Investor relations has undergone dramatic change in recent years.  Rules designed to level the playing field have in some ways backfired -- driving public companies to disclose less and become somewhat inaccessible.

I've just posted the latest episode of my podcast, Talking Communications with Farrell Kramer, called Episode 6 — Great Expectations.  It looks at the current state of public company communications and attempts to draw some conclusions. 

Investor relations today is not a particularly easy business.

This tends to happen whenever market forces turn against investors -- and there certainly hasn't been much to keep them happy over the past 5 or 6 years. These days, every glimmer of a rally is snuffed out in a few days by a nasty decline. It's hard to make any money, and this has put the investment community into something of a snit.

We see this clearly in the Street's reaction to the current raft of Q4 earnings announcements. When the results are good, analysts and investors scour the numbers for something bad. A quarter that would normally have been seen as positive news gets picked apart until it starts to bleed.

A big miss, of course, is punished immediately. So much so that stocks gap down, investors flee in a panic and the negative news overwhelms any rational behavior.

So just what do we, the communicators, do about this? There's really only one answer: Play it straight!

Those of us in investor relations are already gearing up for Q4 earnings, and the longest document many of us will work on is the conference call script. 

The earnings conference call represents a valuable opportunity to directly reach out to analysts and shareholders.  Practically everyone who cares about the company's performance will either listen to the call or catch the replay.  There's a lot of pressure to perform, and the quality of management's prepared comments sets the tone.  So the script must make all your key points -- and make them clearly.

This is easier said than done.