The challenges of web-based investor communications: web-based technologies for communicating with shareholders--and vice versa--allow companies to save on printing and travel costs and lessen their environmental imprint while maintaining greater control over their message and image, particularly at annual meetings..

• Author: Sweeney, Paul
• Position: INVESOR RELATIONS

When Intel Corp. held its annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif., last May, almost half of the shareholders who attended were participating virtually via the Web. Using a validation technology pioneered by vendor Broadridge Financial Solutions, the 83 shareholders who attended online not only put questions to the company's management and directors, but they cast ballots on proxy items as well.

Investor relations experts say that, for virtual attendees, the "hybrid" annual meeting was the closest thing yet to the real thing. "The world is flat and we're leveling the playing field," says Peter Schuman, investor relations manager at Intel, invoking the title of a best-selling book. "We're a global company. We've got stockholders in more than 40 countries and we're finding new channels to communicate with them."

At Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Computer Corp., the investor relations director, Robert Williams, is now also a corporate blogger. In mid-January, he was blogging for the company's Web site from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, reporting that the company was collaborating with AT&T Corp. "on one of the first Android-based smart phones."

AMERCO, best known as the parent company of U-Haul Corp., has instituted a virtual analysts meeting. The online event now follows the Reno, Nev.-based company's annual meeting, which also has an online component, says Jennifer Flachman, director of investor relations at AMERCO.

"Investors and analysts can attend both meetings," she says, "but only shareholders can ask questions at the virtual annual meeting."

As Intel, Dell and AMERCO demonstrate, public companies are beginning to embrace an array of hyper-modern, frequently interactive Web-based strategies as they search for more ways to communicate with shareholders and Wall Street.

Led by 15 to 20 mostly technology and consumer goods companies, the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) reports IR managers and even some top executives at public companies increasingly are blogging (Dell, Marriott Corp., Microvision Inc., Premier Global Services Inc.); using social networks such as Twitter or Facebook (Barrick Gold Corp., Canada Gas Corp., CGI, Sun Microsystems Inc., eBay) and holding virtual shareholder forums, annual meetings or road shows (AMERCO, Intel, Oxygen Biotherapeutics Inc., Consolidated Edison Co.).

Factors Driving the Trend

This phenomenon, which is really just emerging from its embryonic stage, comes as a large number of U.S. companies have embraced paperless "e-proxy" practices over the past three years. That trend first got underway in mid-2007 after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission promulgated its "notice and access" rule. Under notice and...