A company's first day as a publicly traded entity on a stock exchange is a huge deal. Social companies, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Jive, have the added the pressure of socializing this corporate milestone. This presentation will share how I used social technologies to collaborate on confidential information; share updates with employees, investors, and customers; and engage the community using innovative techniques like displaying live tweets on NASDAQ's marquee in Times Square and creating infographics for financial information. It reviews social communications best practices and lessons learned during the evolution of an IPO.
5. Phase 1: Quiet Period 1
Phase 2: Listing Day
Phase 3: Quiet Period 2
Phase 4: Public Company
4 Social Phases of an IPO
Different Social Rules in Each
6. This is a made-to-order case for Social Business
1. Sync up internally
2. Manage external communications
3. Celebrate customers
7. • IPO requires tight teamwork among executives in multiple departments,
from finance and legal to marketing and PR, as well as outside partners and
contractors.
• Our internal employee community served as a hub
• collaboration on documents and plans
• critical decisions in online discussions
• real-time status updates in activity stream
• quickly locate experts to answer pressing questions via
search
• Community allowed for strict privacy controls and permissions, ensuring that
sensitive information was shared only with authorized individuals.
1. Sync Up Internally
9. Executive blogs kept all worldwide employees simultaneously updated and
allowed for a quick Q&A that would be hard via non-social channels
10. • Subject to a variety of SEC rules on internal policies and
external communications
• Essential that employees “get the memo.”
• Our social intranet made it easy to
• disseminate policies
• hold company-wide conversations
• collectively train our workforce on messaging and practices
• Internal alignment enabled us to communicate consistently with
external audiences, including press, financial analysts, and
potential investors.
2. Manage External Communications
12. Invested effort in acknowledging customers since they
helped build the company to this point and were interested in
progress.
• Corporate blog with updates
• Online Q&A about the IPO
• Streamed the opening ceremony
• Invited key advocates to NASDAQ for toast and video testimonials
3. Celebrate Customers
13. Celebrating, socially
An IPO is incredibly hard work, and when a
company makes it to the finish line,
celebrations are in order.
Since not everybody could be present in
New York on listing day, I decided to bring
the event to them in a novel way.
I created a unique Twitter hashtag –
#jiveipo – and invited folks to join the
online conversation. Then we gathered and
displayed the tweets on the 7-story
NASDAQ building in Times Square as the
exchange opened with the new JIVE
symbol on the ticker. We also streamed a
video feed so people could watch
themselves appear in Times Square.
It was a NASDAQ first, and a fun finale to a
process that was social from beginning to
end.
14. Here were some of the tweets from customers, employees, partners and influencers
Proactive and ReactiveIDkey influencers and PR opportunitiesBrand conversationsChannel differentiation Twitter – real time news sharingFacebook – engaging our loyal customer base Instagram – putting some personality behind the brandYouTube – explain our product to the market as well as capture key moments from the “big day”