Social media gives users the tools they need to discover, establish and nurture connections. Many users admit that without social media's six degrees of linkage, they may never have come to know about the existence of such affinities. Social media pulls users into their desired loops. This pole attraction also applies to companies seeking to draw investors and customers into their social graphs. By facilitating listening in on the views and conversations of nodal entities on networks, social media enables participation in those conversations with minimal intermediation. Companies can benefit from social media to grow interest in their products, describe business strategy, report financial performance, support sales and provide the company's perspective in guerrilla narrative contests. It also helps them to tune in to what people are saying about them, their peers, competitors and sector in general. Today, Twitter is perhaps the most evolved channel for establishing those connections, listening, and monitoring. In this post, we show how Nigerian companies can use Twitter for investor notifications, and the potential benefits they stand to reap from the microblogging service's social media features.
Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.’ This description, like the description of Facebook as a social utility, does not begin to capture the immense flexibility it offers its users in such limited characters. In this post, we show why it is important for companies to have a presence on the social web. We also provide markers for companies seeking to develop a social media strategy. Next, we introduce Twitter, showing how its unique publicness among social networks makes it ideal for broadcasting messages across the web. Finally, we show how companies in Nigeria can use Twitter as an investor communications tool.
Social media is all the buzz right now. Rightly so. Buzz should not be mistaken for hype. In only a few years, the shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0, has brought so many changes in the way we use the internet, that the label ‘revolutionary’ would not be an overstatement. These changes have been profound in the way they have induced users to learn new technologies and habits for participating on the social web.
Nonetheless, before going into a discussion on the value of social media, and Twitter in particular, to companies it is critical to point out that social media is squarely about the bridging offline events, news and activities with the web. If one or the other end points are absent, then it is a waste of time. For example, it would be pointless for a company to start tweeting if it does not have a robust and co-ordinated web communications strategy. Similarly, it would be plain meaningless for a company without a website or an outdated one to aspire to social media participation. Likewise, it would be vacuous for a company without an investor relations section on its website, and an internal officer responsible for that function, to assign the responsibility in a casual way to a junior person in the company. Social media participation, while mainly free in terms of entry costs, requires strategic involvement from the most senior levels of the company. It cannot be seen as an IT or outsourced function. ‘There’s someone, what’s his name again, who handles that in corporate communications’ will simply not be good enough. Companies need to take a holistic view to every touch point of contact with the web. Unless they are prepared to do so, there may well be no point in getting involved at all.
The value of social media lies in its power to help users build connections through the web. For companies, these connections should serve a purpose connected to their overall business purposes. However, it would be wrong for companies to see social media as just another marketing channel or brand pipeline. It would also be mistaken for them to set out with the idea that the ROI of social media success is based solely on the number of sales they make through those channels, ‘fans’, ‘followers’, unique page views, community membership growth, or comments that re-inforce their pre-conceived positive notions about themselves. Important as these are, perhaps, the defining characteristic of social media success is that its metrics are not linear.
Social media participation is not a campaign. Unless a company has successfully built a community of members around itself, or been active in other communities prior to the launch of a campaign, then such efforts are unlikely to produce the desired results.
Developing a social media strategy requires companies to have a clear and realistic idea of the goals they expect to achieve, as well as the resources they would need to commit to reach them. To reach their target audiences companies first need to know where these conversations are taking place. They should avail themselves of useful services like Buzz Ding, TweetBeep, Google Alerts, Google Blog Search, AlertRank and TweetDeck which help them to stay abreast of conversations going on about them in the Twittersphere.
Companies must to come to terms with the fact that social media has gone mainstream. It is no longer the preserve of a thin demographic of digital natives.
The following presentation by Dr. Venina Delobelle is a good primer on the subject of developing a social media strategy.
Jeremiah Owyang who has written extensively on the subject lists 10 beacons companies must remember when developing a social media strategy.
Social Media is about people: It is a fait accompli. Chances are that there are several conversations going on right now about the company, both on the public social web and private social web. Customers, investors, prospects and partners are connecting and sharing information with each other with or without the company’s participation. Companies should bear this in mind.
Communities are the goal, conversations are the verb: Social media can be used to reach and connect with customers. It helps users to participate in communities and start conversations. Companies need to know what conversations affect them, either directly or indirectly. Then, they need to listen in, monitor and participate in them.
Let go to gain more: Users of these tools are in charge, typically customers and investors are using these tools long before corporations get on board. In fact, speaking of control in a social media context is a non-starter. If it is to be social, then control, beyond, for example, general guidelines of community membership as described in a terms of service (TOS) agreement, should have no place in it. It is the users who determine the agenda and the sessions. As Time magazine correctly pointed out, social media has made ‘You‘, the individual, the central figure in social and historical discourse. Actually, the way the social media tools are developed, control is so diffused that no single user can control it alone, and still keep the community interested. Overt control stifles community.
Measurement is important: It is vital to measure the interaction between people. As terms like engagement, participation, and attention become part of the social media lexicon, companies must look at the the qualitative responses and the number as well as regularity of responses their participation draws from other community members, readers, listeners and viewers. The quality of responses is as important as the number of members, fans or followers.
Organize internally: Every company with a social web presence must focus as much attention on internal communications about community as it does externally, so that when the need arises, those responsible for social computing and community relations within the company are empowered to act quickly and effectively to deliver a coordinated response between the external messages and the internal updates sent to employees.
Risk of the unknown: Although many companies will be hesitant at first because of the potential risks, for example, inadvertent disclosure, misinterpretation or plain malicious misconstruction by some, learning will only come by doing. So long as there are clear and well thought out policies within the company to guide participation, it will ultimately succeed in the social space.
Social Media goes deep in the organization: Social media changes how executives communicate to employees and the public.
Social Media goes wide in the organization: Social media is not just about marketing or PR, it will impact most areas of company activities.
Social Media spans time: Smart companies are learning how to use these tools across all phases of the customer life cycle. Awareness, engagement, education, pitch, negotiation, deployment, support, product research, customer feedback, market and competitive intelligence, and then repeat. The same applies to investor communications: from pre-listing-listing, going public, transactions in the company’s lifecycle, corporate governance, financial reporting, shareholder services, etc.
Social Media is not magic nor voodoo: Companies should use these tools to open and reach out. No holds barred.
For companies, conversation means casual communications and a willingness to listen to others. It should not all be about the company pushing out its prepackaged messages. Actually, the primary reason why companies should get in to the social space, in the first place, is to have unfettered access what others are saying about them, which means listening and monitoring, then responding in the same tone. They need to remember that the culture is ’social’ not ‘official.’ It is a different ball game from the familiar corporate communications routine of one way communications, or at best, private and lagging exchanges with the intended audience via email. Sometimes, it may mean a public admission that certain aspects of the company’s policies and operations have not lived up to expectations, and occasionally, it may mean being heckled by some members of the social network who oppose the company’s actions. Notwithstanding, the benefits of participation make it worth every penny of effort companies commit to it.
So what is Twitter? Even better, what is Twitter all about? A basic description of Twitter is that it is a tool that helps users send brief updates of what they are doing, thinking or planning. Limited to 140 characters, it forces users to crunch their updates to pithy remarks. As counter-intuitive as that sounds for generating interest, Twitter allows for a lot of ingenuity in how users manage their character limit.
What makes Twitter unique among social networks is that unlike its typical walled garden peers like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and many others, people do not need to ‘friend’ each other to follow each other. No one needs to invite his or her friends to join Twitter, and no one needs to get permission to follow anyone’s updates. Although it has a basic privacy setting that allows users to send private direct message to those who follow each other, the default mode is set to public.
O’Reilly Media has produced an excellent video introduction to Twitter.
Here we focus on its use for investor relations and communications for Nigerian companies. Companies already using Twitter for investor communications include Dell and Sun Microsystems.
Traditionally, companies in Nigeria have to kept investors and shareholders informed about important events through notices in the print and electronic media. In recent years, a few companies have started to send these updates via email and SMS. While each of these means has its merits, they also have a number of limitations that constrain their utility as investor update tools.
It used to be that until recently, the only way that companies could achieve this was using expensive subscription-only proprietary channels provided by the newswire services like Associated Press (AP), Bloomberg, Business Wire and Reuters. These services guaranteed that as soon as any information on a company became available, its editors quickly compressed it to a single sentence and instantly transmitted it across the world to trading desks, media companies, investors and regulators across the world. An example of a newswire update would be ‘Actis announces sale of UAC Nigeria stake.’
Now the main value proposition of these newswire services, instant updates to subscribers, has been replicated by Twitter. In an August 2007 article written when Twitter had started to get a lot of buzz, David Berlind, pointed out that Twitter could take the wind away from the sales of the newswires.
Twitter is a lot like blogging. If you ask me, the special ingredient in blogging is that it’s just Web publishing, greatly simplified. . . Like blogging, I see Twitter more as a disruptive Web publishing tool with ramifications to existing media business processes than I do as a way to find out when and where my friends are going to lunch and how much indigestion it gave them after.
A couple of days ago, I noted how Twitter is the sort of technology that could completely up-end subscription-driven outfits like Bloomberg or Reuters. Investors subscribe to these services and sit in front of giant consoles as editors from these organizations spit out one-liners at them — one-liners with material information to investors — in near real-time. In other words, if there’s a reporter at a financial briefing for some public company and an executive of that company makes an important forward looking statement, that statement will appear on the consoles of thousands of investors within seconds of it being uttered.
On the investor side, there’s a stream of these one-liners about everything that’s important to them flowing by their consoles like a river. The secret sauce is not just in the business process (a chain of talented writers and editors who feed the system), but also in the infrastructure that facilitates that process: a proprietary infrastructure that, as far as I can tell, has been completely cloned by the likes of Twitter and Twitter-competitor Pownce.
Publishing one-liners takes only as long as it takes to type the one-liner.
Now here is where Berlind hit the eureka spot.
Much the same way the advent of blogging has made it possible for us to turn our RSS readers into our own personal newspapers where content from multiple sources is easily aggregated into one river of news and much the same way millions of ‘publishers’ have embraced that new medium (much to the delight of those willing to consume that information), it isn’t hard to imagine a world where experts who don’t work for Bloomberg or Reuters (ones who are just as good at feeding one-liners to investors) start to publish useful, timely, and material information using a tool like Twitter. It’s equally unimaginative to picture investors subscribing to those feeds. They’ll do anything and consider any information that comes their way in an effort to beat other investors to the punch.
The day after Berlind’s article appeared, Dominic Jones took up the baton and reasoning further argued that:
When I read ‘experts’ I think of companies themselves. Investor relations departments and company executives are the ultimate experts on their own companies. Companies using Twitter alongside their websites to notify investors of new material information could bypass intermediaries like wire services.
In essence, Twitter can be a notification system and an editorial system. It can tell someone news is available and provide a link to it. For example: ‘Sun reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq.’
It can also be an information system by delivering the news in a concise format: ‘Sun Beats Profit Target Q4 Revenues $3.835 billion, EPS $0.09 vs consensus $0.05 http://tinyurl.com/2h5osq.’
In fact, with its social media features, Twitter offers much more than the newswire services. Not only will companies be able to provide instant updates to those investors and others interested in the company, they will be able to send instant feedback, about the news item to the company.
As an investor relations tool, Twitter underlines the ‘r’ in relations by allowing a public stream of investor queries and comments to be visible to others. Instead of a simple push model, as used by the newswires, which intermediate between the concerned company and the news audience, Twitter allows the audience to send their unfettered views, opinions and comments back to the company. Since these are usually sent on the public stream, other investors can also see the feedback, follow the company’s response and add their own contributions to the multilogue. By adding links to the website, spreadsheets, news sites, pictures, and videos, companies can point their followers to more substantive information.
Sample tweets would be
@ZenithBank: Ovia at 2009 World Bankers Conference Monaco: Nigerian banks are safe: http://is.gd.sample1.
@UBA_Africa: UBA announces N8bn loan fund to support women owned business in Nigeria. Increase of 26% over 2008 lending. http://is.gd.sample2
@ABCTrans: Bad federal roads costing luxury bus companies N79bn annually. http://is.gd.sample3
@Starcomms: Home internet usage to rise by 200% in 2009. Starcomms is leading provider. http://is.gd.sample4
@DangoteFlour: Flour consumption increased 95% in 2009. Trend will continue till 2017. http://is.gd.sample5
@UAC_Foods: Larry Ettah commissions new Gala sausages plant in Kano.129 Mr. Biggs outlet opening in 2009. http://is.gd.sample6
@MTN to list on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. Reports 2008 earning growth of 54%.Crosses 39M subscribers. http://is.gd.sample7
Investor communications tweets can be about:
Financial results
Strategy
New products and services
Presentations
Shareholder meetings
New investments
Investor requests
Analyst research and reports
Industry research and reports
Industry conferences and seminars
Partnership announcements
Awards
Retweets that are of relevance to the company
Regulatory notices and news
Economic news
Media interviews with board and management
Organizational changes and staff moves.
Using third-party developer applications for Twitter, companies can set alerts so that they receive instant updates via email each time its selected query or key terms are mentioned. These terms may be the company name, names of executives, brands, partnerships, plans, important shareholders or other related items.
The table below compares Twitter with other investor notification channels.
So where can companies begin?
As we said at the beginning, the first step is to have a web communications plan and social media strategy. This means a web2.0 compliant web site, with sharing tools, prominently displayed social media and network badges across the site inviting visitors to follow the company on those sites, and regularly updated information from both offline and online sources. There should be no lag between the two.
Second, companies need to understand the Twittersphere: what it is, how to communicate on it, and what it takes to draw attention on it.
Third, companies must select staff who will post regular updates on the microblogging service, monitor replies, retweets, direct messages and comments, and generally enhance the company’s profile on Twitter. There should be more than one Twitter account in the company for obvious reasons that people fall ill, travel, become indisposed or simply move on and leave the company. Those tweeting on the company’s behalf must also be enthusiastic tweeters in their own personal lives.
Finally, companies need to ensure that the feedback from Twitter is digested into the company and reviewed by top management. What types of questions are followers asking? What are they saying? What do followers tweet about?
Twitter offers so many tangible benefits for Nigerian companies to send out information to those interested in them. Its default public mode means that companies can jump right in to conversations to add their voice while improving disclosure and investor engagement. We hope that in the near future, we will start to see innovative Nigerian companies taking the first steps on the microblogging service.
One cannot help noticing how Niyi Meka Olowola, Oando's Head of Corp Comms, is nodding in approval. Maybe Goldman Sachs can learn lessons.04:47:49 PM January 25, 2012from HootSuite
Twitter: CustomsStreet
