Presuming you do cover these topics somewhere, will our intrepid investor find what you are providing? How hard will this task be for him? Is your website effective in informing, or does it make it a challenge? If it is a challenge, well… why are you allowing it to be a challenge?

It seems IRO’s usually strive for communication effectiveness in ways suitable to the form they are delivering meesages in:

-    for required filings and releases effectiveness is in accurate reporting, a transparent writing style, and balanced treatment of opportunities and challenges;

-    in presentations they shoot for nicely designed PowerPoint slides, hopefully with legibly-sized type and some consistency in visual style;

-    in speech delivery or one-on-ones they practice-up the executives for an engaging and credible delivery.

Yet investor sections of corporate websites are not getting the idea of “effectiveness”. They may be getting the idea of ‘completeness’, but they are just not getting the ‘Internet’ part.

Not many of your favorite websites would consider their efforts to engage their audience complete with the addition of a PDF. Frankly, I can’t think of any good (non-investor related) website that would trust key messages to only PDFs. Well, maybe government websites, but they’re not really in any sort of competition based on effectiveness. Oh, and they’re not trying to achieve a fully and fairly valued stockprice based on informed investors. Oh, and they’re not worried about their cost of capital.

So, back to the idea of considering whether you are communicating foundation material on your website effectively. Ask: “Why should someone who doesn’t know my company invest in it?” “Can my website answer basic questions that will engage them in our story?” “How difficult does my website make it to find these answers?”

Get your visitors, especially potential investors, off to a strong start when they visit your website. (Please Note: I didn’t say “When they visit your Filing Cabinet”).

Don’t make the task of evaluating your company more work then it has to be. Don’t make them convince themselves of your worthiness. Don’t make them play BattleDecks with your sans-remarks Investor Slideshow.

Get your content strategy together. If you’re interested in doing better talk to us at zu.

This screen capture from the I-Metrix brochure displays the concurrent presentation of financials for Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell generated from the XBRL feeds from Edgar Online. This type of tool will greatly accelerate the data gathering process for potential investors from hours to minutes.

Soon the ‘go-to’ description of your enterprise will become the equivalent of a food label nutrition chart in a ‘just the facts’ approach to providing information.

Here we can compare two brands of chocolate chip cookies.

But is this how we buy food? By only looking at these measurables? We all know that, despite the similar make-up of these products, they don’t taste the same and one will be more successful than the other.

The reasons for success may be better explained in the story that goes with the product then in the nutritional performance data.

When XBRL allows your company to be compared side-by-side with its peers in a generic GAAP-compliant view, such as those provided conveniently by I-Metrix, then what is the next step in the analysis? What’s missing?

What will increasingly matter on the Internet and on your website will be the ‘other stuff’, not the financial reporting. It will be the story the CEO tells investors in person. When he’s running the conversation he isn’t reading XBRL to the audience, he’s adding the context, the long-term strategy, and the positioning explaining markets, outlook, competitive advantage and so forth.

When the quantitative XBRL filtering and screening is over with, and the analyst or retail investor visits your website, are they going to get what’s missing? Or is it just out-of-date, coffee table book statements about the company with links to PDF financial reports that are rather superfluous to the slicing and dicing already done by XBRL readers?

Will they find current high-value materials provided in an engaging way? Will they see the clarity in the plan that fosters a corporate culture that will win in their chosen field and create shareholder value? Will it bring to life the recipe that makes a company a success?

When widely disemminated XBRL viewers focus attention on your last quarter’s earnings blips, are you ready to show an engaging version of why your company is a worthy investment?

Even as we integrate new communication forms and technologies, let’s keep our eye on the website.

Anyways, it turns out the most successful companies deliver an “experience”, in addition to whatever else they are doing. (So please take that as a given or go to the MX conference for yourself). The main dividing point in how brands or companies deliver an experience to their clients is whether it is delivered in a ‘prescriptive’ way or in an ‘adaptive’ way. The former is how Disneyland presents their experience of ‘Magic’: “come here and we do it to you”. On the other end of the scale is Harley Davidson: “Buy this and become a modern day rebel” (instructions not included).

Now, many investors, especially more advanced ones, have a planned experience in mind when they hit your site. With mathematical formulas and ratios set to plug in your numbers, these investors use an adaptive approach to create their own experience using materials you passively provide. Most websites will support this type of experience by default with their filing cabinet of materials.

But can your website provide a ‘prescriptive’ experience? Is your website empathetic enough to less prepared visitors to consider how the parts go together to tell a story? Do you provide instructions and strategy to relate the various departments, performance measures, and operations into a cohesive whole? Or will your site come off as a poorly coordinated set of activities and assets, a somehow-successful holding company communicating little sense of priority, direction or focus to the whole enterprise. While the evidence is there, the vision that unites the actions will rarely be realized by chance without empathy for the naiveté of first time visitors. And everyone who owns you was once a first time investor.

While the big picture view may be found in areas of investor relations ‘magic’, such as a CEO’s speech, the greater whole is an unscripted landscape, good for adaptable experiences and poor for the uninitiated.

I’m thinking of an investor-oriented website as a new kind of taco bar, where all the ingredients are laid out, each in their little bowls and serving dishes; it might be delicious, but I’m unsure how to put it together. How does this work? How do other people do this? What is the key to understanding this? I might be fine after I get through it the first time, but I frankly need some prescriptive advice to get the most out of what is being offered.

So please feel empathy toward your first time potential investors, and make sure they enjoy themselves and don’t feel like goofs trying to figure out why you’re worthwhile eating, I mean buying.

One of my favourite management books, John Heider’s Tao of Leadership, describes the importance of process. Here is a partial reading:

“Do not lose sight of the single principle: how everything works. When this principle is lost and the method of meditating on process fails, the group becomes mired in intellectual discussion of what could have happened, what should have happened, what this technique or that might do. Soon the group will be quarrelsome and depressed…When a person forgets that all creation is a unity, allegiance goes to lesser wholes such as family, the home team, or the company.”

This is a good description of how the client-contractor team will tend to lose unity and become quarrelsome should it lose focus on the process by which sites are created.

This is why the process must be respected.

This was apparent to Lao Tzu in the 5^th century B.C. and still makes sense today.

For starters,  communicators should respect the new ways audiences interact and meet them on their own terms. And frankly, most companies that put Social Media in such high regard is really questionable, given their handling of Web 1.0.

Remember that one? Publishing good content in HTML?

A good example of these forgotten basics in the Investor Relations world is the handling of annual reports online. Even though this is the Internet, where folks like to use their browsers to read, search, enlarge, bookmark, copy and paste, enjoy rich media, interactive elements, light boxes, related information–many companies are deciding that the LEAST they can do in meeting the expectations of their online audience is the right choice, and so provide only lifeless PDFs or freakish custom viewers designed by print publishing houses.

Perhaps social media is the answer! Perhaps all will be made well by Twittering about a recent posting of some required filing in PDF format, or blogging about their uninspiring filing-cabinet-of-a-website. “Web 1.0 is dead! Long live social media!”

Excuse me if skip the parade, I have to get back to working on Web 1.0.

twitpitch: Get back to basics of Web 1.0 before you invest in social media.@zutweets @tonyzuck shares insights for publishing good #IR content online.

• The financial crisis is the biggest concern with uncertainty, and optimism, about how the fed is “mostly getting it right” on steering the economy though the recession, though the increased direct government involvement seems a little out of character for the country
• XBRL seems to be gaining speed with useful readers and other technologies beginning to appear, reminding us all that the other supplementary material on the website that provides story, strategy and leadership personality should be enhanced
• The sell-side seems to be shrinking in influence as online commentators and other media personalities take an every larger roll in communicating to retail investors, of whom more and more seek investment strategies, and of course invest, online
• Social media is emerging as a way to conduct “continuous investor sentiment analysis”, and can forewarn IROs of stock-moving rumours, that many (and us) suggest should be addressed in those same online media
• And, after completing many free website audits for IR effectiveness, we have to say: most investor websites do not do a good of job of communicating as websites should and can: unifying ideas such as the value proposition, outlook and strategy are done better in non-website materials, such as speeches, annual reports, and conference calls. Filing cabinet-style sites dominate.

I found that one of the hot topics at NIRI09 was the role of social media in IR. We would like to continue the social media conversation with you and invite you to join us in a live webcast on July 16th, featuring our own social media evangelist, CEO Ryan Lejbak, who will take you on a tour across various social media platforms and demonstrate techniques IR professionals can use. This webcast will reveal the steps you should take on your own to begin to monitor, participate and engage investors. Look for your email invitation in the coming weeks.

I hope you enjoyed NIRI09 as much as we did. Check out our blog for regular IR industry updates.

Over the past few years, we have watched (and assisted) PotashCorp switch from a “Print First” to “Web First” strategy for their often award-winning materials. And the 2008 report titled, “More per acre… the sustainable solution“, was conceived and designed first as an online document. A PDF summary is also offered for those with money to burn on inkjet cartridges, or Kindles.

The sustainability report, including historical data was built around Global Reporting Initiative recommendations. It uses the same programming standards found in their online annual report and so opens in its own microsite—just how website users like it and how this premium web content oughta be.

Of course, not many companies tell the company story, or describe their plans for the future, or describe their sustainability efforts, better. And that makes the web presentation so much stronger.

Congrats to all involved on this one!

Granted, the larger and more multi-purposed the website, the greater the need for IT to control the rate of change of the site. And the greater the controls and project management needed to ensure website changes don’t endanger the integrity of the greater site. We understand their need to move cautiously, resist change and experimentation, and slow the path of new technologies. (Such as corporate adoption of browsers newer then IE6, access to social media sites, etc.)

We’ve found IROs who actually need our help in dealing with/working with their own IT department to make substantive changes to their sites, such as improving information architecture and the addition of usability enhancements. We are happy to do this – to be guides and project managers for the IROs with their own information services group. And after gaining the trust of the technology folks, we are actually appreciated in helping them deliver a project on time. It is reasonable to expect that a temporary boost in web programming capability is what a project needs to actually be accomplished, as corporate IT departments are typically overbooked with projects at any point in time.

Of course, the best strategy is that the IR website be removed from the enterprise solution (while maintaining the online brand) so that Investor Relations can have much closer and immediate control of their website. Just because the website is “programming-oriented” does not mean it should be controlled by IT. The IR website is a communication project, like the annual report. Imagine if IT controlled the means of producing that.

In most cases, and especially where the website has many purposes beyond the Investor Relations function, IR websites would be far better if IT was out of the loop.

It is rather tiresome to hear that there is “too much risk” in actually providing the text of what was said to investors. Text that is quite frankly necessary to make sense of the slides. How about the risk of annoying all of your investors who could not attend the event? Or, if the speech is only provided in audio, what about those with hearing disabilities?

If companies are afraid to provide the words that a key executive spoke in public, it makes me think that perhaps the person was drunk. Why else would the remarks be so unreliable that Legal believes they’re going to get in trouble for letting us read what was said? This is poor disclosure. Or laziness.

The owners deserve to hear what their executives said in public to other owners.

He says the key mistake to avoid now is failing to keep interest rates and taxes low to maintain a good money supply. He says falling commodity prices are good and will be part of the return to good times, as they give everyone more purchasing power. This will reverse consumer sentiments about holding onto money rather than spending it, and so bring about normalcy and growth. “Everything is a good deal right now”, he stated. Other positive indicators: lack of labour power means wages can come down more easily, housing is likely at the bottom, and “inflation adjusted buying power” is up.

His main idea for where the government is failing is in lack of spending on education. The US does well in sports at the Olympics but in the math Olympics, he likens the US to the Jamaican bobsled team.

As a species, we will need to think our way out of all the crisis’s facing us.

But as Dilbert was highlighting lately, wasn’t it all the big MBA brains that got us into this?

The Economic Crisis certainly seems to be on folks’ minds with tales of downsizing, especially in the financial sector, and most focused in North America–New York namely. Talking to bankers from Denmark and vendors from the UK, the pain is felt all over.

Being from Saskatchewan in Canada, which hit the crisis period at a high point in economic activity, at zu it feels more like a hair cut then an amputation—albeit we are feeling some effects as we do sell into markets around North America. Perhaps I will have greater understanding of what’s coming after the Todd Buchholz Monday Keynote. He’s a “leading expert” on financial markets, as his bio says.

Check out some of the pics from the Opening Reception. Follow us @zutweets on Twitter for live updates at NIRI09.

But on the writing of our webcast presentation: “Design for the Bottom Line: 5 Ways to Reuse Existing Materials for your IR Website”, I experienced that worthwhile feeling of having great clarity of thought after being compelled to make a clear case for the suggestions we supplied. When completing a formal audit of a client site we compare their website to their other IR materials, I also come to these a-ha moments where good ideas seem so clear. I guess that’s why folks like to blog, to fully understand their own thoughts and experiences.

This, of course, is good for your bottom line, as long as you’re not on the supply side of the displaced real resources. Companies slash print budgets while providing better access to libraries of materials, never to be printed in most cases, but read and appreciated by greater numbers. Customer service is improved when made 24/7, as long as good user-experience is applied, which appears to be “customer service” on the web.

This is also good for the environment: when we avoid the creation, disposal or waste of real things. It looks like the Internet may help save the world, unless we drown in mobile batteries and grey computer plastic, of course.

Here’s a brief overview of the key points discussed:

• HTML online annual reports are the best approach as they take full advantage of the power of the Internet.

• The goals of best practices are to be investor friendly, meet the needs of investors, enhance communication, promote comprehension and transparency and make key areas prominent, understandable and pleasant for the stakeholder.

According to IR Web Report, these are the bare minimum standards of online annual reports:

· The entire report, including all pages, reports and data tables must be in HTML — not images — for rapid viewing and reference;
· A detailed, clearly labeled navigation menu;
· All HTML pages in printer-friendly versions;
· An easy to use downloads area;
· A link to an order form for the print version;
· Full and segmented PDF files for printing and offline use.

We may hold a webinar every quarterly with more examples and a panel of experts. We also promise to talk slower next time!

Contact us if you missed the webinar and are interested in learning more about online annual report best practices.

Thanks again to everyone in attendance!

We’ve been exploring the ‘living’ annual report format and are dying to create one. In our minds a living OAR captures a ‘snapshot in time’ of the official filing but is then updated over the next several quarters to provide current key financials and current links to related information and updates.

A living online annual report takes advantage of the fact that many investors use the annual report as one of the first steps in their due diligence as a way to get up to speed on what your company is about. With this in mind, why not address the visitor’s obvious next question: “What happened next?”

Providing information in this convenient location dovetails with our mission to create Investor Friendly materials. For us this means simply anticipating the next question and the next piece of related information that a potential investor might want. This may include providing other website materials: press releases, links to product announcements, mining site profiles or whatever else is on the site that expands knowledge about this important topic.

Of course with financial results, the main question is: “What are the latest results?”

While the Annual Report is intended to be a snapshot in time, for 12 months it becomes an important introductory piece on your company. This effect is emphasized in companies with sub-par IR areas. If your IR site is a lame filing cabinet, then consider this idea more strongly. While printed annuals do have a certain shelf life (probably a month or two before being tossed in the bin) their lack of up-to-date information is no sin. Online Annual Reports (OARs) on the other hand, are important resources until they are replaced with the new version. “While OARs function as guides to your company they can’t answer any current questions — even obvious ones. They can’t even direct you to information about “what happened next”. We don’t think this is acceptable given that they could”.

Consider that the printed AR only reaches current shareholders. So the online version’s main target is potential shareholders. With this in mind, and understanding that this is a key source of information in their due diligence, an IRO’s question should be: “how can I help this potential shareholder more quickly reach their comfort zone of knowledge so they can invest?” Well, think about making the site Investor Friendly. Think about anticipating what you’d look for next. It’s not “Rocket Surgery” as Ricky says on Trailer Park Boys.

We are not suggesting that every element be updated. Apply it to key financial tables, key program descriptions in progress, key deals playing out at time of writing, etc. To preserve the ‘snapshot in time’ version we suggest the additional information be accessible via an “Update” button, for visitors to trigger the effect. What will their reaction be? I expect things like: “That’s handy!”, “What a smart company!”, “This makes it easier!”,“These folks understand technology”;“Hey this sucks way less than that other company’s materials!”