Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Blogs and SEC Disclosure

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Interesting developments recently on the public company material disclosure front.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been pretty vocal that he believes blogs and Web sites are better than "anachronistic" vehicles like press releases and conference calls to broadly disseminate material information.  He recently wrote a letter to SEC Chair Christopher Cox asking for clarification of Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure), the rule that requires disclosure methods to be "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public."

Cox’s  reply, posted in a comment to another post on Schwartz’s blog a little over a week ago, indicates that the SEC is open to the idea:

"The Commission encourages the use of websites as a source of information to the market and investors, and we welcome your offer to further discuss with us your views in this area. Assuming that the Commission were to embrace your suggestion that the "widespread dissemination" requirement of Regulation FD can be satisfied through web disclosure, among the questions that would need to be addressed is whether there exist effective means to guarantee that a corporation uses its website in ways that assure broad non-exclusionary access, and the extent to which a determination that particular methods are effective in that regard depends on the particular facts." (emphasis mine)

In other words, does the site have a broad reach? Is it open to all? And most importantly, is it GENERALLY true, not just specifically true in certain instances.

This last is the key one, in my opinion. Sure, Sun’s site and Jonathan’s blog are widely read, and would likely qualify under the FD Regulation. But in order for web disclosure to become a rule, it would have to be generally and broadly true for all public companies, not just some. That’s the much harder test.

So, don’t cancel your PR Newswire or BusinessWire accounts just yet, folks. I suspect we are going to need the old, beleagured press release for a bit longer.

Thanks to John Cass and Robert French. Also, more details in this AP article.

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Today’s trivia:

  • Schwartz is a fellow alum of Wesleyan University.

  • Today is the 2d birthday (anniversary) of this blog.

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Lead management webinar

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I’ve just finished pulling together a webinar for my client GuideMark called "Five Tips for Improving Sales."

Full disclosure: this IS a lead generation vehicle for my client, who sells CRM systems, however, a large chunk of the presentation is based on my lead management philosophy and rating model. My posts here on these topics have received a number of comments, both public and private, so given the apparent interest, I figured I’d let you all know about it.

Here’s the pitch:

One of the most important things you can do to improve your sales is to close the gap between your sales and marketing teams. One salesperson or fifty, one marketer or a whole team, they often have diverging views of the task at hand. This gets in the way of growing your business and increasing your profits. This webinar will help you get these two critical teams working together toward the same goals. Topics include lead management and a brief demo of GuideMark’s SalesDRIVE CRM.

The content is about 2/3 lead management, 1/3 CRM.  I go through a lead rating model step by step, so if you’re interested in how this works, you might want to listen. Bonus if you are also interested in getting a CRM system 🙂

Dates and times: Wednesday November 29th at 10am, Monday December 4th at 10am and Wednesday December 6th at 2pm

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Mood: Optimistic

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While I make no secret of my personal political leanings, I also don’t write about them that often. This is a marketing & communications blog, not a personal political pulpit.

But today, I just gotta say: YAY!!

As of 7 pm this evening, the NY Times election results show a gain of 5 seats in the Senate for the Democrats (including affiliated folks like Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman), with one contest (Virginia) still undecided. Last I looked, that race was led by the Democrat, but there’s bound to be an official recount. Either way, next year, the Senate is either split 50/50 or the Dems have a 1-seat majority.

And the news is even better in the House and nationwide governor’s races. If you are a Democrat that is 🙂

House: solid Democratic majority, with Nancy Pelosi likely to be Speaker.

Governors: Six states, including Massachusetts, my state, switched from a GOP to a Democratic governor. 28 states to be led by Dems, 22 by GOP (a complete flip from the previous numbers).

And the day ended with Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation.

It is going to be a different world come January, and it’s about time.

Tomorrow back to our regularly scheduled marketing topics.

The Ethics Lesson from the Wal-Mart/Edelman flog fiasco

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You know, we all learned pretty much everything we need to know to avoid a similar ethical foul up by the time we reached first grade.

It’s simple.

Tell the truth.

And here’s the truth. The failure in the Wal-Mart Edelman fiasco wasn’t simply a lack of understanding of how blogs and social media worked. That may have been part of it, but it wasn’t the root problem.

It was an ethical failure, full stop.

Here’s the lesson, and let’s be crystal clear. It is not okay to cloak your interests or advocate without honesty. Sure, people do it all the time. We call them liars. It doesn’t matter whether it is explicit or by omission. It is still a lie.

And here’s the other part of today’s lesson: this mess does not mean that companies shouldn’t blog, or sponsor blogs, or reach out to bloggers. The Wal-Gate mess was a lapse of ethics, not an indictment of social media.  Social media can be excellent vehicles for reaching out to and talking with customers, but we have to do it honestly. Your customer knows you have an agenda. EVERYONE has an agenda of some sort. Be honest about your goals, disclose your interests, tell the truth,

It may not set you free, but when you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you told the last person.

Words to live by.

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Bye the bye, the latest word from Edelman on this — 

He recently gave an interview to IT World (Japan). When asked what happened, he says: "We were insufficiently transparent about the identity of one of the two bloggers who went on that RV tour. And in a certain way, it’s not a failure of new media; it was a failure in all media. Which is to say, if they were talking to you in your IDG mainstream media hat, you would want to know the name of the spokesperson and what his background was and what his credentials were and we failed that basic test." He goes on to once again accept full responsibility as the boss and reiterate what they intend to do to prevent future occurences. I wish them luck.  Thanks to Shel Holtz for the link.

UPDATE 11/3/06: Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) puts Edelman membership under 90-day review. See also WOMMA’s 20 Ethics Questions and discussion draft of guidelines for contacting bloggers.

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