Problem: The management of investor relations is a vital business process in all public companies. Current and potential investors are company's key interest groups and communication and interaction with them should be fast, fluent, diversified. Regardless of these facts, there seems to be at the moment very little true social interaction between the companies and the financial community. Instead of two-way communication, or interaction, companies primarily use methods of mass communication or broadcasting to manage their key relationships.
Proposition: Companies should start to utilize tools of social media in their investor relations processes. Companies must change their investor relation strategy to more relationship oriented and select modern instruments to support this process.
Implementation: Companies should implement tools like blogs, micro blogs, mashups, syndication, podcasts, instant messaging and discussion boards in their investor relation services. The nature of the services in the Internet should be Web 2.0. Communications should be real-time and agile instead of quartal based. A totally new kind of culture of collaborative information sharing and relationship building should be introduced. In general, interactivity should be the guiding element in everything
Value: The usage of social media tools in investor relations can effectively create new value to investors, which thereby create value to companies. Also the media definitely would appreciate this kind of movement. In the long run, the more social and collaboratiove nature of investor relations processes can change the behavior and working culture in the whole financial community and e.g reduce problems related to information asymmetry.