Educating the Board on Social Media and Disclosure

I recently shared a summary of ‘Best Practices for Reporting to the Board’ from a survey that Ipreo conducted with their IR clients to gather feedback on the type of information they provide to their Board of Directors.

The findings reveal new ideas and have created a great foundation for an IRO who wants some insight into what information other companies are including in their Board Reporting. At the time, I did realize that social media was not included in the list of topics. But I just assumed that the companies surveyed didn’t use social for IR.

Recently Gene Marbach, CommPro Editor at Large sent me a key finding of the ‘2013 BDO Board Survey,’ conducted by the Corporate Governance Practice of BDO USA and asked my opinion. It states:

Close to two-thirds (64%) of corporate directors are aware of the new SEC rule that allows companies to disclose material information through postings on social media, but none indicate that their companies have utilized this new channel to do so, and only 11% anticipate utilizing social media for material disclosures in the future.

The findings prompted me to write this post. As we do know that social media is being used by public companies. So it seems that more education is needed on this front.

What follows are some ideas that I compiled way back in 2009 (inspired by the article “Problem Solved: How Do You Convince the Boss That it’s Time to Go Social?” by Claire Coyne of MarketingProfs (which are based on ideas from David B. Thomas, Social Media Managers, SAS). The ideas were used to form a list of tips to help IROs make the business case to inform the c-suite of how companies are using social media for IR. As many IROs report to their board, these tips can also be used to help educate them on social media. As a lot of changed in online communications, I also updated the language to reflect what is happening in the IR market today.

Hier geht es zum gesamten Artikel, erschienen im Q4Blog.