If you wait until the market takes a dive to get your I/R ducks in a row, you're bound to sink. But if you're armed and ready, you can use a market slump to leverage your
position, according to Jeffrey Taufield, senior partner at Kekst and Co., a boutique firm specializing in corporate and financial communications. "When markets get rocked like
they did [Friday, April 14], investors see this as an opportunity to increase their holdings in quality companies," he says. "Just look at the companies that made a comeback the
following Monday." The winners, he says, were businesses with longstanding shareholder relationships, strong ties to key media, information-rich I/R Web sites, and "real earnings
potential vs. vaporware fad companies with meteoric multiples not based in reality."
But what even the best I/R-equipped companies need to watch out for are weird coincidences that might randomly occur in tandem with a market downturn, he adds. Take this
example from the market's recent drop: an unnamed company's annual report, issued four weeks ago, included notes about some auditor concerns. Although the news was old, one of
the wire services chose to post the information (coincidentally) during the market dive. The company's stock fell 50%, and communicators had to scramble to let shareholders and
institutional investors know that the information had been previously disclosed, and was unrelated to the stock market's poor performance that day. "The stock rebounded by the
end of the day, but the timing couldn't have happened in a worse market," Taufield says. (212/521-4800)