Twitter, Facebook, iPhone Apps - not the usual stuff of a blog focussing on corporate reporting but then times-are-a-changing. 

Not so many years ago, I was involved in the production of an annual report for an international group that involved many late nights at the printers checking proof copies of the final report.  Once we were finally sure that every ‘t' was crossed and ‘i' dotted and the page breaks were in the right place we allowed the presses to roll.

Probably a week later the fruits of our labours started landing on doormats across the country.  Ok so it was more years ago than I care to remember but how the system has changed and is continuing to change is still hard to grasp.

For instance, look at the recent third-quarter earnings announcement for Hewlett-Packard.  No doubt a company representative stood up somewhere and said that the earnings were x or y dollars per share and a press release was available giving fuller details but the multitude of other reporting mechanisms that were used to convey this information is mind-boggling.

The company naturally posted the results on its corporate website but it also fully embraced the cultural change towards the use of social media publicising its figures via Twitter, Facebook and StockTwits technologies.  The company had previously announced how it would be releasing information about its results and used this opportunity to remind investors of background information providing context to the results announcement.

I have also noticed another development - an iPhone app for XBRL which enables iPhone viewing, searching and sorting of XBRL reports and tags.  With this app on your iPhone you can be notified as soon as a specific company files an XBRL report, or when a specific tag is used.  An Excel spreadsheet of the document is also then only a click or two away.

With this multitude of dissemination channels and almost instantaneous delivery, the role of the corporate report preparer must also be evolving at a rate of knots.  Consistency of message must present continuous headaches especially in the ‘character-poor' environments in play.  The new technologies may be rapid but there is a restriction on the number of characters available to use.

CIMA, in its Report Leadership work, has long advocated ‘conciseness' as one of the virtues of effective reporting but never has this been more relevant than in today new technologies.  The challenge is often to convey complex financial information briefly yet effectively.  Links to online content can help here but this also needs managing and controlling.

I recall that I had a shelf of previous annual reports, preliminary announcements and yes, the odd profits warning, that we had published and I could always turn up what we had made public in any given year.  I dread to think how current preparers keep on top of this with so much information going out electronically.

I'd be interested to hear.....