The shooting death of a Kuwaiti businessman this past weekend is a sobering reminder of how wrong things can go when misinformation is used to pump up stock prices.

Whether Hazem Khalid Al-Braikan killed himself or was murdered isn’t the point.  What is clear, no matter how the CEO of Al Raya investments died, is that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had frozen his assets because of suspicious and potentially profitable trading that occurred just before the release of news on a bogus tender offer.  (Read the full account here)

The credibility of time-sensitive, market-moving corporate news is central to the smooth operation of our global equities markets.

There’s a place for humor, such the ongoing spoof between Apple and Google on the BBspot blooper site and other venues clearly marked as parody.  But the biggest trusted providers of financial information — Dow Jones, Reuters and Bloomberg — are fighting an increasingly difficult battle to screen out bogus data from legitimate news on their closely watched platforms.

Hats off to astute newsroom staffers who rejected the fake release concerning Harmon International and Textron this past weekend, having questioned why those  NYSE -listed companies would not have issued their statements over PR Newswire or Business Wire.  Phone calls and faxed releases from Kuwait were deemed suspicious.

BW’s Neil Hershberg, a former colleague of mine at PR Newswire, noted today that we are approaching the one-year anniversary of an odd SEC statement that gave corporations the green light to experiment a bit more in the way they disclose their material news to investors.  During the past 12 months, the vast majority of companies have continued to broadcast their full-text news to the media, investors, employees, customers and other audiences via the security-obsessed commercial newswire services — ranging from industry stalwarts Business Wire and PR Newswire to Nasdaq’s Globe Newswire and the upstart Marketwire — rather than risk raising questions about the authenticity of their information.

Certainly, some innovation has taken place: 

• Ebay supplemented its use of BW with Twitter to snap highlights during the company’s quarterly conference calls
• Nasdaq-listed BGC Partners, Inc. issued a short statement over PRN saying its earnings release had just been posted to its website.  The downside of “notice-and-access “release is that investors have to take an additional step to download the company’s data, and opening additional browsers is potentially slow and cumbersome

As the C suite and investor relations officers strive to stand out from the crowd — especially when the economy begins to grow again — there will be new models and exciting ways to share information.  High atop any list of possible disclosure solutions should be the question, “Will investors trust that this information is legitimate?”

Slap a logo on your forehead and practice your elevator pitch.

That message is the shocking reality that hordes of freshly terminated workers are receiving as they show up for their orientation sessions at outplacement firms.

Those executives fortunate enough to have received a company-paid stint at one of these “career management” clinics are finding that having a typo-free resume and knowing how to search Monster.com may not spell success in a market where it is estimated that 9,000 jobs are being lost every day.

The issue of how to repackage a demoralized and shell-shocked job candidate is just now gathering steam. Goldman Sachs economist Ed McKelvey said February 12 that 9 percent unemployment will be a reality before the fourth quarter, and that the jobless rate will be in the double digits in 2010.

The unfortunate reality is that many victims of this cross-industry economic morass are simply handed their final paycheck and told they are finished. Those rewarded with outplacement services at least have an opportunity to commiserate with others suffering the same plight.

In the first 15 minutes of the “buckle your seatbelt” orientation webinar at the Manhattan office of Drake Beam Morris, www.dbm.com, the newly jobless were told about a training session for those who would like to take advantage of their career setback to retire, and another track for entrepreneurs on starting a business.

Those whose stomachs were settled enough to throw themselves back into the workaday world were strongly encouraged to think of themselves as a product in need of packaging, marketing and a sales strategy.

The experienced PR and advertising people in the DBM conference room started shifting uncomfortably in their chairs and fiddling with their Blackberries when they heard marketing expertise was needed. Clearly, they were wrestling with internal demons — like whether to thrust their hands into the air, like Arnold Horshack on Welcome Back Kotter, and offer to craft a multimillion-dollar proposal for people who might be eating dinner at a soup kitchen.

It’s too bad the marketers did not offer some tips for job hunting in a Web 2.0 world. Other than one DBM webinar encouraging the use of LinkedIn, there was zero counseling on the DIY tools being used to make candidates highly visible and desirable to employers.

Short of hiring BBDO Worldwide to build a campaign around you, there are some pretty basic and inexpensive/free steps that I have been sharing with job seekers who are keen to be known as thought leaders in their industry while hunting their next position. Put less emphasis on Latin CV, curriculum vitae, and more on the new reality, candidate visibility .

Rather than chastising executives not to wear jeans, modern career counselors ought to be recommending to execs that they consider burning their ties and becoming Web 2.0 savvy. The candidate who reads the blogs and the Twitter and Facebook feeds of people in their field are going to be vastly smarter than others who rely on stale corporate websites, Hoover’s profiles or boilerplate paragraphs in press releases. For those who don’t know how or why to use Twitter, I’ve been recommending Commoncraft’s excellent video, Twitter in Plain English.

Another wonderful thing about new media is that audiences are more nano-targeted than ever before. Gone are the days when there are blogs and TV shows that simply talk about cooking. Now we’re into low-sodium pescetarian cooking. This specialization means that virtually everyone who is out of work can locate the group talking about there area of expertise and join the conversation. Among the easiest tools for this is http://www.blogsearch.google.com

Those whose insights represent original thinking, and who are comfortable being on stage, might want to go one step further and offer themselves up to the media, organizers of industry conferences and analysts. In the pre-Internet days, barriers to entry for new experts were very high. You needed an expensive PR person to get your name and credentials in front of the assignment editors and other gatekeepers. Not anymore. In the same way Craigslist has made it easy to find a Yiddish-speaking masseuse in Rhode Island, services like PR Newswire’s ProfNet can connect you with reporters who are looking for quotable sources on all kinds of topics. You can see a segment of ProfNet’s media queries via Twitter and can complete an “expert profile” so you are included in a database searched by members of the media. Both services are free. If you want the complete feed of ProfNet’s 150+ daily reporter queries, there is a subscription fee. (Disclosure: I used to be president of PR Newswire and still do some consulting for the organization.) Another service, supported by sponsors rather than subscription fees, features requests for speakers and interviewees, yet some of those requesting experts are far from established, respected venues. Whenever responding to a request for help, do some research on the publication, show or individual that might end up interviewing you, and do some prep work so you can easily stay on point and convey no more than one or two key messages.

None of the above suggestions will earn you immediate income.  But they’ll keep your mind in the game and may unearth some job opportunities that have not yet appeared on Ladders.com or Monster.  There are a couple of organizations that will pay experts for their domain knowledge, but these firms are quite selective of who they add to their so-called councils.

The biggest such operation, Gerson Lehrman, makes its money from hedge fund managers and corporations willing to pay a middleman to arrange access to professionals willing to share their expertise. Job seekers participating in these interviews should make sure they don’t pass along any information that’s the property of their former employer.  A wrong step here could jeopardize a former employee’s severance agreement or, worse, get someone into hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission if insider information is disclosed.

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