Take stock of your investor relations program

When I wrote the chapter on measuring investor relations for my book “Measuring Public Relationships,” the assumption was that the only metric that really mattered in the investor relations world was stock price. Everyone assumed that if IR was done right, then the stock price would reflect the quality of the effort.

Since then, the entire investment world has changed dramatically. The relationship between stock price and communications, one could argue, is far more tenuous.

Stock price today is influenced as much by what is being communicated in a Senate hearing on Capital Hill as anything communicated in a financial analyst’s briefing in your board room. So, in this new environment, how do you measure the effectiveness of your investor relations program?

What are you trying to achieve?

As always in any communications program, it all starts with what you’re trying to achieve. Increasingly, companies are looking at the specifics of what financial analysts are saying about their company and the competition as a way of determining if their communications are effective.