An Online Newsroom: The Annual Report Delivered Daily To Grandma Rosie

Grandma Rosie says that Warren Buffett’s letter to Berkshire Hathaway stockholders is “slick”, “he talked like he was just visiting with you, not a whole bunch of facts and figures.” As for “that guy at GE” (CEO Jeffrey Immelt), “he wasn’t so good. He didn’t tell me what I wanted to know about what GE was doing.”

My 83-year-old mother, Rose Marie Lallo, is a savvy stock investor with more than 50-years of experience. She eagerly awaits the arrival of spring, when more than 50 annual reports hit her mailbox. Like millions of other individual investors, she loves reading the chairman’s letter, looking at the photos and seeing where the company has spent her investment. According to her “this year was not-so-good for annual reports. I got more 10k’s than annual reports, and I don’t like reading 10k’s.”

Communications for Investor Relations (IR) is mainly geared toward courting large institutional investors and analysts. The individual stockholder is all but forgotten. IR departments have lost sight, that it is the individual stockholder that drives the daily price of their stock.

When my partners and I designed the first dynamic online newsroom, staffed by professional brand journalist, for Imperial Sugar, it didn’t start-out as a tool for Investor Relations. Truthfully, it never crossed our minds that a tool designed for crisis communications, would in fact become a reliable, cost-effective IR communication tool – reaching both individual and institutional investors.

IR departments at Fortune 100, 500, mid-cap or small-cap companies have failed to developed trustworthy conversations with individual investors. By abandoning story-telling annual reports, they have effectively alienated the base that drives their company’s daily stock price.

The lackluster performance of world markets has been attributed to the lack of confidence individual investors have in companies. A large majority of companies have failed to adequately establish a conversation with the individual investor – and share their vision of the future.

Large institutional investors buy and sell according to needs of the portfolio they control; or on company news – bad or good. Individual investors are more loyal; willing to hold a stock as long as they trust the leadership of a company. This is the underlying reason world markets are trying desperately to lure them back onto the trading floor.

With the death of the annual report, the online newsroom becomes the place to establish a one-to-one conversation with the individual investor. It is the format to share stories, photos and videos about the company and employees told from the companies unique perspective; tout new products and research; and do it all without violating FTC rules or regulations.

Establishing a daily conversation with all investors; the online newsroom openly engage audiences, tell the brands many stories, paint a picture of the uniqueness of your organization and bring it all to life with great image and videos. In addition, it becomes the cost-effective source for your printed annual report.

The online newsroom became an integral part of Imperial’s strategy to establish a conversation with their individual investors, and it gave institutional investors and analysts a place to watch daily the progress of a company in transition. Within six-months of the newsroom start-up, Imperial’s stock gained more than 50%, and attracted analysts to initiate coverage.

The dynamic online newsroom is a news strategy that gives a daily focus to the annual report. It becomes a cost-effective way to prevent last minute scrambling for copy, stories and even videos – to tell the stories of the previous year, and the prospects for the next.

Be it my 83-year-old mother from Austin, a baby-boomer from Minneapolis or a housewife from Hackensack; all stock investors crave one thing – knowledge that they have made the correct decision when they purchased a company’s stock. The dynamic online, staffed by the professional brand journalists of Newsroom Ink, is the one source for institutional and individual investors to get the trusted information they crave.