It’s pretty easy to understand the first two parts of our new tag line – Comply and Control – but what about Communicate?
Financial communication isn’t just about publishing and distributing financial reports like income statements and balance sheets. Consider the combination of Twitter, Investor relations and XBRL. In a recent interview with IR Alert, Michelle Savage, VP of Communications at XBRL US mentions corporate actions as an area of future interest for XBRL US:
One area that we’re focusing on now beyond financials reporting that does have impact on IR is the area of corporate actions. This is when an event happens like a merger or something, that information is transmitted by the company in form of a release or prospectus or a combo of those things and others. Today, it’s in a free form document—and we’re advocating that it gets announced via XBRL. If it’s a prospectus today, the document could have tags embedded or pieces of it pulled out to create those tags and separate elements.
Today, an obvious way to communicate corporate actions to reach a wide audience is through Twitter. The action ‘alert’ is Tweeted and a link provided to look more closely at the full action ‘report’. However Twitter isn’t an XBRL-enabled communication medium. But it could be.
Twitter uses the concept of a hashtag (e.g. #Rivet) to tag a Tweet so that it easier to find via search engines. If an xTag (i.e. an indicator that this is a Tweet about an XBRL tagged corporate action) capability was added and the link went to the XBRL instance document (either in machine readable XBRL or human readable inline XBRL) then users of Twitter are informed of the corporate action, with a document that can also be ‘consumed’ by XBRL-enabled web services. Or Twitter could simply designate a ‘reserved’ hashtag (e.g. #twirp) that is only used by corporate action Tweets (how this would be policed I don’t know…).
So that’s it: A TwIRp. A specially tagged Tweet that links to an XBRL-tagged corporate action report enabling the communication of corporate actions to a wider audience and another way to ‘stream’ XBRL data to both human and machine information consumers.
If this sound far-fetched, it shouldn’t. Just look at the momentum behind Stocktwits who use their special $tags to highlight stock-related information in the TweetStream…
Update 16 Sep. 2009: For a much more detailed and legal perspective on this topic see Corporate Disclosure: The Twitter Effect
Tags: Investor Relations
