Sneaking up on investor relations officers is a communications tool that will revolutionize their work. The new arrow in the IR quiver is a corporate version of instant messaging, or ‘IM’. It’s as fast as a telephone call but without the hassle of a personal assistant, voicemail or a busy signal. Corporate IM is like being in a meeting room, but the room is virtual and you can literally be anywhere.
This is not exclusive to investor relations. IM will soon be appearing across the enterprise as part of corporate communications and client service. This past Christmas on AOL, thousands of youngsters carried out excited live conversations via IM with Santa Claus, while harried parents at their desks struggled with voicemail and e-mail to get their Christmas gifts ordered. Had a corporate version of IM been more widely networked, adults would have been using IM as avidly as their kids.
IM is already just another part of life for tens of millions. Every day after school, children rush to their computers to initiate conversations with friends, even while they research schoolwork. Anywhere from six to 15 conversations at once are not uncommon as the kids multitask at rates that would make old-school efficiency experts stop in their tracks. More nonplussed are college and university professors, who have to compete with IM in the classroom. Students using notebook computers to take notes can’t be separated from IM activity, which slices through attention spans like a laser beam. Noting such attention drift – and conquering it – is now part of a teacher’s job.
Business has been reluctant to plunge into IM without safeguards, but experts say thousands of professionals, including IR practitioners, are now integrating it into their daily routines. The big wave of corporate use is building, but most IROs haven’t got a clue about this powerful tool. At an Investor Relations magazine conference in Amsterdam last October, less than 5 percent of attendees knew the term.
Nonetheless, the investment market is in the crosshairs of vendors and, if brokers and fund managers are snapping it firmly into place at the workstation, IROs need to know what’s going on. Here’s the scene: it’s like an open phone line, and you can actually have many lines open at once, each dedicated to a text conversation with the person, or people, you have agreed to communicate with.
Early adopters
Some of the top players steaming ahead with IM are IBM, Microsoft, Reuters and AOL. The latter three announced in the last quarter of 2002 the rollout of their corporate, or business level, IM products. Most significant to IROs is that the investment market is a key first area of implementation. A Microsoft announcement in December declared, ‘MSN Messenger Connect empowers businesses to communicate instantly with the more than 75 mn unique end users of MSN Messenger, enabling, for example, brokers to share time-sensitive information with customers and clients to make purchases in real time.’ Note carefully, IROs: brokers are the priority category of users cited by Microsoft.
Jimmy Dies, an IBM collaboration products manager who looks after IBM’s Sametime product, also has his eye on the investment world. He told an interviewer a few months ago about the security and compliance aspects of corporate IM: ‘People are archiving and logging messages, firstly for regulatory compliance, which is an immediate and present need. We’re seeing a lot of customers, specifically in financial and pharmaceutical services, who are doing chat logging for SEC and NASD compliance.’
Audit and compliance features are flashing a green light for IM at brokerage and banking firms facing the tightest ever regulatory scrutiny. Vendors of new corporate IM say each company can set up its own compliance and tracking mechanisms. Quoted in the online publication Instant Messaging Planet, IBM’s Dies also described how IM can be linked to more powerful communications: ‘We have a customer that’s a financial services operation based on the west coast that uses Sametime as a trade notification mechanism for its traders. So when a trade goes through on its system, the system will find out whether the trader is logged into Sametime, and send them a message if they are. And if they’re not, it can find someone else who has the same job responsibility or a manager and instant message them.’
Picture an IRO doing something similar. A blast IM to a key list of constituents can be automatically set to trigger e-mails or even voicemails with the same information to people on the list who aren’t currently logged on.
Thomson Financial is ready to bring forth in 2003 its own targeted IM service as part of its suite of tools for investor relations. Scott Rosen, senior VP for investment management at Thomson Financial, says IM will be part of the Thomson Connect system. Looking across the three primary points of contact in the investment arena, Rosen sees the take-up to start at the investment manager’s desk followed by brokers and then corporate issuers.
The Thomson model, which puts IM in the midst of other communication tools, is in line with how the IBM and Microsoft IM products are integrated in collaborative work tools designed to improve efficiency and speed. At the same time, business leaders recognize that today’s work teams may be spread across the world at multiple levels, and even throughout different companies.
For a lot of corporate users, IM is a way to tighten the customer relationship. Brokers, for example, want to be able to communicate recommendations instantly to institutional clients, who in turn want instant connection to traders. For IR representatives to stay out of the loop could well be disastrous when rumors fly and, using IM, mountains of stock trade in a flash.
IM for IR
So is the IR department at Reuters – a purveyor of this new medium – using it? ‘Absolutely,’ answers Nancy Bobrowitz, senior vice president of corporate communications for Reuters America. Initially, the use is internal. ‘During a conference call, for example, associates can advise whether an answer is on track, or provide answers to questions that we on the call don’t have. It sure makes me look smarter,’ she says. Externally, the use of IM is just starting, but she tells of analysts looking at the IM connection lists used by her London colleague. Seeing the CEO’s name next to that of a competing analyst gets their attention. ‘They think, I want to be on that list too!’ says Bobrowitz.
It is early days for IM in IR even at companies pushing the business form of the new medium. Curt Anderson, director of IR at Microsoft, says he, like Bobrowitz, is a user of IM internally. ‘During a phone call, I can ping someone who has the information, say about X-box or Microsoft Network, and I am able to be more responsive or on point,’ he says. Most of Microsoft’s current investor relations work is on the phone or face-to-face, according to Anderson: ‘I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about IM, but I will now!’
Within one to two years, high-powered corporate IM will link conversation snippets with ‘tags’ pulling press releases, audio and video webcast clips, spreadsheets and much more along with the text message. As it blossoms, replete with controls to keep spam out, IM may actually push e-mail onto the electronic railway sidings, a mere memory from the dot-com days.
Mike Reilly is a corporate communications writer, speaker and consultant based in New York. He was formerly a journalist and then IRO with Reuters.
