eBay sets live-blogging standards
Two things that many in the financial communications probably didn’t expect to see together in the same sentence anytime soon: IR and Twitter.
On Friday, eBay announced on its blog, eBay Ink, that after three quarters of reporting its quarterly earnings via blog and covering the earnings calls on Twitter, the company has created some best practices for the earnings blogging going forward.
Those practices include a separate legal page to the Ink blog, rotating financial info every 90 days on the blog and Twitter, and special language that will designate some Tweets as a live-blogging session for the earnings announcement.
Ebay blogger Richard Brewer-Hay wrote that he was worried when he had to approach his legal team for the first time to talk about best practices and couldn’t find other companies who were using these social media tactics for their earnings announcements. But his fears were unfounded.
“I was worried I would be forced to cease this innovative way of reporting company information to our constituents,” Brewer-Hay wrote. “Thankfully that was not the case. Rather, it was mutually agreed that we could take this opportunity to set up a best practices approach to live-blogging and reporting company information via the Web - beyond traditional conference call and press release.”
