This interview is with George Tsiolis, CEO of pure online IR firm, AGORACOM. George and I have conversed for years about the cutting-edge of the IR 
world. George is a forward thinker and an indefatigable executive and shares his thoughts about his firm, the state of the art in financial communications and the future for the industry.
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What is Agoracom and how do you differentiate yourself?
George Tsiolis, CEO: AGORACOM is a pure online investor relations firm. Traditional IR methods are too slow, too inefficient and fail to address the research and communication habits of investors. More than just lip service, we recently announced the following traffic figures for the year:
- 1.25 million investors came to the site (unique visitors)
- They visited AGORACOM 7.6 million times
- They read over 101 million pages of information
Our model (and differentiation) can be broken down into two simple steps.
1. Use Search Engines And Content Partnerships With The World’s Biggest Sites To Target New Investors
First, we have partnered with the world’s biggest sites to target and attract new investors for our clients. For example, we are Google’s largest IR partner in North America. We create search engine IR programs that display a client’s specific message in front of specific investors as determined by what they are searching for. If an investor searches for anything relating to “widget companies”, then a message from ABC Widgets (our client) will be displayed in the search results. We duplicate this process on Yahoo and MSN.
Our overwhelming advantage comes from the fact that both Google and Yahoo create the programs for us. These aren’t simple AdWords programs. These are highly sophisticated programs that include attention to our relevancy score that makes sure the message, landing pages and content highly match the searches. This is a significant advantage over 98% of investor relations firms and in-house personnel that have failed to even scratch the surface.
As a result, we are able to quickly and cost-efficiently target investors in any vertical and in any part of the world. Traditional lead-generation techniques (e-mail, print advertising, conferences, etc.) simply can not match the precision, speed, reach and efficiency of such targeting. If you want effectiveness and ROI, online investor relations can’t be matched and should be a part of any company’s plan.
Part 2 of the process is best answered in your next question to avoid duplication…
New investors found via our search engine and content partners are funneled into a customized and moderated community where they can immediately ask questions, get answers, collaborate with current investors and connect directly with management. Traditional Investor Relations techniques can’t match this because it is constrained by business hours, timezones and a 1-on-1 model. Again, slow and inefficient.
An online community is not constrained by timezones or geography. Investors from Germany have just as much access as investors from next door. Investors take extreme comfort knowing they can ask questions at anytime without worrying about voice mail or closed offices. An online community allows companies to post an answer just one time and share it with hundreds of investors who had the same question, rather than repeating it over and over again via telephone and e-mail.
Our clients also use their IR HUB to communicate beyond text. They can post photos and videos pertaining to new products, new facilities, etc., webcasts pertaining to general presentations and, most importantly, post an audio address when they need to immediately and urgently communicate with investors.
Investors then have the ability to collaborate and share ideas in a moderated discussion forum free of spam and profanity. Your investors are going to have a conversation, so you might as well be a part of it.
As a result, the investor relations process is hyper-accelerated. The faster you provide investors with information, the faster they can digest it, move on to their next question and reach full understanding of your business.
As a result, investors are able to make very informed decisions, while management is able to listen to conversations, measure sentiment, gauge effectiveness of their message and respond both quickly and accordingly. This kind of rapid feedback loop just is not possible in traditional investor relations.
On the private placement side, we had over 600 accredited retail investors sign up within just two weeks of announcing our new private placement initiative in the summer of 2008, with each of them willing to invest a minimum of $20,000 per private placement. This has never been done before. Given market conditions in Q4, we didn’t attempt to raise money for any public companies as we felt it would have been irresponsible until we had greater macro visibility. Q1/Q2 looks like an ideal environment in which to raise money, so we’ll let you know how that goes.
First, each HUB comes with RSS feeds so that investors can have the option of keeping up with companies via readers. Every IR communication (press release, corporate updates, industry bulletins, interviews, new photos, new events, etc.) is transmitted.
Second, we are now in the process of using those feeds to power a mobile investor relations program through Viigo. It is free for both investors and public companies and will make sure anything new from IR will hit their cell phones. Look for that in late Q1.
Third, we are now in the process of using those feeds to power a separate Twitter account for each one of our clients. For those of you who aren’t quite sure what Twitter is, here is a recent post of mine.
When all of these are launched, AGORACOM will have distribution via the web, RSS feeds, mobile phones and real-time messaging.
Finally, in Q2, we hope to have created a blog network with a major content partner. Discussions are still in the early stage, so I’ll let you know how that goes.
From a technology point of view, we are constantly evolving by incorporating new technologies. The trick is not to incorporate every new technology that hits the market because they often don’t work as advertised and can confuse clients and shareholders.
Even though the web is evolving at lightning speed, people aren’t – so you have to be careful about adding the latest thing simply because it is the flavour of the day. As such, we spend a lot of time evaluating and testing new technologies before deciding whether to deploy them. What is the test? New technology must make the lives of investors and public companies both better and easier.
Today, we are focusing on search engines and mobile phones. Search engines dominate our daily web lives, so we want to make this part of our model even better. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are the future when it comes to web access. You have to be there but you have to be there in a smart way. We’re working on some cool things.
At the end of the day, the investor relations community can count on AGORACOM to be at the forefront of innovation for many years to come.
Thank you so much for providing me with this opportunity to participate and I look forward to providing you with future updates.
Thank you, George.
