Coordination and consistency

It is also perfectly clear to all correct-thinking people that investor relations has to be integrated totally with corporate and financial media relations. Consistency of message is probably even more important in the specialist area of City public relations than it is in the other area of communication, not least because of the sensitive nature of so much of the information that has been given out. There is also a temptation to make life easier by assuming that different audiences are discreet and do not interact.

For example, to those outside the City it sometimes comes as a surprise that City journalists talk to City analysts. It should be clearly recognized that to a greater extent they live off each other. An analyst with a particular view can supply a journalist with a story, the story can then provide the journalist with a reason to contact a client investor, who then buys or sells the shares which affects the price, giving the journalist another story. Managing this unstable triangle is at the very heart of any financial public relations activity.

There is a growing amount of information that a company has to give out or send to the Stock Exchange. There are new accounting regulations designed to make company results more transparent. So far they seem to have succeeded only in making every company’s results far more complicated to understand without professional interpretation. One of the roles of financial public relations people is to help ensure that the audience concentrates on the figures that really tell the story and not the hundreds of others that company accountants are now obliged to provide. Controlling the flow of this information and getting it to the right place at the right time is every bit as important as the style or content of the messages themselves.