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Small Cap CEO Lesson: Is YouTube Important To Investor Relations? Yes, Video Views Hit An All-Time High

Posted by AGORACOM at 1:06 PM on Monday, June 15th, 2009

If you needed more evidence as to the importance of integrating YouTube into your investor relations programs, then look no further than this recent report issued by NewTeeVee.   The report states that “Americans streamed 16,785,432,000 videos in April, according to comScore. That’s up 16 percent from March to what we believe is a new all-time record.”

Interestingly enough the number of online video viewers remains constant at about 78% of internet users – but that is still a huge number and we now know they are watching more video than ever.  A further note of interest comes from the fact much of the increased video comes from watching actual TV programs over the web, which further serves to support the fact that people/investors want to consume content at their convenience, not yours.

If ABC, CBS, NBC and Cable TV can’t get people to tune in to great content on a set schedule, what chance does your small-cap company have?

You either begin distributing information through the online stream, or get left behind.  Simple as that.

Regards,
George

Posted in Online Investor Relations, Small-Cap CEO Lessons, Web 2.0, 3.0, ... | 1 Comment »

Brief Summary From 2009 Cambridge Conference In Vancouver

Posted by AGORACOM at 11:37 AM on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

picture-3

I’ve got a full day of meetings today after 2 days of exhibiting/sponsoring the 2009 World Resource Investment Conference on at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver.  However, I’d like to give you a very brief summary of events:

1.  ATTENDANCE

The Conference was very well attended by investors that were still looking for their next great investment.  The AGORACOM booth was busy throughout the entire 2 days, as were the booths of quality exhibiting companies.

2.  EXHIBITING COMPANIES

Unlike attendees, the number of exhibiting companies was WAY down.  Something to the tune of 400 last year to 125 this year.  Personally, I don’t mind this because I’ve been preaching for a year that we had too much garbage in the space.  Now, we have quality of over quantity, which is the very reason behind The AGORACOM 100.

3.  SPEAKER WORKSHOP

My Speaker Workshop on Sunday along with Peter Grandich called, “Learn To Use Blogs, Twitter and RSS Feeds To Make You A Power Investor” was packed.  Standing room only.  What was it about?  For years, CEOs and IROs have ignored them as irrelevant and having quirky names, but with tens of millions of investors using them, public companies incorporating them and even the SEC green lighting them for investor relations, you now need to understand how social media tools can supercharge your market knowledge. The workshop was the initial step in teaching investors how how to use social media to cut through clutter, get the information you need directly to you and connect with the smartest people on the planet.

It was so well received that I am going to create a webcast out of the event and re-broadcast it here, along with a series of short videos on iGoogle, Twitter, Blogs and RSS Feeds.

That’s it for now.  Catch you later.

Regards,
George

Posted in AGORACOM News And Events, Small-Cap CEO Lessons, Web 2.0, 3.0, ... | 3 Comments »

AGORACOM Client Intelligence Report – April 2009

Posted by AGORACOM - Mitch at 11:00 AM on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

We’re pleased to provide you with the April 2009 edition of the AGORACOM Client Intelligence Report. For confidentiality reasons, all “Off The Blog” items mentioned in these reports are not mentioned in the blog posts.

WHY AN “INTELLIGENCE REPORT”

For the benefit of our new clients, we call this an “Intelligence Report” because it provides you with important information, data and trends that impact your business – information that you normally don’t have time to find.  We often write about these in The AGORACOM Blog, so we call these “On The Blog” Stories.  In addition, this newsletter gives you a chance to look into our crystal ball and know what AGORACOM is working on months before the general public.  You can’t find these tidbits on our blog, so we call them “Off The Blog” and ask that you keep them confidential.  As you know, we move faster than any IR firm on the planet, so knowing what we’re doing in advance helps both of us coordinate our activities.  This is especially true for what we expect to be an extremely fast moving and exciting year.

In short, greater market intelligence that puts you ahead of all of your peers.

I can’t stress enough my recommendation that you review our monthly newsletter carefully for the purposes of incorporating some of our market intelligence into both your IR and business initiatives.

AGORACOM is now the largest small-cap IR firm and site on the continent thanks to our effective use of web technology.  As such, following us will help you achieve your goals.

OFF THE BLOG … Shhhhh

**For confidentiality reasons, the “Off The Blog” items are not mentioned in the blog posts as they are only available to AGORACOM clients**

ON THE BLOG

What The @#$! Is Twitter?

You’ve heard about it.  It’s been on Oprah, but you’re not quite sure what Twitter is and how it can help you achieve your business goals.  Our founder George Tsiolis has prepared a 5-minute on Twitter to introduce to this tool and why you should use it.   This is a must see…

Small Cap CEO Lesson: Millionaires Are Now Trading Online

For those CEO’s who continue to believe online traders are – for the lack of a better word – flakes, you might want to take a look at this article in the Wall Street Journal…

Small Cap CEO Lesson: Mobile Internet Trading And Research Skyrockets 188%

If you are a CEO of a small-cap or mid-cap company and have been considering a mobile strategy, then you absolutely have to see the blow away numbers in a comScore report that came out in March.

AGORACOM Hold’em Night at the PDAC a Smashing Success

We’d like to thank all who attended the AGORACOM PDAC “Bay Street Hold’em” Poker Tournament last month making it a smashing success that surpassed all expectations. A new standard has now been set for all future PDAC parties.

Skyrocketing Social Media Growth = Skyrocketing Online Investor Growth

We’ve always known the web is big.  However, what many in the small-cap space don’t realize is how big social media is becoming, or what social media actually is.

Small CAP CEO Lesson – Issue Press Releases By 8:30 AM EST

Why putting your news out by no later than 8:30 AM EST still makes the most sense…

Harvard Business: “Communities Of Stakeholders Will Help Shape Managerial Decisions”

If you don’t think creating a shareholder community is important read the following article from Harvard Business…

Online Investor Relations Model Makes AGORACOM ‘Greenest’ Firm In The Industry

AGORACOM is proud to announce the results of our Carbon Footprint findings in recognition of ‘Earth Day‘.

CONCLUSION

We hope you found this edition of the AGORACOM Client Intelligence Report to be helpful.  If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us or your AGORACOM representative for further assistance.

Thank-you and have a great day.

Yours truly,

George Tsiolis

Posted in AGORACOM Client Intelligence Report, AGORACOM Mobile, All Recent Posts, Online Investor Relations, Small and Micro-Cap Space, Small-Cap CEO Lessons, Web 2.0, 3.0, ... | 6 Comments »

What The @#$! Is Twitter?

Posted by AGORACOM at 2:27 PM on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Don’t laugh at the title.  When CEO’s, investors, lawyers, brokers, friends and family hear me talk about Twitter, the overwhelming response I get is “What The @#$! IS Twitter?” In fact, it has become so prominent that I purposely set people up by asking things like “What’s your firm’s Twitter policy?” / “How often do you post to Twitter?” and – my favourite – “How many Twitter followers do you have?”

At that point they just burst out about how they keep hearing about it but don’t know what the hell it is.  Within a few minutes I’ve got them breathing easier.

Given the number of times I have to explain what Twitter is, I decided to post a screencast that will be mailed to our clients, prospects, partners and members.  Why talk or write about it, when you can actually demonstrate it.

Feel free to use this to help answer the questions in your circle – but keep in mind this is targeted to:

  • Non-users or novice users
  • A financial audience.  CEO’s, investors, brokers, etc.

Nonetheless, the underlying principals are the same, so it can be used by anybody.

UPDATE: Ironically enough, within hours of posting this, AdAge published an article titled The Rise Of The C-Tweet. Must Be an Issue on Everyone’s Mind Lately.

NOTE:  CLICK ON “FULL SCREEN” MODE FOR A BETTER VIEWING EXPERIENCE.  TO DO SO, SCROLL OVER THE SCREEN AND CLICK ON THE TV IMAGE IN BOTTOM RIGHT HAND CORNER

Regards,
George

Posted in All Recent Posts, Gold $1,000, Online Investor Relations, Small-Cap CEO Lessons, Web 2.0, 3.0, ... | 7 Comments »

Skyrocketing Social Media Growth = Skyrocketing Online Investor Growth

Posted by AGORACOM at 10:50 AM on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

“The growth of nearly every aspect of social media has and continues to be
enormous. We’ve dug up some amazing statistics and numbers from this realm.”

Mashable – The Web In Numbers and The Rise Of Social Media

We’ve always known the web is big.  Nothing new there.  However, what many in the small-cap space don’t realize is how big social media is becoming, or what social media actually is.  Click on the story and you will see the numbers are ginormous and growing.

However, for small-cap CEO’s to really understand the significance of these numbers and the trend, you  must first understand what social media is.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?

In layman’s terms, social media is the process of people amalgamating around content that is created by the people.  From kids sharing home made videos, to wickedly smart financial bloggers sharing charts, trends, analysis and information.

The common denominator in social media is that you no longer have to be employed by a media conglomerate to publish your views.  If you have something intelligent to say, simply publish it and people will flock to you.  Previously unknown people from all walks of life are literally becoming super stars in any and every vertical, including finance.

WHAT DOES SOCIAL MEDIA MEAN TO YOUR SMALL-CAP PUBLIC COMPANY?

Wikipedia says “At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content.” I’ll break that down further and say you can no longer keep your company in the shadows.  If you won’t lead the conversation about your company and choose to stick to press releases, others certainly will.

On the other hand, social media can turn out to be an incredible investor relations asset if you choose to accept and engage.  How you do that is material for another post where I teach you how to use blogs, Twitter, YouTube, photos and audio to get your message out.

Regards,
George

Posted in All Recent Posts, Online Investor Relations, Small-Cap CEO Lessons, Web 2.0, 3.0, ... | 2 Comments »

Harvard Business: “Communities Of Stakeholders Will Help Shape Managerial Decisions”

Posted by AGORACOM at 8:59 AM on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Smart CEO’s are starting to realize the importance of online investor relations. Starting. If they are, it is only from the point of using search engines and other online tools to target new investors.

However, very few realize the importance of speaking, collaborating, sharing and listening with those shareholders once you have attracted them.  They’ll do it on the phone, they’ll talk all day at a booth – but they suddenly stop at the web. The one place where they would have the farthest reaching impact.

Unfortunately, their failure to do so adds up to a massive lost opportunity to gain the loyalty and trust of shareholders.  it In fact, it is going to be the basis of an upcoming post titled “Why Aren’t You Talking?” in which I’ll debunk some of those fears and show how simple, yet powerful, it would be.

In the meantime, as a pre-cursor, have a look at the following quote from a post on the Harvard Business Blog titled The Finance 2.0 Manifesto:

“Stakeholder communities. Institutional investors are so 20th century. Centralizing control over our biggest corporations in the hands of a bunch of old dudes asleep at the wheel was as good an idea as the spork: interesting in theory, useless in practice. Tomorrow’s radical innovators are already updating corporate governance for the 21st century, by letting communities of stakeholders shape managerial decision-making. Think mega-Etsy.”

Now, I’m not willing to go as far as shareholder communities shaping managerial decision-making – but I am willing to say that CEO’s that engage shareholder communities will see tremendous impacts on their business.  How? Engaging thousands of investors gives you:

  • Thousands of IR evangelists to help you gain more shareholders
  • Instant feedback on the effectiveness of your message
  • Mass competitor intelligence gathering by a motivated and passionate shareholder community
  • …More

Unless you think you are the perfect CEO that has hired the perfect team and getting advice from the perfect board, you need to start giving this some serious thought. Investor Relations 2.0 is coming whether you like it or not.

Regards,
George

Posted in All Recent Posts, Online Investor Relations, Small-Cap CEO Lessons, Web 2.0, 3.0, ... | 2 Comments »

Small Cap CEO Lesson: Mobile Internet Trading And Research Skyrockets 188%

Posted by AGORACOM at 11:37 AM on Monday, April 13th, 2009

If you are a CEO of a small-cap or mid-cap company and have been considering a mobile strategy, then you absolutely have to see the blow away numbers in a comScore report that came out in March. If you’re not considering a mobile strategy, then you need to see these numbers even more.

For our part, AGORACOM has been planning its mobile strategy for a while now and you can expect to see significant announcements shortly, as well as, some commentary below.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE REPORT

  • The number of people using their mobile device to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009.
  • Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35%) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.

PERTINENT FINANCIAL DATA AND QUOTE

  • The number of daily users trading stock or accessing financial accounts jumped 188% from 1.135 million users to 3.274 million users.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve
from an occasional activity to being a daily part of people’s lives.”This underscores
the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant
on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

Mark Donovan, senior vice president, mobile, comScore.

HOW DO YOU GET MOBILE?

There are several ways to get mobile from creating an app for iPhone and Blackberry, to partnering with someone like Viigo to get your RSS feeds into the mainstream.  However, this is tough for many small cap and midcap public companies for two reasons.

First, they rarely have the resources or tech knowhow to execute such strategies.

Second, even if you have the resources and knowhow, 99% lack the critical mass to make it successful.  In other words, once your mobile strategy is engaged by a few hundred shareholders and a few board members using it, then what?  How do you scale to reach the millions and millions of investors out there?

THE SOLUTION

In order to make a mobile strategy effective, small cap and mid cap stocks need to come together under one umbrella in order to create an offering that provides plenty of fresh news and information for consumption by investors.  As 1 company, you’re not going to get a mobile investor to keep returning to your mobile site/app.  As 100, 200, 300 companies, an investor is far more likelier to keep returning for morsels of valuable news and information.

Here comes the shameless promotion.  AGORACOM is already one of only  13 financial content providers to every Blackberry device on the planet.  However, we are now looking to replicate our online success into the mobile space.  It’s coming fast and it is coming soon.  Most importantly, it will be multi-faceted and include:

  • Multiple apps
  • Multiple devices

If you want to know more, you know where to find us.  Hope this report and my subsequent comments have been helpful.

Regards,
George

Posted in AGORACOM Mobile, All Recent Posts, Mobile, Small-Cap CEO Lessons | 2 Comments »

Small CAP CEO Lesson – Issue Press Releases By 8:30 AM EST

Posted by AGORACOM at 1:00 PM on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

I first published this story in August of 2007 – but it is worth repeating.

Now that AGORACOM Small Cap TV is approaching 500 episodes, one of the things I have noticed is that small-cap companies continue to release news just at or before the open. This might have been an acceptable practice back in the day when only brokers could access press releases on their screens but it made no sense once the web opened them up to the entire world.

It makes even less sense now. Why?

Folks, we are in a Web 2.0 world in which citizen journalism and analysis is becoming a bigger, more important research tool than Wall Street and finance portals. As a result, small-cap and micro-cap information is being analyzed and discussed by bloggers, podcasters, and vloggers everyday – all of which is being fed into every corner of the web via RSS feeds, Twitter, iTunes, blogs, podcasts etc. on your behalf – and for free!

THE LEAST THAT YOU COULD DO

However, if you want your great news covered by these incredible reporting sources, you have to give them a chance to see your news, digest it and report on it. Just like traditional news, Web 2.0 sources have deadlines as well.  AGORACOM TV, for example, has a cut-off of 9:00 AM so that we can tape at 9:20 and be up by 9:45. I’m certain others are not much different.

As such, if your press release is coming out at 9:30, you’ve robbed yourself of potential mass coverage by one or more sources that might have otherwise picked up your news and sent it right around the world.

Bottom line – put your news out by no later than 8:30 AM EST.  In fact, somewhere between 7:30 and 8:30 AM EST makes the most sense …. unless shunning free coverage is actually part of your business plan.

Best,
George

Posted in All Recent Posts, Online Investor Relations, Small-Cap CEO Lessons | No Comments »

Small Cap CEO Lesson: Millionaires Are Now Trading Online

Posted by AGORACOM at 5:01 PM on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
If Thurston Had Internet, Hed Be Trading From Gilligans Island

If Thurston Had Internet, He'd Be Trading From Gilligan's Island

I know this doesn’t come as a surprise to many of you but there are still a number of CEO’s out there that continue to believe online traders are – for the lack of a better word – flakes.  They fail to realize that online investors are take charge, self-directed, open minded and very intelligent.  I know this because I’ve watched them for years on AGORACOM and blogs around the web.

For those CEO’s that don’t want to take my horribly conflicted word for it, you might want to take a look at this article in the Wall Street Journal:  Some Millionaires Trade Online.

(UPDATE:  It looks like the WSJ no longer has the story available – but here is a cached version of the article)

The article specifically talks about Canada – but I think we can all agree it applies to US online traders as well.

You can continue to ignore online investor relations – but do it at your peril.

Regards,
George

Posted in All Recent Posts, Online Investor Relations, Small-Cap CEO Lessons | 1 Comment »

Small-Cap CEO Lesson: Take Advantage Of Broken Trust In Wall Street

Posted by AGORACOM at 1:35 PM on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

For months I’ve talked about the loss of trust being the greatest risk to markets.  Specifically, investors can flow with market cycles and always come back.  However, if they lose trust, it will take a long time for Wall Street to gain them back.

Thanks to information provided by Dominic Jones over at IR Web Report, that trust is officially broken.  He cites a number of reports here, here and here - but here are some of the highlights, starting with this telling graphic:

  • Nearly two-thirds of investors (62%) trust corporations less than they did a year ago.
  • Only 38% said they trust business to do what is right, a 20% plunge since last year.
  • Only 17% said they trust information from a company’s CEO.
  • In China, the “trust in business” score actually rose from 54% to 71% among 35-to-64-year-olds.
  • Specialists remain the most trusted purveyors of information about a company, with 62% globally saying an academic or expert on a company’s industry or issues would be extremely or very credible.
  • Employees and peers are also considered credible sources of information about a company, with 47% trusting what they hear from “a person like yourself” and 40% trusting conversations they have with employees.

In short, investors don’t trust Wall St CEO’s – but they do still trust people like themselves.  This tells me quite clearly that there is no better time for a grassroots investor relations campaign by small-cap companies.

Need another sign of the people times?  Obama went grassroots and it resulted in the election of the first ever Black President of the United States despite daunting odds from both within his party and amongst voters in general.  Your personal politics aside, the man proved the power of connecting at the ground level when the ground level had little trust in the upper echelon.

Wall Street is out of favor … waaayyy out of favor.  Take advantage of the environment, get out there and show investors why you and your hard working small-cap company can be trusted.

Regards,
George

Posted in All Recent Posts, Online Investor Relations, Small-Cap CEO Lessons | 1 Comment »

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