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. 

As podcasts become more widely adopted, it's worth keeping an eye on who is using them for communications -- and how.

Today, the very good communications blog Micro Persuasion linked to an item on Podcasting News about the big financial services firm Bear Stearns launching "BearCast:"

BearCast delivers Bear Stearns conference calls, proprietary research and special events in downloadable audio files for busy investors to listen to anywhere.

At the end of 2005, I posted on CNBC adding full company names to its broadcast ticker -- a move that took largely useless information and made it useful to the general public.

In that post, I also talked about another anachronism -- newspaper stock tables. 

When was the last time you looked up a stock quote in a newspaper?

I’d be surprised if 1 in 100 can remember.  However, newspapers continue to print these tables at a tremendous cost — newsprint accounts for a very large percentage of total expense to newspaper companies.  Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that newspapers are struggling so badly.

If Google's 7% stock swoon Tuesday stuck you as deja vu, you're right.  But it wasn't a  Wall Street replay.

Think, Italy.  Torino, to be precise. 

Bode Miller's spectacular flop at the Winter Olympics was just as great a failure at the expectations game as Google's admission earlier this week that "growth will slow."  It was spectacular.  It was awful.  And it was reality.  The problem is this -- the expectations game is one that can't be won forever.  Eventually, it will eat up anyone who dares to play.

We live in a superstar society.  We expect greatness, again and again.  Whether we're talking about growth stocks like Microsoft, AOL and Home Depot or Olympians like Carl Lewis, Mark Spitz and Eric Heiden, we want to see gold.  Reasonable or not.

The truly great athletes always seem to find ways to deliver.  When they can't, they retire. 

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!

I've seen it again and again.  Someone is giving a PowerPoint presentation and hits a dense slide that literally slows the talk to a crawl.  Eyes glaze over and Blackberrys come out.

The secret is this -- the slide must work for you, not the other way around!  There's no need to cover every point on a slide, particularly a complex one, as you can safely assume your listeners have looked at them all the first few seconds the slide went up.  Find the point or points on the slide that directly relate to the story you're trying to tell overall and simply ignore the rest.  You must do this, otherwise this one slide can threaten your whole presentation.

Yes, sometimes it does seem there's no one single point that relates to the slide that came before and the one that is to follow.  In this case, the problem is not you.  It's the slide.  Either it is misplaced or misconceived.  It has to go.