Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

11–8. Issue Investor Relations Podcasts

Publicly held companies are beginning to post investor relations podcasts on their Web sites. A good example of this approach is IBM, which has created a lengthy Web page containing hundreds of podcasts, with the investor relation–specific podcasts shown at the bottom. The basic approach is for investors or analysts to access these Web pages just once to sign up for an automatic feed, so that subsequent postings are pushed out to them for subsequent downloading to their iPods or similar mp3 devices. This approach is especially useful for recipients, who can listen whenever they have time, pause broadcasts, fast forward, and so on.

Here are the basic steps for creating an investor relations podcast:

1.	Attach a condenser microphone to a preamplifier, and from there to a sound card in a PC.
2.	Download a free copy of Audacity software to record the podcast, which is easily accessible at audacity.sourceforge.net.
3.	Record the podcast in Audacity.
4.	Convert the file to an mp3 file.
5.	Post the file on the company Web site.

If recordings contain an excessive level of sibilance, then replace the preamplifier with a sound mixer, and use the mixer settings to reduce the high-range sound of the recording. Also, be mindful of bandwidth costs, which may be an issue if the company has a large number of investors and analysts downloading the podcast.

Cost:

Installation time: