David Jackson's Instablog

How Do The Most Successful IR And PR People Use Seeking Alpha?

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 01:22:47 -0500

About 3,000 IR and 2,000 PR people are registered on Seeking Alpha. We've been watching how they use the site. Here are five tips, based on what we see the most successful IR and PR people doing:

1. Know what's being said about your stock

2. Tell us if an article about your stock contains errors
If there's a material error in an article about your stock, we'll act fast to correct it. You'll find a link to contact our editors (Problems with this article? Please tell us.) in the "About this article" unit below every article.

3. Send information to authors who write about your stock
Seeking Alpha enables you to direct message authors who write on your stock or sector. You'll find a "Send Message" button under the author's photo on every article page. You can use that to send press releases, or even offer an interview with management.

4. Ensure your conference call transcripts are being published
Seeking Alpha publishes thousands of conference call transcripts every quarter. Make sure yours is included by going to the quote page for your stock on SeekingAlpha.com to check if the transcript is there. If we're not publishing it, email racheltova [at] seekingalpha.com

5. Get your news in front of the influencers who matter
As well as broad coverage of individual stocks, Seeking Alpha has outstanding coverage of macro, sector and theme issues. If you have news that's relevant, search for articles on your topic and send a direct message to the authors.

If you're an IR or PR person, in what ways do you use Seeking Alpha?

55% Of The Equity Buy Side Reads Seeking Alpha

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 07:15:21 -0400

According to the most recent Erdos & Morgan study, Seeking Alpha is widely read by buy side equity investors:

55% visited in the last year
47% in the last month
22% in the last week
14% in the last day

By job type, the percentage who read Seeking Alpha is:

38% of Chief Investment Officers
19% of Heads of Trading
46% of Portfolio Managers
46% of Directors of Research
58% of Analysts

By type of firm, the percentage who read Seeking Alpha is:

45% of investment management firms
50% of mutual fund firms
44% of hedge funds

By firm, by assets under management, our readership is:

53% of firms managing under $100 million
48% of firms managing $100-499 million
46% of firms managing $500-999 million
50% of firms managing $1 billion or over

By firm type, our readership is:

44% of corporate pension funds
44% of other corporate funds
47% of government municipal pension funds
50% of other government public funds
48% of endowments and foundations
45% of hedge funds
49% of insurance funds
42% of trust funds
49% of mutual funds
58% of venture capital funds
47% of private equity funds
46% of personal asset funds

This Made My Day

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:56:25 -0500

A direct message I just received from a user:

"I am writing to let you know that SeekingAlpha has helped me rethink, reposition, and reinvent my entire financial existence in a very positive way. For many years until this past summer, I would occasionally happen on SA and read a few articles; I always found them interesting and stimulating, but I never followed up in any way. As a result of a significant change in my financial circumstances, however, I suddenly picked up on SA a couple of months ago and since then, it's been one huge home run for me. I visit SA daily and find it to be the best, richest, most honest, and most flexible financial website for personal investing. As a direct result of SA, I have rediscovered valuable things about stock investing that I learned 35 to 40 years ago, but forgot or put aside over time. It's all coming back to me now thanks to the marvellous authors and community on SA. And the results show in my personal investment portfolio--it's impressed even my personal investment advisor! SA is an excellent resource and I hope it's around for a very long time to come. Thanks to you and your team for your excellent efforts."

Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

Rethinking how Seeking Alpha calculates Top Commenters

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:18:47 -0400

We've been aware for a while that our Top Commenters leaderboard and badges are unsatisfactory.

Until now, we were calculating Top Commenters by a simple tally of the number of "likes" their comments received. The problem with that is that there are many groups on Seeking Alpha who repeatedly "like" their own members' comments, so the number of likes might not be an accurate recognition of comment quality.

So we've decided to re-evaluate the algorithm we use to calculate Top Commenters. I suspect we'll still base the rankings on "likes", but we can be far more sophisticated, for example by taking account of the "authority" of the person who votes with a "like". (Think aboout Google's calculations of Page Rank based on links and the authority of the linking site.)

While we rethink this, we're removing the Top Commenters badges and the link to the Top Commenters leaderboard in the footer of the site. But we're still storing all the data about "likes", so that when we launch the new algorithm it will take account of up to date data.

If you have any thoughts about how we should calculate Top Commenters, we'd love to hear your ideas - please leave a comment below.

Bloomberg reports when SA moves stocks

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:18:55 -0400

Why do people get so emotional about SIRI, RIMM and AAPL?

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 03:20:44 -0500

Over 40,000 comments are written by readers on Seeking Alpha articles each month. Many of them are remarkable, offering carefully written insight and analysis, often even better than the articles themselves.

But certain articles -- anything to do with SIRI, AAPL or RIMM, for example -- elicit highly emotional comments. In those cases, the comments often aren't about the stocks, but more about the companies themselves or their products.

What is it about gadgets that is so emotional?

From a column by David Pogue, the outstanding technology columnist for the New York Times:

Some people’s gadgets determine their self-esteem. Being a tech columnist is like being onstage: feedback from readers is instantaneous, impassioned and voluminous.

For years, I was baffled by the degree of emotion they’d express. (There was this gem from 2006, for example: “In my oppinion you should be fired for wrighting such a biast article in a (somewhat) professional newspaper. Oh and in case you think i work for microsoft or have bad grammar, or something, you should know that im 15!”) Eventually, I came to understand. Today’s gadgets are intensely personal. Your phone or camera or music player makes a statement, reflects your style and character. No wonder some people interpret criticisms of a product as a criticism of their choices. By extension, it’s a critique of them.
Which brings me to my next realization:
Everybody reads with a lens. Some of the cultural wars in this country are deep-rooted, eternal and irresolvable. Gun control. Abortion. Justin Bieber.

But feelings run just as strongly in the tech realm. You can’t use the word “Apple,” “Microsoft” or “Google” in a sentence these days without stirring up emotion.

When I reviewed the iPad, I tried something radical: I wrote two separate reviews, of equal length, in the same column. One was negative, one was positive. My point was that you could view this machine very differently depending on your technical background.

But on blogs and in e-mail, anti-Apple readers wrote about the “love letter” I’d written to the iPad; the Apple fanboys got riled up about the way I’d “trashed” it. Incredibly, each side completely ignored the other half of the review.

Is he right that some people's gadgets determine their self-esteem, and everybody reads through a lens? What do you think?