derek abdinor

In discussion the other day we were puzzled as to why the majority of companies on the JSE do not take advantage of Schedule 23 for their regulatory communications to the market and shareholders.

For issuing companies to embark on an electronic consent program, the following benefits accrue to company and shareholder:

1. Email addresses of shareholders for direct communication
2. Mobile numbers and landline numbers if proffered
3. Reduced printing and mailing costs
4. More cash in the kitty for dividends or retained earnings
5. Saving the planet
6. Training your shareholders to come to your official website as the #1 source of fact, news and comment

There are even more reasons to clean up one’s share register, embark on an asset reunification project  (tidying up unclaimed dividends) and ALL of them do credit to your brand. How you choose to spin it, be it by planting a tree for every shareholder converted or a reporting unit in your sustainability report, is up to you.

In South Africa, where public monies are involved, its always only a matter of time before the issue becomes politicised.

<pause for effect>

It follows that employing good shareholder communication governance NOW is better than having industrial action in a few months or years, at your AGM or outside your glass doors.

Ofttimes, people come up to me and say “please stop taking pictures” or “get off my lawn”. Othertimes, I talk to them about communicating to their stakeholders in an online fashion.

There are many tools to accomplish this. The variety becomes a problem because clients may see it as a shopping list. The real issue is the usability. If you do NOTHING online, do you expect an analyst to go to the stock exchange or regulator, or your company’s head office, and ask there for a report at reception? Of course not.

Its a continuum, stretching from extreme discomfort at getting public information, to extreme ease of use. The client has to decide where to jump off this line. As it is all really low-cost technology, the question should not be solely around cost.

continuum of investor information

What one must bear in mind, is that we live in a multi-channel world. By making all the formats in the graph available, some will still choose to have a printed report, others a PDF, others will only concern themselves with the Excel while some will have scanned the newspaper.

You can’t be all things to all people, but you can give all the options to all people.

Next Fifteen Communications Group’s annual report claims to be the first to incorporate weblog functionality into it.

‘We have an opportunity to expand the role of the annual report,’ comments Tim Dyson, chief executive of Next Fifteen. ‘We can transform it from a relatively dry summary of what’s gone on over the last year into a means of having a dialogue with our shareholders about all of the issues that the report raises.’

On the annual report microsite, one has a link (in a few sections) linking to a standalone page with a post, allowing comment.

and this links to another different page (new window):

Well done. As one who works in corporate communications. I was wondering when someone would attempt this. Merging investor relations with social media/enterprise 2.0 is a keen interest of mine.

Having said that, I feel some opportunities were missed (I would say that, wouldn’t I?).

1. The blog should be part of the annual report.
Pop-up, pop-out, ajax, iframe: whatever. You cannot post alongside it, you have to open a window to a different site. I pictured reading a page and seeing all the commentary beneath it, instead the post is not part of the annual report (ie: not signed off by the auditors).

2. It says blog but somehow doesn’t feel like it

• No RSS feeds, so one can’t be updated by the blog, one has to visit the page. Enough to disqualify it as a blog per se
• This is a homemade blog if you inspect the code. Valiant effort, but font tags and not half as well optimised as the usual blogging engines
• The links to Digg and Delicious would make IR novices more familiar if you used icons or a whats this?
• No trackbacks or comments RSS – not serious

3. Feels too controlled

Found out about this the same day as the BlogCouncil. This feels like a good IR idea that somehow got hijacked by legal and company secretarial. Written in ASP.Net code goes some way to explaining. Lose the lawyers in the brief, and get some PHP cowboys in.

Nevertheless, congratulations to Next 15. Here’s to seeing more uses of social media in IR!