Collaboration Cast

Today the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that they are officially allowing companies to blog instead of filing a press release. The announcement liberates companies from having to pay PR wire services to distribute their disclosures.

This announcement will greatly encourage companies to make investments to improve their investor relations website and facilitate the user of blogs for communication with investors.

Previous law dictated that corporate websites could only be used as part of the disclosure process, but with the new guidance corporate websites or blogs can now be the sole means of disclosure. The SEC also leaves wiggle room in their statement to include Video and Audio release fillings.

Companies will need to recognize the web as a recognized channel of distribution and ensure that information is “posted and accessible and, therefore, ‘disseminated.’   Additionally, companies will also need to ensure that their websites met the simultaneous or prompt timing requirements for public disclosures under Regulation FD.  More specific requirements will soon be released by the SEC.

It is good to see that the government is keeping pace with technology and customer demand.  Today only 60 out of the fortune 500 companies are blogging.  This new government change will surely give the rest of the non-blogging companies more financial incentives to start blogging.

This last week, Alterian, a provider of marketing resource management and enterprise marketing management software, announced that it intends to acquire Mediasurface, a Web content management (WCM) vendor.

Mediasurf will be acquired for $35.6 million.  Now a part of Alteria, Mediasurf  will have the opportunity to sell into 1,000 marketing departments and leverage a network of 100 channel partners across 26 countries.

 Alterian’s goal from the acquisition was to provide a platform to allow business units to take control of their Web content authoring and help turn “visitors” to a Web site into “users.” The move empowers marketing managers to have greater control of their web campaigns, visibility into their campaign progress, success in driving their online sales, and ability to report on a campaign’s ROI.

This latest consolidation marks the beginning for further consolidation in this space.  In the end, my bet is that the analytics, enterprise marketing management, content management, and social software vendors will primarily consolidate to create a single platform that can drive and show ROI for web investments.

It will not only be interesting to see the success from this acquisition, but to see how the market consolidates.