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.

Though I wish I had an iPhone (I have serious app envy), I do have a 3G phone that keeps me well-connected – and that has given the concept of being mobile an entirely new meaning for me. No longer am I chained to my desk in my corporate cave here at Johnson & Johnson, but I can wander wherever, and still feel connected. I know, I know – I’m not alone in that. In fact, according to a recent comScore, Inc. report:

Recognizing this, my colleagues over at McNeil Pediatrics recently created a new mobile web service that people can access from their phones to text for information about ADHD by texting “ADHD” to 87415.

(BTW: It happens that this week is ADHD awareness week as well….)

Once again, it is all about making sure information is available to people when and where they are looking for it – in this case, on their mobile phones.