The question of whether or not a firm should or has to make an announcement to the public, whether that be via a news release, public announcement or press conference, is often more than just an internal debate comparable to the age-old argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

In fact, when it comes to companies that have shares that are available for sale and purchase in a public stock market, this question moves beyond the rhetorical realm into the practical world.

Why? Because in some instances, a publicly traded company has no say it the matter — it MUST make a public announcement.

The key to such a triggering event hinges upon the question of “Materiality” and understanding what the word “material” means from a legal/financial perspective when it comes to publicly traded companies.

A Layperson’s Definition of Material News

In the case of a publicly traded company,

News is said to be “material” if the average person would likely make a decision to either Buy or Sell the company’s shares if he/she knew such news.

If the answer is “Yes,” then the news is “material” to the company and triggers the need for a news announcement. If the answer is “No,” then the news is NOT “material” and a news announcement is not needed.

Clearly, what constitutes material news for one company may not come close to being material for another firm.

Materiality and the $1 Million Contract

Consider the example of top execs at a publicly traded firm that learned that one of their associates had just closed a one-year contract worth $1 million. Is this contract material to the company?

The answer is, “It depends.”

If a firm (call it “Company A”) had annual revenue last year of $100 million or more, the likely answer is “No,” a $1 million contract would not be considered material by most individuals. Certainly it would not be a contract to sneeze at, but at less than 1 percent of Company A’s top-line revenue, a $1 million contract would probably not cross the line of being considered “material.”

However, what if “Company B” had annual revenue last year of less than $20 million or even $10 million? A-ha — now we’re talking about additional annual revenue equal to 5% to 10% (maybe even more). Now we’re talking about a much bigger potential impact on Company B from just one sale.

In the examples outlined above, I believe that a $1 million annual contract is a material event in the case of “Company B” (with annual revenue of $20 million to $10 million, or less), while the same size contract would not be material for “Company A” since it has annual revenue of $100 million or more.

The gray area, of course, in these examples would be those publicly traded companies generating between $20 million and $100 million in annual revenue.

Other Types of Material News

Certainly material news is not merely defined by the size of newly won (or lost) contracts.

Material news can also include such things as

• Executives hired,
• Executives fired,
• Board members added,
• Board members dismissed,
• The health of a senior executive (think about Steve Jobs’ liver transplant and Apple’s handling of this news),
• The death of a senior executive,
• The opening of a new plant or facility,
• The closing of a plant or facility,
• Entering a new country or market,
• Leaving a country or market (think about Google’s position in China),
• Launching a new product,
• Issuing a product recall,
• Significant layoffs,
• Significant hirings,
• A flood,
• A fire,
• A storm,
• A natural disaster,
• A war,
• A riot,
• A burglary,
• Etc., etc., etc.

In conclusion, let me restate what I wrote above.

News is material if the average person would buy or sell stock if they knew the news.

And yes, it’s really that simple (or that complicated), depending upon the company, the news and your viewpoint

Quote someone besides the CEO in your next news release, especially if you want to make a smaller company appear to be larger than it really is.

I know it seems silly, but try it. Quote the Chief Financial Officer, or the Vice President of Engineering, or the Chief Operations Officer instead of simply quoting the President/CEO.

I have found this works quite well with start-ups and smaller entrepreneurial firms that do not have to disclose their size.

Then again, this presumes that you work with a company that has other senior executives beyond the CEO that are worth quoting . . . but that’s a whole ‘nother question. 

If you’re preparing a written speech for yourself, your boss or your client, there are four things you should to do to make sure your speech copy is easy to read and follow.

One:   Write your speech copy in ALL CAPS.

Two:   Triple space between the lines of your speech copy.

Three:   Print on one side of each page.

Four:   Bind each page into a three-ring binder.

It may seem silly, but taking these steps will make the speech even better.

Here’s a PR tip I picked up years ago from my friend Jeff Acerson back when he was running the public relations department for WordPerfect Corp.

Provide journalists with 25-, 50- and 100-word descriptions of your new product, service, executive or announcement.

In today’s hypercompetitive and financially challenged world, one of your main goals as a PR professional is to make journalists’ lives as easy as possible. One way to do this is to give them as little editing work to do as possible.

Chances are in many instances they just won’t be able to include all six-hundred-and-eighty-seven words from your press release in the next edition of the newspaper or magazine or use it in its entirety on their Website or during their next newscast — that’s the reality of the situation.

So . . . make it easy for them: Provide shorter versions of your news copy that they MIGHT use verbatim.

Chances are they will. And if they do, they’ll love you for it.

According to Professor Rulon L. Bradley, Ph.D. (my 1st public relations counsellor at Brigham Young University), the most important skill I would learn in BYU’s PR program was writing.

“As a professional, 70 percent of your time will be spent writing,” Dr. Bradley used to say.

Back then I thought he was nuts. Today? I’m not so sure.

I may not spend 70 percent of my time writing, but I’ll bet it’s close to 50 percent.

So . . . one of the aspects of PR writing that makes it so crucial is the need to understand (and write in) the journalistic style of writing. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, be aware that journalists write differently than most people.

Some journalists would suggest they also write better than most people, but that’s not the point of this piece.

The fact is that journalists do write differently. They have their own rules, their own style, their own policies and procedures — especially when it comes to writing.

That’s why shortly after leaving BYU I came to truly appreciate the fact that we HAD TO take a minimum of two journalism classes as part of the PR sequence. We also HAD TO work for for at least a term or semester for The Daily Universe, the student-run on-campus newspaper by taking what was then known as Comms 312.

I was even fortunate enough (as a married PR student) to be able to complete my required PR internship as a non-paid, part-time “Senior Staff Writer” for the Universe during the 1983 Fall Semester.

As a result of my Comms 312 and Sr. Staff Writer experiences, I left college with more than 400 column inches of bylined stories that I had written and published while in college. And when I shared my portfolio and this work to Kathy Keenan, the then Assistant PR Director at Palo Alto, California-based Tycer-Fultz-Bellack in December 1983, her response was

“You wrote all of this? In college?”

I had, in fact, and even though she had clearly told me that TFB did not have any job openings at that time, she called my home less than two hours later to offer me a job.

The Point of This PR Tip

After more than 25 years as a PR professional (including 10 years as a self-syndicated columnist), I can authoritatively state a few PR FACTS:

1. The more you understand journalism, the better PR professional you will be.
2. The best PR pros are great at writing in a journalistic style.
3. The closer you can get to writing as a journalist writes, the greater likelihood all or part of your PR materials will be used “as is.”

One of the best feelings as a PR practitioner is to open a magazine or an online story and see something you’ve written being used word for word in a story published by a media outlet.

Chances are it means that you did a good job writing and did so in a journalistic style. And that’s the point of this PR Tip.

If you handle public relations or investor relations for (or with) a publicly traded company, this tip will serve as merely a reminder.

However, if you’re new to the IR world, please note that before sending out a news release for a publicly traded company you need to send an advance copy of your release to the stock exchange that lists your company’s shares.

Providing an advanced copy puts the exchange on notice and allows them to quickly evaluate if there is anything out-of-the-ordinary about your forthcoming news, something that might attract special interest from investors in your stock on that particular day.

Typically, an advance copy of a news announcement can be sent to the exchange a minimum of 10 to 15 minutes before a release is distributed publicly.

However, the greater the potential importance of the news to your company, the further in advance you should send a copy of your announcement to the exchange in case the exchange decides the market needs time to digest the news.

This is one of the reasons why we typically recommend distributing news before the markets officially open for trading. (If the news is big enough, there is no need to halt trading during the day.)

If you’d like more details about how (and when) to notify an exchange in advance of distributing a news release, please contact your CFO, in-house legal counsel, or an external securities attorney.

BTW: Here’s the link to the NASDAQ Electronic Disclosure Request page.

Pop Quiz:

Which of the two examples below is the most correct (from a public relations perspective)?

1. Riley spent over $300 on a new outfit.
2. Riley spent more than $300 on a new outfit.

The correct answer, boys and girls, is No. 2.

The word over is typically used to describe a relationship between one object or person with another, such as

• She held her fist high over her head, or
• He used his victory to lord over him.

In the first instance, the fist is being held above the head. In the second instance, the victory is used to create or establish dominance.

Conversely, the term more than is used to convey the thought that one thing is larger, greater or bigger than something else.

Ergo, the PR Rule of Thumb is this:

In PR writing, the term more than should be used 99 percent of the time when you need to describe something that is larger, greater or bigger than another thing.

Conversely,

The word over should be used to describe a relationship between one object or person with another.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

THE EXECPTION TO THE RULE:

For better or worse, however, people use the word over all the time in their day-to-day speech to describe something that is larger, greater or bigger than something else.

So . . . the one place where we allow this exception is within someone’s quote, such as

“We made over $2 million in profit last year,” Smith said.

So the question is this: Is it CEO or Chief Executive Officer or chief executive officer?

Here’s our multi-part answer to this PR Rule of Thumb.

1. The same standard applies to the CEO title as any other title (as outlined in Politis PR Tip #75: Capitalize Titles or Not?). If the name precedes the title, then the title is written in all lower case letters. If the title precedes the name, then capitalize the first letter of title (or words of the title).

Hence, this is correct: Chief Executive Officer Wayne Taylor.

Then again, this is also correct: Roberta Harris, chief executive officer.

{NOTE: For some reason, the C-Level titles (chief executive, financial, operations, etc.) seem to be the ones companies always want to write in the initial-cap writing style. If that’s the case, don’t sweat it — make ‘em happy.}

However, since CEOs often carry an additional title, such as chairman or president (to name a few combo positions), we at Politis Communications have instituted our own writing rule. Let’s call it the Combo Title Rule.

In essence, if someone has any C-level position (such as CEO, chief financial officer, chief operations officer, etc.) and any other position AS WELL, we

1. ALWAYS abbreviate the C-level title on first instance, and
2. ALWAYS spell the title in ALL CAPS.

Hence, this is correct: President and CEO Wayne Taylor.

Then again, this is also correct: Roberta Harris, president and CEO.

We’ve implemented this rule at our agency to shorten word count within written PR documents. And it also happens to be the standard way most companies say such Combo Titles.

When it comes to spelling professional titles — president, chief financial officer, vice president, etc. — in public relations documents, the rule of thumb is as follows.

When a person’s name is used in a PR document for the first time

1. If the title comes before the name (such as XYZ Company President Mary Jones), then the title — President — should use an “initial cap” spelling style, meaning the first letter of the title (in this case, the letter “P”) should be capitalized.
2. However, if the title comes after the person’s name (such as Bob Smith, vice president of ABC Enterprises ), then the title — vice president — should be written in all lower case.

Naturally, if your employer (or client) insists that all titles should be written in an “initial cap” spelling style, sticking to your guns on this PR rule is certainly NOT worth getting fired over.

But that’s the “rule” for capitalizing titles in PR documents.

Clearly, if you need to “tell” readers there is more to come on a subsequent page in a public relations document (see “Politis PR Tip #73: Use ‘More’ at Bottom of Multi-page Documents,” you also need to tell readers that they’ve reached the end of the document.

The best way to do this is putting the word

- end -

or the symbols

# # #

or the number

30

at the bottom of the last page.

Any of these three will tell media and/or PR professionals that they’ve reached the end of the document.