Dominic Jones_'s  Instablog

I've started a series of posts for investor relations professionals and company executives that is exploring how they can become successful contributors to the Seeking Alpha community. My overriding objective is to ensure that IROs and company executives have a realistic understanding of what is required for them to add value to the site.

It's clear from the input I've already received from SA regulars that companies that join simply to push out news releases and promotional materials are going to fall flat on their faces, and potentially alienate people here.

I've also received some excellent suggestions from SA regulars on the types of content they'd like to see from companies, but I can always use more input from the SA community.

The first post is an overview of SA and its audience (I'll update this list as new posts are posted):

1. For Investor Relations, Seeking Alpha may be the ideal social network
http://www.irwebreport.com/daily/2009/11/24/for-investor-relations-seeking-alpha-may-be-the-ideal-social-network/

A very interesting article published by Market Rap was forwarded to me by Bruce Carton on Twitter.

The story is that Dow Jones says it received Take Two Interactive's (NASDAQ: TTWO) Sept. 1 earnings release under embargo ahead of its general release via Business Wire. This allowed Dow Jones to write an analysis of the results that was released within 48 seconds of the news crossing Business Wire, and before the company's release showed up on most places on the web. (It typically takes a minute to seven minutes for news releases to be widely distributed on the web).

Even more interesting to me is what Dow Jones told Market Rap:

“We, like other newswire organizations, are often able to issue analysis articles very quickly because companies provide releases under embargo slightly before the releases are broadly distributed.  The embargo prohibits us from distributing a release or related article before an agreed upon time.  In the case of Take-Two’s earnings, the embargo was until the company issued the release over Business Wire.”

This suggests that giving earnings releases in advance to proprietary wires like Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg is common practice. Frankly, this is the first I've heard of this practice and if it is widespread it needs to stop.

While there's nothing I know of that prohibits this practice, it's incredibly risky. What if one of the newswires inadvertently publishes their story before your news release crosses the wire? The practice also opens up more opportunities for insider trading, and hacking.

However, there's another issue here. How do you choose which news services get your embargoed release and which don't? Indeed, what is a news service today? Isn't Market Rap a news service? What about Business Insider? Or SeekingAlpha? Or StockTwits?

It's getting harder these days to tell the difference between mainstream financial media and alternative financial media. Indeed, you could say there's a full-scale war afoot between the traditional financial newswires and the new entrants.

I don't think it's smart strategy for a company to be seen to take sides in this war, which is what Take Two Interactive seems to have done and is now getting bad publicity for.

Bottomline: Companies should treat everyone the same. And they need to make sure their IR firms and PR newswire services is doing the same.

Using the Seeking Alpha transcript database, I thought it would be fun to see at how many companies' earnings calls various social networks have been mentioned by executives or analysts.

This is by no means scientific, but here are the results anyway:

• Facebook -- 160 companies
• MySpace -- 125 companies
• Twitter -- 45 companies
• Bebo -- 13 companies
• LinkedIn --10 companies

You can find lots of interesting info in the transcripts. Like did you know that the first time Facebook was mentioned on an earnings call was February 2006? You can see the precise context by following this link.

Interesting, huh?

I recently relocated my office 3,000 miles and had to rely on a new netbook and an iPhone for all of my work needs while my main machine was in transit.

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