I’m coming up on a year managing and writing this blog (April 2 will be the one-year anniversary) and I’ve been pretty impressed (and I guess maybe even a little disappointed given the nature of my job) that I haven’t drawn the attention too much of our legal team. Until now.
As most of you know, I’ve been reporting eBay’s Quarterly earnings results via this blog and specifically covering the calls live on Twitter for the past 3 quarters. Full disclosure…? I did it without checking with our Legal team first. Not the best strategy for your faithful corporate blogger and, after they found out, I had to meet with them to discuss my strategy and thinking behind the reports.
I figured I would bring other examples of companies using Twitter in this way to the meeting to state my case. Although a number of companies were referencing earnings and company information via Twitter, there were no real direct comparisons between my Tweets and other companies’. As a result I was worried I would be forced to cease this innovative way of reporting company information to our constituents. Thankfully, this was not the case. Rather, it was mutually agreed that we could take this opportunity to set up a best practices approach to live-blogging and reporting company information via the web – beyond the traditional conference call and press release.
Plain and simple, eBay Inc. is a public company and, as such, must comply with SEC regulations. We feel that these guidelines will make that compliance more transparent. What follows is by no means a final set of micro-blogging/live-blogging best practices for companies but it is a step – and a very significant one at that. Something that I realize I will have to refine and evolve over time.
Legal
To start with, I’ve created a separate legal page to Ink that includes cautionary statements that apply to any of my blog posts or tweets regarding earnings and other company information: http://ebayinkblog.com/legal
Secondly, it is common practice for us to replace our financial information online every 90 days (to ensure that we have the most recent, accurate information available and to avoid confusion). I do the same with the ebayinkblog.com/news information each quarter. Moving forward I will be doing the same on Twitter.
In the future, when I’m reporting on a company event via Twitter I will preface each “live-blogging session” with the following language:
Tweet 1: “Important information about the nature of this session. Forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. Click here:”
Tweet 2: “This session will contain non-GAAP financial measures.”
Tweet 3: “The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures.”
Tweet 4: “A reconciliation of these measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures can be found by clicking on the following link:”
That’s it for now. Fairly straightforward stuff I think. I’ll be trying this out for the first time next Wednesday for eBay Inc.’s analyst day. I’m sure I’ll have a few more legal eyeballs on what I’m typing than normal.
Basically there is a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this… and I’m trying to make sure I land in the former camp rather than the latter.
Cheers,
RBH
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