We recently announced our first 100,000 users, and now there’s more big news: Johnson & Johnson intends to use Moxy Vote to communicate with their retail shareholders. This should be no surprise to those who follow J&J’s investor relations practices — they are at the cutting edge of shareholder engagement through social media.  For example, they have been among the early corporate adopters in the use of blogs, podcasts, webcasts for mobile devices and Twitter to communicate with their stakeholders.

Through Moxy Vote, Johnson & Johnson will offer their individual shareholders the ability to vote their proxies and receive important information from the company.  This new avenue of communication gives J&J the ability to have dialogue directly with those shareholders as well as all their interested stakeholders on Moxy Vote.

When we founded the company, we wanted to create a marketplace of ideas, where companies and shareholders could freely communicate. For the first two years, we concentrated most of our efforts on getting and engaging shareholders. We knew we’d have to eventually get companies to participate too, and my goodness, J&J is now on board.

Thank you to J&J for once again being ahead of the curve.  We look forward to helping you with your stakeholder communication.

This week’s newsletter focuses on socially responsible investing, or SRI.

Have you ever heard of if?

Last week our Corporate Governance Update covered CEO succession planning, a hot topic in the corporate governance world. According to a global survey of 1,300 companies, 98% of companies think a CEO succession plan is important, but only 35% currently have one in place.

In 2010, Whole Foods shareholders submitted a proxy ballot resolution requesting a CEO succession plan. Later that year, the company agreed to the shareholders’ request [PDF link], stating “It is the policy of Whole Foods Market, Inc…  to be prepared for an eventual change in leadership – either planned or unplanned – to ensure the stability and accountability of the Company during periods of transition.”

Own shares of Whole Foods? The 2012 Whole Foods ballot  is now available to vote on Moxy Vote. The ballot features two shareholder resolutions regarding board members and directors.  Want a say in the director elections and resolutions? Be sure to get your vote in before March 8.

If you’ve ever launched a business, you know what it means to start from nothing. We launched Moxy Vote with exactly zero users, and the first twenty people who signed up, bless their hearts, were employees, friends, and family. And then they started reporting bugs.

A few short hours ago, we got our 100,000th user. Six digits, baby.

Yay!

Now, we work on our second comma.

Proxy season is just around the corner, and to get your palates whetted for the ballots to come, we’re serving up a little appetizer. On special: the Apple ballot, featuring four corporate governance shareholder resolutions. Read more

Walgreens held their annual shareholder meeting last week in Chicago.  We covered Walgreens in last week’s Corporate Governance Update.  We pointed out that over the past three years Walgreens has faced shareholder resolutions that are hot topics in the corporate governance world.  For instance:

• Majority voting (2010)
• Performance-based compensation (2011)
• Executive equity retention (2012) Read more

A few weeks ago, one of our users pointed out a company to us that is doing a commendable job.  We were impressed with what we learned about Subaru of Indiana Automotive (SIA) from this Bloomberg Businessweek article.

Read more

With the holiday season over, many of us may have already begun daydreaming about what tropical location we want to book flights to with hopes of escaping the winter blues upon us.  Well our recent Environmental Update addresses a hot topic and I don’t mean tropical hot! Read more

Earlier this week, MarketWatch featured a press release from The Association of BellTel Retirees, which represents over 230,000 Verizon retirees. Over the past 12 years, the group has played an active role in using their shareholder power and proxy votes to influence Verizon’s corporate governance policies. However, MarketWatch reports that the group’s present concern centers on Verizon’s failure to disclose to shareholders $20 million in additional compensation paid to former CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, in 2009 and 2010. Read more

With the New Year upon us, we here at Moxy Vote can’t help but reminisce on how much we have all accomplished together this past year.  For instance, it was just a few months ago when we introduced a new way for you all to communicate with companies – Letters to Management.  We were shocked at how quickly everyone jumped on board.  I mean check out how many signatures we got on the following letters:

• Bank of America (7,590)
• Citigroup (5,464)
• Tyson (3,389)
• Hormel (2,377)
• Coca-Cola (3,230)
• Campbell’s (1,952)

Read more