derek abdinor

In a survey conducted by Agoracom, of 850+ Canadian retail investors, the following findings were made :

• 81% of Investors Prefer Small-Cap Resource Companies over Large-Cap.
• 48.4% of Investors were most Bullish on Gold compared to other minerals and metals.
• 73% of Investors Conduct the Majority of their Research (75%+) into New Stocks Online. This is a dramatic 18.65% increase over 67% of respondents in 2007 and serves as proof positive that an online investor relations program is critical if you want to reach new investors.
• 48% of Investors Conduct All of their Research (95%+) into New Stocks Online. No online IR program means you immediately miss out on 48% of all investors.

• 60% of Investors Use Discussion Forums For Information and/or Research.

• AGORACOM brand recognition amongst retail investors has risen by 360% over the same period last year. With 95% of our market budget allocated online, we are an actual case study about the power of online marketing to small-cap investors.

QUESTION #3 – What Percentage Of Your Research Into New Stocks Is Done Online?

100% of Research (21%)

90% of Research (27%)

75% of Research (25%)

50% of Research (18%)

< 50% of Research (16%)

NOTE: This is one of the most striking statistics in the entire survey. Specifically, 73% of small-cap investors use the web to conduct the majority (75% +) of their research into new stocks.

Even more striking is that fact that 48% of investors rely on the web entirely to find their next small-cap investment.

Finally, after averaging the numbers out, the web accounts for 77.05% of all research into new small-cap investments.

These figures are both striking and logical when you consider the fact that major finance media provides very little, if any, small-cap and micro-cap coverage.

Based on these figures, a CEO that fails to implement an online IR strategy is doing a great disservice to their company and shareholders.

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excellent results from the survey by Agoracom. Retail investors were being arrogantly branded as nuisances less than a year ago, but with the increased shareholder activism and the market we’re in, they may be the best discerners of growth.

I recently had the need to get information on Vignette (story server) in a hurry, and followed a certain methodology which is no doubt common to many.

In order:

1. Google
2. Vignette’s site
3. Wikipedia
4. Phone dev friends
5. Twitter
6. Post a question on LinkedIn

You could seperate the first 3 into old-style information harvesting (even wikipedia), #4 into common sense, and #5 and #6 into “leveraging social media”. Well, the winner by a country mile for answers was LinkedIn! Let me share with you those that were public answers:

Vignette server: difficult to develop a website on top of it or not?

Answers

Krishna Kumar: Sr. Vice President & Group Editor – DARE at CyberMedia India Ltd
If you are talking fo getting it done by a consultant, that can be costly.

And the cost may have nothing to do with the complexity.

Vignette is supposed to be one of the most scalael and highend content servers out there, having hosted sites for Olympics, etc.

The server (plus various additional modules) itself is very costly. And consultants with experience on vignette do not come cheap

kkkg

Eric Small: Director, Consumer Product, with extensive technology background, focus on web communities and UGC
If you’re at the point you’re even asking this question, you’ve got a difficult task ahead of you. Vignette, or any enterprise-level CMS, is meant to solve the problem of large-scale content management. By and large, when you get to this point, your web site is going to be complex (and thus difficult). Otherwise you wouldn’t be considering spending that much $$$.

Use the CMS Watch report at www.cmswatch.com/cms/report/ to make sure you’re getting the right vendor. And get someone in your organization to read the CMS Bible by Boiko (ISBN 978-0764573712) to get a good sense of the process of building out a CMS-driven system. If you have the leverage (and you should with this kind of investment) insist on a prototype before signing on the dotted line.

By the way, if all of this seems out-of-scale for what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be looking at Vignette. For smaller implementations there are good open-source solutions like Drupal and OpenCMS.

Luis Mendez: Solutions Architect
Vignette can be very complex. But this will be the case with any combination of portal server, web server, application server, content management server, and dynamic business objects delivering along with search, security, and high performance environment.

It really depends on how you want to foray into the Vignette products themselves.

On one hand, you can use the Vignette out of the box content managers and have everything sent out via RSS, XML and so forth. That’s easy assuming all content management is done through the apps that come preconfigured out of the box.

On the other hand, doing things like delivering secured data with integrated directories and other ACLs on both the content management and the content delivery is another bowl of wax.

There are of course other issues to deal with such as client side request through frameworks like AJAX, how portlets communicate with one another in multiple states and how all of that translates into where you content is going to come from.

Getting a Vignette consultant on board would be an expensive proposition because they can help you traverse all of these topics. They are typically well versed in all areas of the web and then some!

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What did we learn? That LinkedIn is powerful as it filters a lot of the noise and is targeted at professionals,  that you will get an answer from strangers and friends alike and that anyone wanting hard skills in this economy should hit the Vignette books. Thanks all!