The media has always enjoyed teeing up contentious shareholder meetings, but a number of this year’s are billed like heavyweight fights.

Take a look at the [1] AP’s tale of the tape for the Yahoo! shareholder meeting.

Shareholders are certainly embolden to share their disdain for poor results or policies.  And an emerging powerhouse stakeholder group is proxy or shareholder advisory firms like [2] Institutional Shareholder Services, [3] Glass, Lewis and Proxy Governance who are make their recommendations public to stir the pot.

Corporate managers and IR professionals are going to need better ways of monitoring investor sentiment or be prepared to face a major annual crisis event: the shareholder meeting.