Earlier today, senior leaders from our Medical Devices & Diagnostics segment (which, BTW, is the the company’s largest business segment) held a meeting with the investment community to highlight the new products, pipelines, geographic presence and other strategies that will sustain the long-term growth of this business. You can listen to a replay of the webcast on our website, but below are a few of the tweets I put out earlier today:

J&J holds analyst meeting highlighting growth strategies for its Medical Devices and Diagnostics (MD&D) segment http://bit.ly/cdY11k

Webcast of presentations for J&J MD&D analyst meeting on J&J website http://bit.ly/gNVaT

MD&D day will highlight new products, including blood glucose monitoring/hernia repair systems, disposable contacts http://bit.ly/agrGrp

Gorsky, WW Chair, MD&D segment: can grow in underpenetrated mrkts thru intro of more advanced products/organic growth http://bit.ly/agrGrp

MD&D received more than 12 reg approvals so far in ’10, plans to make about 80 significant submissions between ’10-’12 http://bit.ly/agrGrp

MD&D segment continues to globalize current portfolios by developing more localized products for different markets http://bit.ly/agrGrp

As I was wrapping everything up for the day, I thought that for those who weren’t following @JNJComm this morning ‘d share my tweets from today’s annual shareholders meeting. The meeting started at about 10 AM Eastern Standard Time.

10:04 — Johnson & Johnson Chairman and CEO Bill Weldon addresses shareholders at company’s annual meeting #JNJAM10

10:37 — CEO Weldon says 70% of sales are from products with #1 or #2 market share positions #JNJAM10

10:37 — CEO Weldon says it is the 48th consecutive year Johnson & Johnson has increased quarterly dividend #JNJAM10

10:38 — CEO Weldon says that in 2009, Johnson & Johnson delivered total shareholder return of 11.3 percent #JNJAM10

10:40 — Shareholders elect nominees to the J&J Board of Directors/ratify PricewaterhouseCoopers as independent auditors for 2010 #JNJAM10

10:41 — Johnson & Johnson increased quarterly dividend from 49 cents a share to 54 cents a share http://bit.ly/bnhLmx #JNJAM10

10:46 — CEO Weldon outlines 4 factors that enable growth that will be focused on: 1) innovative products, 2) robust pipelines #JNJAM10

10:47 — CEO Weldon outlines 4 factors that enable growth that will be focused on: 3) global presence, 4) talented people #JNJAM10

10:49 — WW Chairman of Consumer, Colleen Goggins addresses the Johnson & Johnson shareholder meeting #JNJAM10

10:50 — Goggins describes opportunities for the consumer business: emerging markets, digital media, non-traditional retail channels, sustainability

10:55 — Johnson & Johnson increased quarterly dividend from 49 cents a share to 54 cents a share http://bit.ly/bnhLmx #JNJAM10 $JNJ

11:03 — Goggins highlights Text4Baby initiative (http://bit.ly/9mo0nK and http://bit.ly/csUdPt) at J&J shareholder meeting #JNJAM10

11:04 — WW Chairman of Medical Devices and Diagnostics Alex Gorsky addresses Johnson & Johnson shareholder meeting http://bit.ly/2mgd9k #JNJAM10

11:10 – Gorsky says MD&D segment is “largest in the world” and then highlights some of the breakthrough innovations the company is bring to market

11:19 — WW Chairman of Pharmaceuticals Sheri McCoy addresses Johnson & Johnson shareholder meeting http://bit.ly/2mgd9k #JNJAM10

11:23 — McCoy describes how the global pharmaceutical market is roughly $775 billion and projected to grow to over a trillion by 2014 #JNJAM10

11:39 — CEO Weldon describes the company’s Bridge to Employment program — and how it builds HC systems and lives http://bit.ly/b34Q83 #JNJAM10

11:42 — CEO Weldon talks about how Johnson & Johnson responded to the earthquake in Chile http://bit.ly/dwGAXm #JNJAM10

12:23 — That’s the end of the presentations at the J&J annual shareholders meeting. Thanks for joining us. http://bit.ly/2mgd9k #JNJAM10

In my first blog post, I discussed the implications of some of the recent SEC reforms on you as a shareholder. I’d now like to introduce and explain some of the useful tools for keeping up-to-date on Company news and financial events without the need to keep checking our Company website.  

Investors Section of JNJ.com:  Not just for investment professionals           

The Investors section of our website is a wealth of information about the business, results of operations and financial condition of the Company. It should be the first point of reference for any shareholder wanting to learn more about their investment in the Company, including current information about our stock. One feature we have added is a separate web address for the mobile viewing version of our Investors page. Since so many people are now using mobile devices, like cell phones, iPhones and PDAs, to check websites for information, mobile-optimized sites can be helpful when you need information while away from your computer. Since I often find myself on-the-go, I have bookmarked our mobile-optimized Investor Relations page on my BlackBerry web browser.  

Cool Tools to Stay Informed 

A few great tools that I personally use to stay up-to-date on our investor-related news are e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, podcast feeds, and the “shareholder briefcase.” These types of tools are sometimes referred to as “push technologies” because they push information out to the user instead of making the user actively seek the information when new materials come out. I’ll explain each one of these tools to you: 

E-mail Alerts Registration: Signing up for investor e-mail alerts lets you automatically receive an e-mail notice whenever there are new investor-related materials posted on the site. This means you won’t have to worry about missing notices of our annual meetings or earnings calls or keep checking our website for SEC filings or news releases important to you as an investor. All of this will be pushed out to you directly at the same time we make it public. (This, of course, assumes that you regularly check your e-mail account.)

RSS Feed Registration: RSS feeds are similar to e-mail alerts, in that you can choose to receive instant updates on certain types of information. With RSS feeds, instead of receiving e-mail notices every time there is something new on our site, you receive the information through your personal web portal (such as Yahoo! or iGoogle) or an RSS feed reader (such as Google Reader or Feed Demon). RSS feeds can be an effective way to create your own news websites, specifically tailored to the news you want to receive instantly.

Podcast Subscription: Podcasts have really taken off and have become the “new radio” for some people. If you don’t know what a podcast is, it’s simply an audio (and now sometimes even video) recording of an event that is available for on-demand playback on your computer through a website and/or for download and playback on a mobile device (like an iPod, hence the term “podcast”). You can subscribe to automatically receive your favorite podcasts through Apple’s iTunes or other services. Johnson & Johnson makes podcasts available for many of our investor-related events, including our annual shareholders meeting, earnings calls and presentations at major investment analysts meetings. You can listen to and/or subscribe to automatically receive these podcasts for free on our Webcasts & Presentations page, or just browse through and listen to a few before deciding to subscribe.

Shareholder Briefcase Registration: This handy tool lets you quickly select documents posted in our Investor Relations website and place them in a kind of shopping cart for you to later download or e-mail them. To use it, first register and then, as you are going through the Investor Relations website, click on the “Add to briefcase” icon next to any document (such as a press release or an SEC filing) that you want to save for later. When you want to retrieve your saved documents, return to the Shareholder Briefcase page and follow the instructions to download or e-mail. Registering for the Shareholder Briefcase will also allow you to view webcasts, submit requests for printed materials and access RSS news feeds.

I encourage you to experiment with these forms of push technology to get a feel for these tools and refine your subscriptions to suit your needs and level of interest. You can easily unsubscribe to any of them if they’re not useful to you. 

Take some time to check out the Investors page on www.jnj.com and the tools I’ve described above. I’m sure you’ll find that they can be very beneficial in helping you keep up-to-date with what’s going on at Johnson & Johnson.

By Doug Chia, Senior Counsel & Assistant Corporate Secretary, Johnson & Johnson

This is my first post on JNJ BTW.

Today, I’m writing on a subject near and dear to my heart—shareholder voting. You may have heard that earlier this month the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a number of corporate governance reforms aimed at shoring up investor confidence. You can read about all of those reforms in the SEC’s press release, but I’d like to highlight in this post what is perhaps the most significant of these reforms—one that may directly impact you if you own Johnson & Johnson stock through a brokerage account–the elimination of the “broker vote” in uncontested director elections.

For those of you who don’t live and breathe this subject, I’ll attempt to translate that into plain English.
Previously, under the rules of the New York Stock Exchange, if stock brokers didn’t receive instructions from clients on how to vote their shares on the election of the board of directors at an upcoming annual meeting, the broker had the discretion to vote those uninstructed shares as they deemed appropriate. Since typically retail brokerage account holders who did vote tended to vote in favor of the recommendations made by the listed company’s management team, most brokers voted uninstructed shares along management’s recommendations.

To illustrate how this discretionary broker voting worked, let’s say you owned 100 shares of Johnson & Johnson stock in a brokerage account at XYZ-Trade. You received your Johnson & Johnson Annual Report, Proxy Statement and proxy card for the April 23, 2009 Annual Meeting in the mail from XYZ-Trade sometime in mid-March. As you typically do every year, you perused the Chairman’s letter and some of the stories about Johnson & Johnson’s newest business developments in the Annual Report, but you didn’t mail your proxy card back to XYZ-Trade in time to vote on the Johnson & Johnson Board of Directors or other business. In the final days before the Annual Meeting, XYZ-Trade saw that you had not instructed them on how to vote your 100 shares of Johnson & Johnson stock and thus cast the votes for the election of directors on your behalf.

Because of the SEC’s recent action, your broker will not be able to do this for next year’s Johnson & Johnson Annual Meeting. From now on, if you don’t take the affirmative step of telling your broker how to vote your shares in director elections, your votes will not be counted at all. Why am I taking the time to explain this to you? Basically, I am encouraging you to vote. Vote your shares at next year’s Annual Meeting and at every shareholder meeting after that one for as long as you own Johnson & Johnson stock. Vote in line with Johnson & Johnson management’s recommendations or vote against them if that’s what you wish. Just please take the time to vote, not only for our shareholder meetings, but for all of the companies in which you hold stock. We think it’s important that you do so. After all, voting in director elections is your legal right as a shareholder and starting now, if you don’t, no one will do it for you. At Johnson & Johnson, we believe in shareholder engagement and hope you exercise your right to vote going forward.

2009 marks the 65th year that Johnson & Johnson has been listed as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange. To commemorate this event, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bill Weldon, Chief Financial Officer Dominic Caruso and a bunch of other folks involved with our investor and shareholder activity yesterday rang the closing bell at the exchange.

Twelve of my collegues squeezed on to the historic balcony overlooking the noisy floor of the 217-year-old exchange to literally bring trading to a halt as the clock struck 4. You can catch the footage here.

A lot of thoughtful planning goes into the bell-ringing ceremony, with participants encouraged to arrive as early as 3 p.m. As we were making their way to the balcony at around 3:50, something prompted one of our group to ask their NYSE host if any ceremonial bell-ringing individual or organization had ever shown up late for the job. As a matter of fact, he was told, just recently one celebrity performer was quite upset to arrive a couple minutes late and discover they hadn’t held up the exchange closing for him.

To mark this moment, Margaret (as usual!!!) pulled out some fascinating facts and information about what it was like 65 years ago when the company first made the move from being a privately-held company to being listed on the NYSE.

After days of cold, rainy weather, this morning the sky over New Brunswick is a rich blue and the sun is shining. As I walked off the New Jersey Transit platform and into our offices to get ready for today’s Annual Meeting of Shareholders, I thought to myself how this yearly event always seems to fall on a beautiful April day. But, according to our resident historian and blogger, Margaret Gurowitz, this wasn’t always the case. As she explains in her latest post on Kilmer House:

Margeret goes on to provide a wonderful recap of some little known facts about the Annual Meeting of Shareholders that is well worth checking out.