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PRINTER VERSION

How Is Your Image?
USE THE WEB TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

• Visit Earnings Whispers for whisper numbers on 4,000-some stocks. What (if anything) are the brokers saying about you?
• Stock Rumors offers news on-line or via e-mail, reporting on rumors heard on the street, new domain names or trademarks applied for, etc.
• Stock Twits expedites traders' short announcements about stocks and trends. Although they try to curtail hypes and gossip, keep an eye on it.
• The rumor mill is fed by a huge number of stock-related discussion sites. Here are a couple of sites which can organize your search for gossip on your company:
  • TheLion.com. Organizes messages on a given stock from Twitter, Facebook and the major boards.
  • BoardCentral.com. Similar to TheLion but has different results.
• Make sure your company has an official page (or profile) at the following sites. Even more important, make sure someone else hasn't already created an inaccurate version of such a page.
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • YouTube

There are so many places where you should be found on the web that you can't keep track of all of them but you should try to look at the main ones. Financial sites such as CNN Finance, MSN Finance and Yahoo get their data fees from the big financial providers such as Hoovers, Market Guide and Comstock. Those big providers usually get their data from the SEC's EDGAR documents. Therefore, if you find incorrect information about your company on the web your time is probably best spent in determining where the information came from and correcting it at the source.

Make sure you are on the leading calendars such as:

• Seeking Alpha Conference Call Transcripts
• Yahoo's Events Calendar
• Briefing.com's Events Calendar
• Earnings.com
• The Online Investor's Events Calendar

Putting together a simple IR Page which meets disclosure requirements is relatively easy with the help you get today from your stock exchange, your press release distribution service, and so on. To go a step beyond, read Jakob Nielsen's "IR on Corporate Websites. Here is a text-only version if the article disappears from the Web.

There are many sites on the Web which give information on web design and programming. This may not be a subject you want to learn in depth. You should, however, be aware of developments in the area of financial tools and standards, if only to point your IT department in the right direction for the investor relations portion of your Website.

• Financial Markets World Daily intelligence on US and global financial marketplaces - Updated online!
• Wall Street and Technology A sophisticated site for IT people in the securities industry.
• Bank Systems and Technology A sophisticated site for IT people in the banking industry.
• Banks have developed a common XML format to be used over the Web called the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) format.
• Buyside and sellside groups have developed a common XML format to be used over the Web called the Research Information Exchange Markup Language (RIXML).
• Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is the XML format developed by business groups to be used over the Web. This is now required by the SEC for financial reporting. Since it is, indeed a superior way to transmit and view financial data, it will become increasingly important in the future.