If your company has a strategy of acquisition – why not explain it to your potential investors?
Imperial Tobacco not only explain who they’ve acquired, but when – and give their acquisition criteria. If I happened to have a company ripe for acquisition, I might be very interested indeed in this information, but even if I didn’t, investors are likely to want to understand this strategy.
[Read more…] about Bought a new company recently?
Not many companies provide this kind of functionality, but it is useful, enabling companies to push information to its investors and alert them to stock movements.
Although not all investors will be interested in this kind of tool, I’m sure some would be – and perhaps also some financial journalists at key times of the year, or around company transitions.
BAT will send an SMS alert twice a day – to registered users – keeping investors up to date.
[Read more…] about Tell us when your share price changes
I’ve seen one! Addleshaw Goddard have a blog maintained by their CSR manager, and contributed to by one of their recruitment team who is working on a community project. Recruitment blogs are increasingly available, usually written by new recruits to explain to potential recruits what the first year or so will be like – but this is the first CSR blog I’ve noticed.
This site has a CSR quiz, to help you assess the weight your company places on each of the four main quadrants of CSR (environment, marketplace, people, community), and then – very interestingly – stacks this up against the responses provided by others.
[Read more…] about Spotted: CSR blog
Naturally, the CSR reports will be available from the CSR section, just as the financial reports will be available from the IR section, but I think that the smaller services provided to the visitor in the IR section should be replicated in CSR.
Just as the investor section should have FAQs, a glossary, contacts and a calendar, I believe that the CSR section should have the same content and functionality – including the events calendar.
[Read more…] about The CSR section: visitor services
If appropriate, companies should have an insider trading policy, and this should be clearly communicated to everyone concerned. Then everybody knows what is expected.
Stora Enso provide their policy online, but also go one step further by listing those individuals who qualify as insiders – and to whom, therefore, the policy applies. I have also seen the ‘closed periods’ listed, during which these people may not trade in the company securities, but it isn’t there at the moment. Perhaps this information is only provided around those periods.
While browsing the FTSE 100 corporate sites this week, I was struck by how few use a favicon – less than 30%.
For those who don’t know, a favicon is the tiny icon that represents your site in the address bar (next to the URL), or in someone’s list of favourites or bookmarked sites, or in the tabs of a tabbed browser, such as Firefox or IE7. You should see one for this site – a small tick.
It is a tiny piece of web estate – 16px by 16px – but why not use it to reinforce the brand?
Most of those favicons I found today are immediately identifiable – I’ve put them in the image, above. Obviously those high street brands which have been heavily advertised have an advantage here. But every time the favicons are seen, it reinforces the brand of that company. Given how valuable every pixel can be on, say, a home page, it would seem a mistake to ignore this tiny square of space, which, after all, is available, and can’t be used – yet – by anyone else. Though, thinking about it – how long until people sell their favicon space for advertising?
Dan Taylor has an interesting article about use of favicons at his blog Fabric of Folly, in which he discusses the various approaches that could be taken to designing a favicon. Definitely worth reading if you’re thinking of implementing one.
