Rebecca MacKinnon is one of the bravest souls on the planet. She calls out companies like Yahoo! (YHOO) for the way Yahoo! collaborates with the Chinese authorities. She’s fearless, incisive and incredibly gentle in the flesh. (I met Rebecca last year). Why should you care? In her latest post, Rebecca says:
Note I have added Yahoo!’s ticker symbol to my title. Thanks to Kathryn Cramer for pointing out that if you include a company’s ticker symbol on your blog posts, they’ll show up in Google Finance. Very cool.
What this means is that if you include the ticker symbol of a company you’re writing about in the headline – pop – it appears on Google Finance. This has potential consequences for publicly traded companies that to date have not been open to blogging. And to the financial analysts, and to shareholders and to you and I. How mind blowing is that? Can you see how this expands the pool of knowledge that we’ll be able to glean for clients, competitors of all stripes and of course partners? Can you see how this changes the audit of businesses with which you’re engaged? Most important, can you see what this could do for transparency and financial markets? Why would you need the analyst community? Here’s an idea:
Let’s say for instance that instead of all the Q&A that happens over at AccountingWEB, there was a resource for Sage, Access, CODA – you name it. And let’s also say that anytime there was a question, the appropriate ticker was included. What might that do for communications and accountability? What might be the value of engaging in those discussion? So let’s dream on a bit:
How about if all those blog postings were categorised into say R&D, marketing, finance and so on? Now we get to see where the chatter relates to the money. Now we see how effective marketing really is and whether it is better to divert funds to R&D instead of continually feeding the marketing machine. In other words, it will be the conversations that determine customer relations percolating through to the investor as well. Scary stuff because this could be the future of auditing.
Technorati Tags: accounting, client relationships, marketing communications
