AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

Good evening to you all. As most of you know, I like to share AGORACOM traffic data on a regular basis and today is no exception.  I was a little distracted for the quarter ended September 30th and with things getting back to normal around here, it was a good time to report on our traffic.

I’m pleased to report that the number of visitors (873,000) visits (5,820,000) and page views (50,000,000) to AGORACOM remain very strong despite a couple of extraordinary matters this year compared to last year, which I will discuss further below.

Please find enclosed a Google Analytics shot of our traffic year to date (January 1, 2010 – Nov 17, 2010)

The continued strength in our traffic can be attributed to the following reasons.

1. Social Media

We have really turned on our social media efforts in 2010, which have resulted in:

• ~ 1,400 followers on our main AGORACOM Twitter Account. In addition, we’ve also created successful Twitter accounts for our following content channels: @AOL Small Cap Show (183 followers); @SmallCapTV (320 followers); @YahooSmallCap (96 followers); @SmallCapCEOshow (78 followers); @TopSmallCapNews (140 Followers)
• Our YouTube initiative is in full gear with 3 channels now delivering laser targeted videos on a daily basis. I don’t think any other small-cap investor relations firm can match the following: Main AGORACOM Show (980 videos); AGORACOM Small Cap Gold and Resources TV (210 videos); Chinese Small Cap TV (237 videos)
• Our Facebook Fan Page now has over 450 Fans thanks to the great content we are feeding into it on a daily basis

SOCIAL MEDIA IS MEANINGLESS WITHOUT TRAFFIC

Furthermore, we’ve worked hard at cross-promoting our social media channels AND providing a variety of content on each. If you’re a small-cap company that is simply creating Twitter and Facebook accounts to post press releases, you are simply wasting your time (Beware Of ….  The Rise Of Social Media IR “Experts” a.k.a Pretenders)

Cross-promote and differentiate so that investors have options to consume what is most important to them.  If you can’t do this internally, call me.

2. Cross-Promoting Great Content

We recently introduced a “News Flash” feature that allows us to provide investors in every corner of AGORACOM with breaking/important news as it happens (both small-cap specific or macro-market related). As a result, investors that may be focused on a particular HUB or group of HUBS on AGORACOM no longer feel as if they are missing important news.

Click-through analysis shows these are a big hit with AGORACOM visitors and a good reason to both keep returning to the site and consuming our content.

3. Great Platform

Small-Cap Investors continue to flock to AGORACOM thanks to what we believe is the best small-cap community platform on the web. By providing Wiki and UGC tools to our members, we’ve put significant control into their hands and that has benefited the entire community. From adding/editing/updating content, to self-policing their own HUBS, members have created a small-cap community that is more informative and cleaner than any other small-cap site on the web. It isn’t perfect – but it is as close to perfect as you can get using today’s technology.

DECREASE IN PAGE VIEWS

On the flip side, we have seen a decrease in page views over the same period last year that can probably be attributed to two items. First, one of our busier HUBS was Freewest Resources which was acquired by Cliff’s Natural Resources in Q4 2009 after a long and bitter battle with Noront Resources, which also happens to be a very busy HUB on AGORACOM.  As such, with Freewest being taken over, we haven’t had the benefit of page views for one of the prominent players within the Ring Of Fire, nor have we had the benefit of the debate between two very busy HUBS.

Second, as a result of our OSC matter, several of our high-profile client HUBS have been put on hold, leading to page view losses there as well.

Nonetheless, 873,000 visitors and 50,000,000 page views is pretty good for a slow year.

CONCLUSION

Going forward, we’ll be adding further fuel to the fire via the following exciting initiatives:

* Our upcoming mobile push in November, including the launch of our iPhone App and of course our Blackberry partnership

* An expanded content push (Holding our cards close to our chest)

* A greater social media push (Look for Facebook and Twitter integration announcements)

Thanks to our great clients and members for continuing to make AGORACOM the best community platform within the small-cap industry.

Regards,
George

As you know, we like to report AGORACOM traffic results on a regular basis, especially our annual results.  In the world of online investor relations, nothing speaks more about your ability to meet a client’s needs than the amount of traffic and overall engagement you are able to deliver.  This is especially true in the small-cap space, which is full of investor relations pretenders that throw around all the right jargon but offer little to no substance.

To this end, I am very happy to announce our traffic results for the full year 2009.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, this snapshot from our Google analytics is worth several million

[PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGE, CLEAR GRAPH]

THE TALE OF THE TAPE

(Figures for January 1, 2009 – December 31, 2009. All figures reported by Google Analytics)

• Unique Visitors 1,114,905
• Visits 7,777,197
• Page Views 72,582,304
• Pages Per Visit 9.33
• Avg Time On Site 8:05
• Number Of Countries/Territories 212
• Top 10 (Canada, USA, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway)

The numbers look even better when you consider

• We built our model on quality vs quantity. As such, this is pure discussion. No spam, flaming and bickering traffic.
• We are only focusing on small-cap and mid-cap stocks …for now.

What is even more encouraging are the Q4 numbers which, if extrapolated out, point to rapidly accelerating traffic of close to 10M visits, 100M page views and 1.4M unique visitors.

Suffice it to say, we are once again ecstatic with the results. This is especially true given the state of the markets in H1 2009. We attribute much of this success to practicing what we preach. Specifically, when times are tough and your competitors are running for cover, crank up the marketing. AGORACOM did just that with the continuation of TV ads on Bloomberg, CNBC and BNN that we had begun in 2008.

In addition, 2009 was the year in which we continued upgrading site features – but we really increased time, energy and resources on extending our content far beyond AGORACOM.  Specifically, we are now extremely active in terms of:

• Video (See: AGORACOM Launces YouTube + Multi-Site Video Distribution For Clients)
• Vlog (See: AGORACOM Small-Cap TV On YouTube)
• Twitter (See: What The @#$! Is Twitter?)
• Facebook (See: Facebook Fan Page)

Where are we going in 2010?  Mobile, Mobile, Mobile baby.  Look for good stuff to start coming out in the next 30 days or so.

CLIENTS AND MEMBERS THAT BELIEVED

I want to thank all of our great clients and members that believed in our model and breathed unbelievable life into this paradigm shifting platform. Without them, this would be one hell of an application with no users. A special thanks goes out to all HUB Leaders that abandoned their former communities at Stockhouse, Raging Bull, Yahoo Finance and others in hopes of a better experience. I’m glad our promises to you have been fulfilled.  We know we’re not perfect – but together we’ve created a financial community that come as close to perfect as possible.  Thank-You!

REPUTATION AND RANKING SYSTEM

When we created our community by combining UGC, Wiki and reputation based tools, we set out to destroy the stock discussion forum status quo that we have all come to hate over the past 10 years thanks to unrelenting spam, profanity, stock bashing, stock hyping and the unacceptable. Many thought it could not be done because we could neither change habits nor unseat the incumbents. We not only knew we could, we knew investors wanted us to. All they needed was a solution that focused on quality over quantity.  By refusing to sacrifice quality for quantity, we will continue to attract great investing minds that have a lot to offer. Quality begets quality. As a result, we now have a massive community that both generates its own content and moderates itself to replace the status quo.

CONCLUSION

This is Wiki meets IGC (investor generated content), meets reputation based systems at their finest. There are bigger communities to be sure – but can you find another vertical in which the need for a drastically more efficient model is needed more? As I’ve stated since October 2007, Trillions of dollars are at stake. People’s futures are at stake. The implications of inefficient or imperfect information are severe. We now know it to be true.

Electronic shareholder forums are vital to the lives of so many people. With the advent of top-notch financial bloggers such as Kedrosky and Ritholtz and Grandich, as well as, the StockTwits financial micro-blog and online investor conferences, we are witnessing another paradigm shift in the way investors communicate and make decisions – and we plan to keep pushing that change for the foreseeable future. Stay tuned for more.

Regards,
George