ASKING an investor what makes a good annual report is like asking somebody what makes a good pizza. Some enjoy the simplicity of a thin, crispy base topped with only tomato sauce and cheese. Others prefer thick-crusted varieties capable of supporting a shopping-cart load of toppings. What’s the secret sauce for annual reports? Like good [...]
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Often the investor relations job revolves around corporate news, and sometimes timelines get compressed so we must get it out quickly. This kind of breaking news puts the IR professional on deadline – a short deadline. This morning, for example, a client got in touch just after 7:00 and asked me to write a news release on [...]
COMPLEXITY is unavoidable in today’s ever more complicated and sophisticated business environment. Much of the complexity in corporate reporting, however, is created by the sheer volume of disclosure. The solution? Thoughtful reduction to achieve simplicity. That may sound easy enough. But the corporate reporting system isn’t just about financial and operating numbers. It’s also about [...]
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ANNUAL reporting season has finally and mercifully come to an end for most companies. The cost of this exercise? Just for Form 10-K, the SEC estimated that companies chalk up 4 million hours of staff time and 12 million hours of outside advisor time, which, at $300 per hour, amounts to $3.6 billion. And that [...]
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LOVE it or hate it, Management’s Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) provides a window on details behind earnings and other key performance numbers. But is the MD&A a bastion of storytelling and plain language? Probably not. So how can you capture a reader’s attention and communicate clearly and effectively in the MD&A? The answer is to [...]
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LET’S start with hello and thank you. Greetings to IR Web Report followers – I’m hoping we won’t be strangers for long. And thanks to Dominic for asking me to be a contributor – I’m looking to helping you make IR Web Report an even more valuable resource. You may know from reading Dominic’s recent [...]
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- by Phil Dennison, Senior Marketing Specialist It’s a topic we’ve addressed before — buzzwords and jargon in press releases — but Mark McClennan at Schwartz Communications has come at it from a unique way. He took Adam Sherk’s list of the most overused words and phrases in press releases, and made a word cloud [...]
In this edition of SEO Tip Jar I want to show you some free keyword tools that can start using today to supplement your press release and online content creation efforts. Keyword tools are an excellent resource to help you optimize for search, generate new ideas, gauge the relative popularity of different keywords among searchers [...]
A tried and true technique in the world of public relations is to hook your news to a popular story. Many experienced PR practitioners are great at this, but in today’s media world, narrowly targeted and easily accessible ‘hit’ stories are often overlooked. However, building off these hits or using them for PR inspiration can [...]
Investment newsletters may be steeped in analytics, fundamental and technical research, and powerful stock screens. But at the end of the day, they are discrete pieces of content which require people to subscribe to them and eventually, read them.
Here, we want to learn from effective copy writing rules even if they were written for other [...]
