AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

If you are a CEO of a small-cap company and don’t have a search engine strategy to target and attract new investors to your story, then are seriously hampering your company.  In fact, you are probably guilty of being downright incompetent.  (If you are an AGORACOM client, then you are a search engine wizard 🙂 )

If it’s empirical evidence that you are after (like there isn’t enough already), then you’ll be very interested to read the following quote from JP Morgan in reference to Comscore’s May search engine report:

“Total US core search volume increased 32.9% Y/Y in May. The total growth in the first two months of 2Q accelerated to 36.1% Y/Y.”

Translation?  People are using search more and more everyday.  Investors are people.  As a CEO, I guarantee you are using search engines to find information everyday.  If so, getting you to incorporate search engine marketing into your investor relations should not be difficult. Why? If you use search engines to find information, then simply start using search engines to be found.

Regards,
George

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

“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

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