In part 1, I shared the legal and investor perspectives of social media’s influence on IR. Today, you get to hear from two IROs who share how social media helps them control how people see the company and claim their identity in the social space.
David Urban, Director of IR, Johnson Controls
Johnson Controls just started using social media for IR a couple of months ago. Like most companies (that we have seen in our research), they started using Twitter first. From the beginning, they wanted to have an account specifically dedicated to IR – so that it would be easy for them to own the space, as well as making it easy for investors to seek out the information they’re looking for and not have to search through content they aren’t interested in.
Here’s how they decided to use social media for IR:
We saw how many people were on these channels and felt like it was a space that we really wanted to be a part of.
For implementation of the channel. We spent a couple of months researching what some companies were doing on Twitter. We then came up with a strategy for Twitter and some goals that we hoped to achieve through the channel. We worked up some drafts of the kind of information we were hoping to share and went over it with our legal department to give them an idea of what we wanted to do and make sure that everything was compliant. As for policy, we piggy backed off of our communications team and used a lot of what they had already put together. We just addressed all the risks that we thought we might be dealing with and made sure that we are keeping track of everything that is going out.
Here’s how they use Twitter:
We really started with baby steps and expanded. The challenge for us is to make social media and investor relations more relevant and efficient for investors.
Our activity on Twitter has been very basic, we only share content that is already on the website. With Twitter, we can share this content to this huge network of people who may never be interested or even know about the content on our website. Also, unless you are regularly checking the website, you have no idea when a new piece of content is added. Through Twitter, we are able to update our followers as soon as something new is added to the website. This is extremely useful for investors who are always interested in being kept as up to date as possible.
Twitter is a much more active form of communication which is different from the website which I would say is much more passive. Linking back to the website is the easiest way to add content to Twitter because there is much less legal and compliance risk.
We have created a content calendar to ensure there is never much of a down time in our communication when we aren’t busy with earnings communications. We are probably tweeting once a week or so. We let people know about company news, events and any regulatory news.
Our Twitter channel has centralized all of our information into one easy to navigate feed. Something that is especially useful for any analyst or investor.
Who is responsible for updating the content?
We have picked out a member of our team to champion the Twitter account. She is in charge of drafting the tweets and coming up with what we are going to share. The VP of IR or I then review all the tweets before we send them out. Make sure you are monitoring your Twitter account and come up with a response matrix so that you are prepared to handle both good and bad interaction with followers on your account.
Dennis: Any lessons learned from the launch?
Dave:
Probably the main thing is you need to think through who is going to follow you. That can be a good thing and a bad thing. We didn’t want to discriminate. Some of our followers are a little more active in being critical of the company. You just need to be prepared for that kind of activity and come up with the appropriate responses.
RJ Jones, IRO, Zillow, Inc.
Zillow is a rarity when it comes to using social media for IR, as RJ revealed that the company’s CEO was very active on Twitter before he joined. His initial reaction was that there was too much sharing happening on too many channels. So when RJ started at the company he had a lot of questions about how the process worked and how they would prepare for this kind of activity on Twitter and blogs.
Here’s some more information on how it all comes together internally:
We have a lot of frameworks in place for the CEO to work off of so that he has a guideline for how interactions take place on social media.
Whenever there is an event coming up we prepare a Tweet, Facebook post, Google+ post and a blog post.
With the mission at Zillow at the forefront, we want to make sure that we are sharing as much as we can so we can be as transparent as possible.
Social media is something that we do in addition to all of our other disclosure efforts – it is another piece of the puzzle. Not something that will eventually take over entirely.
Social media channels are an additional way for us to reach out. Also for us to control how people see the company and control our identity in the social space.
RJ also offered some other important considerations:
You need to make sure that the leadership team is savvy with social media and supportive.
It can’t just be the IR team that is working on it. The IR team needs to develop partnerships with the marketing, communications and PR departments.
When we were contemplating taking Q&A over Twitter during our conference calls we had to go through all the scenarios that could be involved in that kind of activity.
We crafted some polices and shared them with the team.
Additional thoughts:
There is a lot of value of having the CEO on Twitter as it provides a lot of visibility into the person who is largely responsible for the direction of the company.
Using Twitter to field questions gives access to an audience that may not always get a chance to listen in on meetings and calls and get to ask the questions that are relevant to them.
Dennis:
How do you respond to criticism that you are not answering the tough questions?
RJ:
We don’t have time to answer all questions so we have started focusing on themes. Depending on the topic of the day we try to highlight some good questions within the theme.
Audience Q&A
For Zillow: How do you know what questions you are going to answer when you are pre-crafting messages?
RJ: The questions are live in call. They are not prepared answers. We had two people: our social media manager and chief marketing officer taking questions and grouping them into topic areas. When a question came in that seems like it would be a little more straightforward to answer on a call and fit into a category we were building on we would answer it. Every question we got we highlighted on the screen and then would make special note of the question Spencer was going to answer and all the other questions that were being asked that related to it.
For Zillow: What other social media (other than Twitter) will Zillow use for IR?
RJ:
We have engagement on Pinterest but not so much on other channels. That means that right now we are not designating those as official channels yet. If engagement changes and it becomes clear that this is where investors and analysts want to engage with us we will look into it again.
Question (for entire panel): Should there be an integrated or dedicated IR channel separate from the standard, corporate communications channel?
Compiled answer:
Most people on the panel felt that there should be separate channels. Except for RJ, who said that depending on the company, different set ups make more sense. It is something that needs to be discussed internally.
Question (for entire panel):
A recent USA Today article that stated social media for IR is a fad and that it is much too difficult for investors to follow.
Answer:
Social media for IR should be determined by what is right for the company. No one on the panel thought that it was a fad. More and more people are getting comfortable on social media and this is going to be a space that people are going to want to interact with companies in. The conversation on social media is just getting started.
Bloomberg terminal with Twitter integration shows that social is here to stay. Even if investors say they are not using twitter, if they are on the terminal they are going to be seeing the Twitter feeds.
Stay tuned for some follow up blog posts where I sit down and interview each member of the panel to get an even deeper understanding of their thoughts and opinions of social media for IR.
Related posts:
NIRI 2013 – Social Media Workshop Follow up: Q&A – part 1
Social Media: Parsing the Hypos Webinar Wrap-up – Part 1
Social Media & IR Websites Best Practices Webinar Follow-up Q&A
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