Marketwire Joins With Cisco Systems, AMD, FD Ashton Partners, and Atlantic Equities in Offering Insight Into Best Investor Relations Practices

Market Wire, June, 2008

Quotes from Bryan Armstrong, Executive Vice President, FD Ashton Partners “Any time you can shore up information voids in terms of your story or for the industry, you can certainly mitigate some of the quick trades and the momentum styles that are influencing the stock. You could sequence press releases and make sure there aren't dead periods during the calendar year. And you could integrate the broader strategic messages into product or customer releases that can help turn investors’ attention to the longer- term story.” “How you talk about your story… what you say… in the written, verbal and non-verbal context… projects a certain level of confidence in your story that investors pay particular attention to. Body language and tone of delivery are as important as what is said. This presents several important risks when dealing with momentum, short-term traders. Management teams should be aware that casual conversations are not off limits for investors.”

Quote from Darin Wolter, Senior Vice President, Sales - West, Marketwire " Brian Solis has a statement on his blog that says 'if someone blogs about your company and you're not there to read or comment on it, did it really happen?' That's the old existential question, and the fact of the matter is, 'yes,' it absolutely did. The point that Brian likes to make is, whether your realize it or not, and whether you are in technology or whether you manufacture rope, people are talking about your company whether you're there to engage them or not. So one of the things we want to talk about is monitoring third party blogs."

Quotes from Ruth Cotter, Director of Investor Relations, Advanced Micro Devices "Gone are the days of the corporation telling its story in a blogging community. It's now about sharing information with bloggers - moving into the world of conversations and exchanges. And you better like it." "A dedicated person in our communications group focuses on bloggers in general, embracing the community and providing specific events for them. We do live video webcasts specifically tailored to the blogging community, with interactive Q&A sessions that they very much like. We've tried to push our information and share as much as we can with third-party bloggers. We have found that it has really helped us in terms of disseminating information very quickly." On using social media elements other than blogs: "By using tagging through services such as Marketwire, you can tailor your releases to specific areas as they cross the wires and target very specific audiences. It's not just a blast across the world anymore. We really look at the tailoring to get the bang for our buck in terms of our particular message. And try and refine our website to make it more interactive in a way that the user can use." Quotes from Marilyn Mora, Manager of Investor Relations, Cisco Systems On blogging and social media: "It drives, we think, conversations and productivity, as a lot of social media and blogging tools do because you may get a question or lots of questions on one topic and it's an easy way to point investors to a particular page where they can get the download. And it saves you time so you can put your resources elsewhere." “At Cisco, I'd say about one-quarter of all our blogging consists of video blogs. We find that this lends itself well to being authentic and real for an audience. We do podcasts, and those are quite beneficial as well. "Cisco is very focused on an interactive website that pushes out lots of audio and video beyond our earning announcements and analyst day events. We regularly host an educational series for our investors on a variety of topics. We're also looking at virtual worlds such as Second Life, but the question remains how to leverage the message and promote what it is our company is doing on all levels from a sales perspective to a sustainability and environmental aspect. Our future plans around blogging are to look at ‘micro blogging’ or ‘twittering” to further enhance our communications.”