The Practical Implication of the SEC’s Netflix Social Media Investigation

Investor relations Musings has been on hiatus over the past five months as various items from my personal life – selling a house, moving back to the Chicago area, buying a new house, finishing my teaching at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University – have conspired to keep me from doing much writing. However, now I’m back to add my two cents to whatever investor relations topics catch my fancy.

In the period during which I’ve been silent, perhaps the most interesting investor relations development has been the SEC’s report of investigation regarding Netflix. You may recall that Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, used of his personal Facebook page to disclose that Netflix had exceeded 1 billion hours of viewing during a single month and the SEC investigated whether this constituted a violation of Regulation Fair Disclosure. The case presented a number of interesting issues. First, there was the  threshold question of whether an internal company metric such as viewing hours should be considered material, when company revenue was based on fixed subscriber fees, not viewing hours. Second, the case presented a great example of how a company, by talking about an internal company metric such as viewing hours in both public documents such as press releases and shareholder letters, and in less public documents such as blogs and Facebook pages, builds a case for the SEC that the information is in fact material. (This is a great example of how trying to be transparent can get you into trouble with regulators, but that is a topic for another day.) 

However, the SEC sidestepped these issues by giving Reed Hastings and Netflix a pass on any regulatory sanctions and using the investigation to issue guidelines on the dissemination of material non-public information through social media sites. In a nutshell, the SEC said you can do it, as long as you tell investors where to look and your social media sites qualify as a “recognized channel of distribution” for communicating with their investors. 

From my point of view, the release basically establishes a safe harbor for the use of social media which investor relations departments should waste no time in establishing as a prudent risk management tool. The SEC has said that companies should take steps to alert the market about which forms of communications a company intends to use for dissemination of material, non-public information. Therefore, adding language to a company’s web site and press releases to the effect that the company may from time to time use social media sites to disclose important information would seem to be the prudent thing to do. For example, here’s what General Electric said in its first quarter 2013 earnings release: 

“GE’s Investor Relations website at www.ge.com/investor and our corporate blog at www.gereports.com, as well as GE’s Facebook page and Twitter accounts, contain a significant amount of information about GE, including financial and other information for investors. GE encourages investors to visit these websites from time to time, as information is updated and new information is posted.”

For most companies the point of this statement would not be to establish social media as their principal points of disclosure, but rather to insulate them in the event some important piece of information slips out in a twitter, Facebook or blog post. Remember, what is considered material, non-public information is determined with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.