I came across an interesting press release from Furlong PR suggesting that FTSE 100 companies are missing on the investor relations potential of social media. The press release mainly cites some research that Furlong has conducted which looked at a number of FSTE 100 corporate websites. Unsurprisingly, most of them lack any kind of social media elements, even the basics such as RSS feeds. In the release, they also make reference to a Canadian company that began integrating social media into their investor relations and saw traffic to their site increase from 100 to 4000 per week, and also saw the share price double from $0.06 to $0.12.

With most experts assigning social media “ownership” to PR, is IR the next big milestone for the PR industry? In my own experience over the past four years working with social media, it was initially quite difficult to convince traditional PR teams to invest in social media and I envisage the same journey unfolding with IR teams. So, what lessons can we learn from our social media journey with traditional PR teams? It surely has to be simplifying the entire process:

• Clearly outline the objectives to be achieved – drive further traffic to IR information, increase conversation around this information. Ultimately, help increase the reputation of the company and therefore help the share price
• Clearly identify the audience – understand the stakeholders that are important to IR, outline the different groups within these and rank their importance
• Identify relevant channels – where do we best focus our efforts? Looking at he audiences, where do they spend their time and where are we most likely to be able to deliver our information and meet our objectives
• Measurement – we know what the objectives are, who the audience is and the channels we’re going to use, so therefore we should know what we’ll measure to judge success

Sounds simple and straight forward doesn’t it? But what’s not addressed here is the fear factor that we all faced with those initial projects with clients. This is something that we’ll need to address with more authority and vigor with this audience. So, how do we do it? Do we employ the tried and tested methods of crisis communications, do we wheel out the Crisis comms chap? Nope, that’ll just increase the fear factor by 10! So what do you do? You follow a method that’s not readily employed in PR, but one that encourages companies of all sizes invest anything from a few thousand dollars to billons of dollars – you assess the risk, independently if you can.

Risk assessment is something that FTSE 100 companies undertake in most major projects, either externally or internally depending on the size and scope of the projects. Why can’t PR do the same when dealing with IR in social media? Most PR firms have IR, corporate and even legal teams that could help produce such an assessment, so it seems a logical step to take and one that FSTE 100 companies are very comfortable with.