Social Media and Investor Relations Redux

Readers of this blog will know that I am somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to the use of social media in investor relations (and yes, I recognize the irony of that statement when written in a blog). It’s not that I think there is no use for twitter, linkedin and the other social media services, it just that they strike me as being over-hyped compared to the nitty gritty job of getting the basic message right. But I am here to report that even I can be convinced of the ways that social media can be helpful.

Earlier this week I was privileged to give a speech to the NIRI Houston chapter on my favorite topic, the intersection of academic disciplines and real world investor relations. Before the speech I was introduced to Catherine Crofton of Q4 Web Systems. It turns out that Q4 Web systems had agreed to sponsor the luncheon and Catherine was going to introduce me. As we chatted about investor relations issues before lunch, Catherine told me about a success story of one of their clients in using social media. It turns out their client, TVI Pacific Inc., launched a campaign to use social media in their investor relations program that, coupled with a good story, helped to raise the firm’s visibility with investors, resulting in improved trading volumes and stock price performance. Q4 Web Systems has written about the program on their blog, which can be found at

http://www.q4blog.com/2010/01/11/tvi-pacific-shares-roi-of-using-social-media-for-ir/.

As I thought through this example, it occurred to me that the company in question, TVI Pacific, was a micro cap company, and one of the big issues facing small cap companies is simply one of visibility. If you are a Fortune 500 company, visibility is not an issue; many sell side analysts cover you, you have a large established base of institutional shareholders and the media is focused on you. However, if you are a small cap company, just getting on the radar screen of many investors presents a problem: the sell side may not cover you at all, very few institutions may own you and you are thinly traded. In short, the markets are a whole lot less efficient when it comes to small caps, mostly it seems because the information does not get in front of the right investors.

There is actually some interesting academic research on this topic. The title of the paper is “Investor Relations, Firm Visibility and Investor Following” and was written by Brian Bushee of Wharton and Gregory Miller of the Harvard Business School. The paper finds that investor relations efforts to improve a small cap firm’s visibility result in better trading volumes and increases in institutional ownership and better valuations.

The interesting thing about the TVI Pacific case is that they used social media in the form of postings on Twitter, Facebook, Fliker, YouTube and Slideshare and links on their website. Slideshare is a new one on me, but it turns out there is a site that allows you to post and share your slide presentations. (For those of us who have had to sit through endless boring powerpoint presentations during meetings, this may seem a bit masochistic, but it seems to be a popular site. Who’d of thunk?)

So if you are a small cap stock in need of visibility, social media may be an additional set of tools an IR officer can use at very low cost, assuming you can get the company’s general counsel to sign off on the use of them.

And it also seems as though a certain cranky IR observer may have to wind up eating his words.