As securities regulators have become more and more comfortable with electronic disclosure, there has been an increasing trend towards posting key information online.

In fact, the recent reporting reform has been largely driven by the capabilities of the internet and the emergence of continuous disclosure environments. Technology today of course allows instant access to information as soon as it is published. Reports that used to announce the financial results for a company twice a year are now largely pre-empted by media releases uploaded to websites and published online, concurrently with SX announcements.

Couple this fundamental shift with the emergence of blogs, RSS feeds, webcasts, video sharing, social media, mobile web and much more, and it’s little surprise to find investors are  bombarded by streams of information from a full range of sources pretty much in real-time. The landscape for how companies disclose and how investors receive that information has shifted dramatically.

While the cost savings of these actions are obvious, it is vital that companies change their view of their investors to better suit the new requirements. Our experience shows that what is required now is for companies to think of their investors as a form of customer. That’s because, in buying shares, investors are actually looking for the levels and styles of information that they expect as consumers. In other words, they are just as liksely to be attracted by emotional factors as they are by rational arguments and numbers. So they not only require different information, but that information needs to be presented to them in different ways than in the past.

That’s why companies are increasingly looking at the communications they send those investors as a form of marketing, designed to engage shareholders and provide them with information that reinforces the benefits of, and prospects for, the investment they have made.