So Many Changes - So Little Time. The CARD Act of 2009

The first mandates within the CARD Act of 2009, including increasing consumers minimum time to pay their bill, a longer notice period for changes in terms, and the ability for consumers to opt out of changes with enough time to shop for a new card went into effect on August 20th. There is much more to come in 2010.

One of the cornerstones of the CARD Act is that all the forms and statements that credit card companies send out “have to have plain language that is in plain sight.” The law makes specific requirements for each type of document in terms of content, language and in some cases even type size. The requirements were based, in large part, on extensive consumer research sponsored by the Federal Reserve. An overview of the research and results can be found at http://tinyurl.com/l6o6fr

For card issuers already struggling with the August 20th portions of the law (see Countdown to the CARD Act Part One) the clock is ticking to get all of these reporting changes designed, coded and tested in advance of the February 2010 deadline. I’ve summarize the key content and formatting changes to each type of document in a blog post on The Digital Nirvana
http://thedigitalnirvana.com/

Banks are going to crank up their rates and wring every last late fee out of the system before these changes go into effect next year so watch your bills carefully. But once all the howling ceases this will be a very good thing for consumers and provide many opportunities for service providers as well.

- Elizabeth Gooding

Social Media and Investor Relations: Surf’s Up!

I think social media and shareholder communications go together like surfboards and big waves. It’s a great big ocean of opportunity. It’s exciting. It’s fun. It can draw a crowd. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can totally wipe out. (Cue theme music http://tinyurl.com/aqh5nj)

Maybe you think you’ll just stay out of the water, so to speak. Unfortunately, since social media is happening with or without your participation, you still need to know what people are saying about your company. There was a great post from Bruce Johnston at DBJ Associates on what can happen when you don’t have a social media policy, which includes a link to the toe tapper video “United Breaks Guitars” which logged over 20,000 comments. http://www.dbjassociates.com/?p=208

Part of your strategy needs to center on gathering information about your brand and being prepared to respond to it – whether it is positive or negative. Customer service, marketing, product management and investor relations can all learn a lot, and build a better brand by putting an ear to the Web 2.0.

In a recent interview regarding his CEO’s foray into the Twittershpere, Mark McKenna, Managing Director of Communications of Putnam said, "Bob is one of the first to recognize that that we need to get our content out there." http://tinyurl.com/n4n2h8 The good news? Bob Reynolds @robertlreynolds is the first CEO in the mutual fund industry on Twitter and Putnam got a lot of great PR from that initiative. The bad news? The strategy that Putnam has portrayed is about “getting the content out there.” Just talking, not listening. This may wow the folks in PR, but it won’t create a lot of fans among Twitterers.

One company that is doing a great job of leveraging the social web from shareholder relations to customer service is Johnson & Johnson. Marc Monseau the Director of media relations at Johnson & Johnson started their blog very humbly with the comment “it’s clear to me how important it is not just to watch, but to join in productively. Doing that will take some unlearning of old habits and traditional approaches to communicating — and I will have to find my own voice.” Three years after jumping into it, they now have a corporate blog, JNJBTW, the Johnson & Johnson health channel on YouTube, a corporate Twitter account and a Facebook page.

On August 6th Doug Chia, Senior Counsel & Assistant Corporate Secretary for Johnson & Johnson made his first post on JNJ BTW titled “Don’t Let Your Vote Go Uncounted.” The post was intended to let shareholders know about the elimination of the “broker vote” in uncontested director elections and does a great job explaining it in plain English.
http://jnjbtw.com/2009/08/dont-let-your-vote-go-uncounted/ This post provides a valuable service to the average investor who may not know that their broker can no longer vote their beneficial shares, and also helps to build trust. It’s smart, it’s timely and it is completely consistent with the rest of J&J’s social media strategy.

Maybe it’s natural that the marketing guys are going to paddle out before the general counsel, and maybe you need to start small so you can take a few spills without damage. But, once the lawyers are in the water you can bet it’s safe to swim.

So, Dude, check the water, paddle out, make a plan and ride the social media wave. Just remember, there’s always another wave coming.

- Elizabeth Gooding

Count Down to the CARD Act

The clock started ticking on May 22, 2009 when the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act was signed by President Obama. It is a landmark piece of legislation that provides American consumers with stronger protection against unfair credit practices than previously imposed by the Federal Reserve under changes to Reg Z and Reg AA. It also gave issuers less time to comply than the Fed: the first date for compliance is this month, only 90 days after the law was passed. Tick. Tick. Tick.

I'll be doing a series of posts on the CARD Act and its impact on communications this month.
Read the rest at http://thedigitalnirvana.com/

Elizabeth
www.Linkedin.com/in/EGooding

Shareholder Services: A Best-Kept Secret Opportunity for Content and Delivery Management?

In developing the Shareholder Communications Symposium and working with our sponsors and clients, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in the area of shareholder communications, digging deep into issues related to new SEC rulings that affect everything from the way prospectuses, proxies, and other critical investor-related documents are written (new, plain language) to the way they are delivered (say goodbye to the thick stack of printed materials that no one reads!).

One of the outcomes of this activity is my growing sense that there’s a lot of opportunity in them thar hills, for both the public companies and investment firms that need to respond to the regulatory changes and the solution providers that support them. Here are just a few of my thoughts:

1) Thanks to the SEC’s spate of recent initiatives – notice & access, summary prospectus, retail voting, compensation disclosure & analysis, plain language guidelines – the pressure is on for investor relations and shareholder communications professionals to create new content that is developed by finance, compliance, and other executives and is readily deliverable both in print and on the Web. In many ways, they’re having to rethink authoring, compliance, and distribution processes and tools they haven’t touched in years, and they’re hungry for direction and advice.

2) The scope of this attention and activity ranges far beyond the annual report, which is the big bit of content most people think of because of the important public-facing role it plays. However, this specialized dossier is much more than the thick piece of marketing collateral it often is considered to be. Rather, it is a highly-visible compliance document that is subject to the same kind of strict controls as an SEC filing, proxy, prospectus, governance document, or annual meeting presentation.

3) With the economy stagnant and the ‘usual suspects’ in marketing and Website/portal development pretty well saturated, content management and delivery vendors are scouting hard for new points of entry into the organizations they seek to serve. Given the regulatory squeeze the shareholder services community now finds itself in, it seems to me that there’s a marriage to be made there, a relationship that stands to be as long and as fruitful as any we’ve seen in the content technology space.

The trick for vendors is to recognize that shareholder services are quite strategic, highly regulated, and enormously complex. The trick for shareholder services executives is to quickly get comfortable with the notion that compliance with the new mandates may require enhancing or replacing (even if only in part) their current technology solutions.

So there it is, a little more than my $0.02, submitted, as Rod Serling would say, for your approval.

- Steve Weissman

Want to dig deeper and to talk more? Join me at the Shareholder Communications Symposium, October 6-7 in Chicago. Click for Agenda and Registration information.