When Zillow decided to take questions via Twitter and Facebook for its May 2013 earnings call, the Nasdaq-listed company became the first to use social media in this way. Fast forward four years and the firm – which has a very social CEO in the form of Spencer Rascoff, and an IR team that wants ‘to push innovation into the IR profession’ – Zillow has added a new tool to its earnings call portfolio: Slido.
Slido is an audience interaction tool for meetings and events, which Zillow was originally using for internal meetings. But the resourceful IR team – made up of vice president of investor & corporate relations Raymond Jones and director of IR Dennis Walsh – thought it could be put to use for investor relations, too.
Despite fielding earnings call questions via social media since 2013, Jones says ‘there was some frustration that we were not really getting a lot of topical questions on Twitter; we were getting two or three questions we knew weren’t coming from institutional investors or analysts. We began wondering whether it was worth the effort.’
Walsh points out that at a company like Zillow, which has 19 covering analysts, there is often only just enough time ‘to get through our analysts and allow them to ask a question in the follow-up’, at which point the end of the call has been reached. ‘There really isn’t an opportunity to get those questions from the buy side,’ he adds.
Essentially, then, IR’s goal with Slido was: how do we engage with the buy side? Slido certainly offers a number of benefits over social media for the earnings call. For one thing, it’s anonymous, which gives investors the opportunity to throw out a hard question without revealing their identity and investment thesis, says Jones.
‘There is criticism out there that some covering analysts throw softballs,’ he points out. ‘Without having to have your name associated with it, the buy side now has an opportunity to put a tougher question out there for management to answer live on the call.’ Did the IR team find that daunting? ‘We are all about transparency,’ says Jones. ‘We were willing to answer any question that was out there.’
Slido also allows users to vote on questions, so an issue everyone is interested in gets bounced to the top of the list. ‘That’s great because when you are taking questions in order, someone’s question may not be that great, no matter who it’s from,’ notes Walsh. ‘This way we got to give the audience the chance to say, This is the question we want answered.’
So how do Jones and Walsh feel they fared in their original goal of attracting questions from the buy side? With 73 active users, 35 questions submitted and 54 votes, as well as more strategic questions than they were getting from Twitter – covering strategy, auction density, different revenue streams, and more – and the fact that one user chose to forgo anonymity, they’re confident they reached their target audience.
Jones’ key tip for other IR professionals considering adding Slido to their own IR suite is: be prepared. ‘We do a lot of Q&A prep,’ he notes. ‘I have talked to other IROs and they have asked, What if you get a question about….X? But you could get that question from an analyst anyway and you should be really ready and willing to answer it.’
A screenshot with a sample of the questions Zillow received over Slido
This article appeared in the fall 2017 issue of IR Magazine
