IR Blogging session

Today was the first day of sessions for me as I was working the booth on the NIRI exhibitors floor for the past few days. Up first was the session: Is Your Company or IR Dept Ready for a Blog? Innovative Communication Methods for the 21st Century. There were about 80 people in the session, which was moderated by Robert Williams, the Director of Investor Relations at Dell.

Marilyn Mora, the Director of Investor Relations from Cisco Systems, Broc Romanek, who is a lawyer and expert blogger from thecorporatecounsel.net, and Monika Maeckle, Vice President of New Media, BusinessWire rounded out the panel.

The session was great. Each panelist spoke for about ten minutes and then they opened up the floor for an informative group discussion.

Rob started out with some stats: on any given day there are 15,000 articles written for magazines, 72,000 columns written in newspapers and 1.2 million stories written for blogs. To me, this is proof that blogs are here to stay, and that they have gone mainstream.

Monika talked about RSS feeds and why companies should have them. She asked the crowd how many people have RSS feeds on their sites and about half do. For those who don’t know, RSS feeds are a way of publishing your content to RSS readers or other websites. From a user perspective, they will be notified when you update your site. RSS is a must for anyone using the web today.

Monika switched gears and showed that people are starting to get information from each other (using blogs, etc.) as opposed to getting info from corporations or the media. For IROs, this means that it is getting harder to control the message. Starting a blog allows you to bring some of that conversation back to your website.

Monika’s third point was something that I say all the time: the Internet is not going away; you need to embrace it, not fight it.

Marilyn talked about how Cisco views themselves as leaders and how they try to adapt new technologies to make their company more efficient. About three years ago, they launched a blogging site. They now have 12 corporate blogs. Some of their blogs are internal and they use them for things like distributing corporate messaging. She pointed out that you need to get people to blog at least twice a week so info is not stale and so you gain trust with the audience.

Rob then gave a quick history lesson of Dell, which I thought was fun. Ten years ago, Dell took all of their orders on 250 fax machines. 7 years ago, they decided to webcast their conference calls. Now, they do about $25 billion a year online. This showed how quickly things have changed in the last ten years. They now have a popular IR blog, DellShares.

Rob asked everyone in the room to stand up if they were blogging. 10 people did. I think there were three live bloggers on Twitter, the results of which you can see on summize.

Dell is using a blog (IdeaStorm) where customers can suggest ideas. They have used about 100 of these ideas so far. Interestingly, about 80% of the ideas have come from their employees.

Broc was the last person to speak. His first point was to keep current and marketable because the IR industry is changing. He joked that you will need to blog to keep your job in five years.

Broc talked about five things that are changing the IR world right now. He went kind of fast through these, but he is coming by the booth later, so I will do an update then. Broc said that before you start blogging, you need to ask the following: Do you have what it takes? Do you have the time to blog twice a week?. Do you have something to say?

I loved the enthusiam of the speakers and I wish there was more time to learn from them. I’ll be back shortly with another entry that covers the Q&A.