories that mention Newmont as a stream in the NEM Monitoring tab, click the “Add Streams” button and select the “Symbol News” button.

Add the ticker symbol in the text field and the SkyGrid Symbol News stream is added to the NEM Monitor tab.

When any news articles mention Newmont, they will appear in the monitoring tab in StockTwits Desktop.

Add an RSS stream

The RSS stream option in StockTwits Desktop gives you many possibilities for monitoring activities on the web. Any service that provides an RSS feed can be included as a stream. You can also combine multiple feeds into one stream by using a service like FeedMingle or Yahoo Pipes.

Using the RSS stream in StockTwits Desktop you can add streams for SEC filings, message board posts, news, blog posts, Wikinvest updates and a host of others.

For this post, I’ll add an RSS stream for posts to message boards about Newmont. The first thing to do is get the relevant RSS feeds from forum search services.

My favorites are BoardReader and Omgili. They output search results as RSS feeds, which means you can get near real-time updates in StockTwits Desktop when new posts about your company are made on a wide variety of forums.

Once you have the RSS feed URLs from BoardReader and Omgili, combine them into a single RSS feed using FeedMingle, as shown below.

Click on “Mingle Now” and copy the combined feed’s URL from FeedMingle so that you can add it to an RSS stream in StockTwits Desktop.

In StockTwits Desktop click on the “Add Streams” button and choose the RSS stream button.

Paste the combined feeds URL from FeedMingle in the text field.

Click “Load” and you will now have a new RSS stream that looks like this:

Using the same procedure, you can add a variety of other RSS streams, such as a blog search stream by combining Seeking Alpha blog posts and Google Blog Search results for your company, as I’ve done below for Newmont:

There is a lot you can do with RSS streams. I think it is possibly the single best feature in StockTwits Desktop.

Monitor peers with a Watchlist stream

A good monitoring system shouldn’t just focus on your company, it should also keep tabs on what is happening at your company’s competitors. StockTwits Desktop has a great feature for doing this.

You can create a Watchlist comprised of your peers’ ticker symbols by clicking on the Watchlist button at the top of the screen.

I created a watchlist for Newmont by entering the ticker symbols for a variety of gold producers.

Once you’ve set up a watchlist, you can bring all messages that mention your peers into a single stream in your monitoring tab or in a separate peer monitoring tab.

To do this, click the “Add Streams” button and choose the Watchlist button in the streams menu.

Select the watchlist you want to add as a stream and anytime someone on StockTwits mentions one of your peers, their message will now appear in your new stream, which will look something like this:

Of course, you can also add a peer news monitoring stream using the RSS stream button. I did this for Newmont by combining 22 news feeds from Google News Search and Yahoo! Finance into a single peer news RSS feed, as shown below.

There are a number of other peer monitoring streams you could add using the RSS stream option, including all mentions of peers on Twitter and all forum discussions about your peers.

Here are some screenshots showing you all of the streams I set up while working on this post. They show a number of additional streams that I haven’t mentioned. Click on the images to enlarge.

This post should get you well on your way to creating your own monitoring dashboard using StockTwits Desktop. The reality is that StockTwits Desktop is a flexible tool that enables you to build extremely powerful monitoring dashboards with just a bit of time and know-how.

If you would like us to set up a monitoring dashboard for your company using StockTwits Desktop, we’d be happy to set up a pre-configured StockTwits Desktop account for you and then walk you through installing and using the software.

AFTER a long delay, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has finally proposed tweaks to its failed “notice and access” process for delivering shareholder meeting materials on the web.

The model, which essentially transfers the decision to receive materials electronically or in print from shareowners to companies, has resulted in a  dramatic drop in the number of retail shareowners who participate in annual meetings.

It has also meant that millions of passive individual investors receive little or no information about the companies whose securities they own.

A better notice about a meaningless process is still meaningless

These unintended consequences of the rules have been a source of deep concern — and some embarrassment — to SEC commissioners and staff. The proposed changes published yesterday (PDF 370KB, 42 pgs)  are meant to remedy the problem of plunging participation.

Unfortunately, the proposed changes don’t go far enough. They address only the “notice” aspect of the model. The tweaks are designed to give companies more leeway to jazz up the notices that are mailed to investors and include “educational” information about the N&A process.

However, on fixing the critical “access” part of the process — what shareowners get when they actually go online — the proposals are strangely silent. And that is why the changes will fail to fix the mess that N&A has created.

Even if more people go online due to improvements to the notices, what they’ll experience online will teach them that responding to the notices is a meaningless exercise.

There is a precedent for this already, and the SEC should be aware of it because it was communicated to them during the comment period when N&A was first proposed. Under the e-delivery regime, where shareowners opt in to receiving materials via email and the web, millions of people who initially opted in later withdrew from the program, citing a range of usability and security concerns.

The same has been and will continue to happen with N&A. Some people will respond to the new notices, but they’ll quickly become inured to them.

Putting real access into “Notice & Access”

If shareowners are ever to move to the web as their primary communications channel with companies, there needs to be a compelling and meaningful prize waiting for them when they do go online.

Poorly designed online annual reports, proxy statements and voting forms are not that prize. Shareowners want to engage with the companies whose shares they own. They want to be acknowledged and respected. They need the ability to hear and talk to executives and directors. They need information in formats they can actually use and, yes, understand. The SEC and issuers need to be thinking less like FASB and more like Facebook.

In my opinion, the SEC’s failure to address the “access” shortcomings of the rules stems in part from who the SEC staff and commissioners listen to when considering anything to do with proxy fulfillment issues. Mostly they listen to issuers and Broadridge Financial Solutions , the near-monopoly shareholder fulfillment firm.

Broadridge and most of its issuer advisors don’t get online communication. They’re good at logistics, but not communication. Indeed, it’s not in Broadridge or issuers’ interests to see the SEC address the “access” side of N&A because it could mean more work for companies and less business for Broadridge’s crummy annual report and proxy statement “conversion” services.

Sure, Broadridge will argue that they’re pioneering new online communications with their Investor Network forums and their virtual annual meetings. And I’ll give them credit for at least trying to push things forward.

However, these new tools from Broadridge are themselves failing. They’re failing because issuers are trying to outsource their accountability for communicating with shareowners.

But the simple fact is you can’t outsource accountability. You have to show up and be counted. When directors and executives show up online, their shareowners will, too.

ANALYSTS and investors have long complained that management at some companies manipulate the flow of information to the market and play favorites by carefully screening which questions they take on their earnings calls.

Now Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has taken the lead to bring transparency to the earnings call question queue by inviting analysts — and everyone else — to submit questions online that are then voted on by other investors. 

During Google’s Q3 2009 earnings call October 15, the first time the company has used the process for an earnings call,  a total of 124 questions were submitted and voted on almost 5,500 times by 322 people.

The questions were posed to Google executives by the company’s IR director Maria Shim during the earnings call and a separate 45-minute extended Q&A conference call. Google introduced the extended Q&A in January to reduce the number of individual follow-up calls from analysts.

Analysts and investors submit questions that are then voted on by other participants. Questions are posed to management in order of their popularity.

Google is using its own Google Moderator application to manage the questions and the voting. To submit questions, analysts and investors must sign in using a free Google account. The company’s only restriction is that questions must be relevant to the earnings release.

Any company can use moderator for free after signing up for a Google account.

Google first used moderator for its April 2009 annual meeting, but few shareholders and investors used it. The search giant used it again for its investor meeting in September, during which it received 30 questions.

However, based on the heavy use during the Q3 earnings call, it now seems that analysts and investors are comfortable using the format. A complete record of all the questions that were submitted is archived on the company’s website.

• Does this sound like something your company might try?

I RECENTLY heard a senior investor relations officer talking about RSS feeds. He said his company was thinking about offering more feeds for different types of content.

This isn’t unusual. Many companies offer a variety of feeds for different types of IR website content. Thomson Reuters’ IR websites typically offer 3 different feeds –- one for news releases, another for calendar events, and yet another for SEC filings.

Thomson Reuters IR websites typically offer these three RSS feeds

Shareholder.com is similar, except that they typically implement 3 different news release feeds and 2 separate SEC filings feeds! (Shareholder.com has never really gotten the concept of RSS.)

Shareholder.com's typical RSS options make little sense.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of an analyst or institutional investor who has invested in your company or whose job it is to stay on top of developments at your company. What do you think they are going to do when faced with this menu of RSS feeds?

That’s right. They’re going to subscribe to ALL of the different feeds. Why? Because they’re afraid of missing something. Missing something could cost them a lot of money — and possibly put them out of a job.

So when I hear senior IROs and others talking about adding new feeds for different types of content, I know their hearts are in the right place but that they’re not using their heads. They think they’re doing investors a favor by giving them more options, but they’re really not doing anyone any favors, least of all themselves.

It’s more likely that they’re exposing themselves to the risk that someone is going to miss something important if they don’t subscribe to all of the company’s various feeds. If that happens to one of the company’s most influential investors or analysts, who do you think is going to get the blame? That’s right, the IR department is.

A single IR disclosure feed is a win-win for companies and investors

The solution is to provide a single IR feed that includes all relevant items of interest to investors. The only company I know of that has done this – though not well enough by my standards — is Sun Microsystems. They developed an “IR aggregate feed” after having discussions with the SEC about using their corporate website for Reg. FD compliance.

After discussing using corporate websites for Reg. FD compliance, Sun began offering a single feed that combined all news, SEC filings and CEO blog posts.

Of course, a single IR disclosure feed includes a lot of items, from news releases to events to insider transaction filings. You might think this is too much information to be pushing out to investors, but from the investor’s perspective it’s better to get too much than too little and miss potentially important information.

There’s also a benefit to companies in providing a single disclosure feed. A single feed from a company containing all information relevant to investors is the kind of unique information resource that can attract investors to obtain your company’s information directly rather than through intermediaries.

And as investors begin to use your single disclosure feed, you might find that you have fewer reasons to rely on third-party sources to distribute your information. You’ll be saving money while improving your ability to communicate with investors at the same time.

There’s a lot more IR departments need to know about web feeds that their current vendors don’t seem to have a clue about. But getting the basics right, like providing a single disclosure feed, is a good place to start.

• Do you have any questions about RSS feeds? What has your company’s experience been with investors adopting the technology?