Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Archives for 2009

Hard Copy Reports from Online IR

For most investor relations departments, the Internet and the company website have been a great addition to the arsenal of tools used to communicate with shareholders, analysts, and the media.  But, for all of the online world’s advantages, there are still some things and some people that are just a little better when they are offline.  Mixing the two is just one of the important challenges IR faces.

Annual Reports Online

Offering the company annual report online has become a no-brainer at many publicly traded companies.  In the past, many investors requesting the annual report really only wanted certain information.  Tailoring a report to each user’s specific needs would have been a regulatory nightmare with the necessary disclaimers likely running as long as the full annual report itself.  So, investors requested the annual report, and IR put them in the mail.  Many trees were lost, and many printers grew wealthy.

Fast forward to today, and investors can generally get any company’s annual report with just a few clicks.  Some companies offer online versions which allow the investor to browse through all of the information online without ever leaving their browser.

Other companies offer their annual reports in a downloadable format such as Adobe PDF.  This solution allows investors to save the file to their computer and then review it at their leisure whether online or off.  Additionally, for users that want hard copy, the pages of interest are just a printer away.  The investor gets the best of both worlds, online reading and electronic tools when wanted, and hard copy printouts for highlighting, note taking, and just easier reading.

No longer must an investor wade through 80 pages to find the 6 pages and 4 tables that they are actually interested in.  No more skilled investor relations professionals spending 3 hours a day in the mail room pasting labels.  No more clear-cut forests, and the sons and daughters of the printers now go to state schools.

But, is something missing?

Hard Copy Reports in the Mail

It is easy, and perhaps unfair, to stereotype the investor who wants a traditional printed annual report mailed to them as older or technologically behind the times.  IR departments still dutifully mail out full hard-copy annual reports to multitudes of shareholders.  But, there are many investors and potential investors who are technologically savvy but, for one reason or another, want to get a printed copy of the annual report in the mail, not a file to download.

For these users, the IR website can accidentally become a fog of semi-confusion.  As they click around the site, they may become more confused as terminology changes, links go to places they did not expect, and the simple question they have, “How do I request an annual report to be mailed to me?” seems to go unanswered.

One frustrated user resorted to posting a comment to an article here on Good Investor Relations Websites, no doubt after arriving via search engine query that apparently did not contain the exact words required to get the answer he wanted.

PG.com - Investing

Ironically, the information the investor wants is very easy to get.  The catch is, that you have to know the difference between what you want and what it is called on the website, and that is where an investor relations team needs to bend over backwards to ensure that everyone can get what they are looking for, regardless of whether or not they speak “IR”.

Consider the household giant Proctor and Gamble.  In many ways, PG could be the poster child for an easy to use informational IR website.  The Investor Relations website is easily found via a prominent link in the main menu across the top of the company’s main page.  The site constrains its width to ensure proper function even with older monitors or small laptops.  The landing page has easy to follow navigation to virtually anything an investor could want, including the Annual Report.

Click the first link (the heading is not clickable) and you’ll find yourself in the online annual report, just as promised.  If you clicked hoping to find a way to a non-online annual report, you are still in luck, but only if you look very closely.
PG-annual-report-online-links

Of course, clicking this link goes straight to downloading the PDF, so depending upon your connection speed and how you have your browser set up, you could be in for a bit of a wait.

There is of course, the archive, and the Financial Report menu and tab, all of which go here.
PG-annual-reports

Again, information galore, but no place to get the hard copy.

Right about now, if you work in IR, or analyze their websites (or other websites), or if you know something about usability studies, or if you are just one of those people who spends a lot of time online, you might be screaming, “There it is!” while pointing at either Contact Us or Request Information.  And, you would be quite right.  In fact, if you pay attention to the bottom status bar, you’ll notice that the “Request Information” link points to a file called annual_report_order.html!

So, yes, there it is, right in front of your face.  That is, if you know what you are looking for.

request-annual-report

Consider the investor who does not spend hours on the Internet.  Perhaps a small business owner running a very successful enterprise which is so successful precisely because he spends 10 hours a day in his shop assisting customers.  After a long day at work he spends time with his family, not online.  When he heads to the PG website — he actually typed www.proctorandgamble.com but that’s ok because the company thoughtfully redirects to PG.com from that domain name – he wants to fill out a form and get a copy of the annual report.  So, why not click Contact?

Many users are used to “contact us” being some bottomless pit email account that is read and responded to by an intern buried within the bowels of the company somewhere underneath the mailroom.  That isn’t where he wants to make his request.  Besides, the whole reason he came online in the first place instead of making a phone call was because he wanted to do it quick and easy at 11:00pm and consider it done.

Best Practices

In the end, the company does everything right.  The PG IR group offers up a smorgasbord of easily accessible and usable information, and yet, just one nuance can put an investor’s objective tantalizing out of reach.

What is an investor relations department to do?

  1. Remember multiple terminology – just because someone who works around investors all day long knows that report and results often mean the same doesn’t mean that everyone does.
  2. Make It Obvious and Then More Obvious – don’t just put “Contact Us” on your site, let people know why to contact you.  An investor FAQ can do wonders.  Anyone looking for info is likely to read a section called Frequently Asked Questions.  Inside, they can find and answer like, “Use the Contact Us link to request any printed materials.”
  3. Link It More Ways – Just because the link is there on the landing page doesn’t mean the same info can’t be linked from more pages.

Keep these concepts in mind, and you can have less confused shareholders every day.

Freshening Up

Spring is here–which encourages thoughts about new growth. So here are some updates and extras relating to previously planted posts, plus two new seedlings.

Following up on Silver Linings, the post about a grassroots employment campaign that took root on Twitter:

  • Job Angels now has a website—minimal, but helpful if you want to pass the story along to others. It contains a brief version of how Job Angels got started, along with links to the various social media implementations of JA.
  • Nice news: The number of Job Angel participants (following and being followed) on Twitter has more than doubled in the month since my original post.
  • In a similar spirit, David Szary at Recruiter Academy offers food for thought about recruiting and life, with a post that starts off by asking “Are we forgetting what we do for a living?”

Recalling three recent posts that took a deep dive into Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work—it was fun to see a segment exploring the list on the CBS News program Sunday Morning for March 15. “In Good Company” focuses on Fortune’s #15, W. L. Gore & Associates. (The “associates” are the employees, every one of them.) If you missed it, it’s not too late to watch!

dan-schorr-21Just after All Atwitter was posted, a delightful segment on National Public Radio program Weekend Edition captured veteran journalist Daniel Schorr (now 92!) discovering Twitter. Schorr—who began his career in 1946 as a foreign correspondent and has covered every noteworthy event since—still appears weekly as a senior news analyst for NPR. And his Twitter following is coming up on 6,000.

And two new items worth taking note of:

  • Job Radio. I won’t lie! I had fun channel-surfing this clever site, which offers assorted audio content about job-seeking, career-building, and more. And while there, I discovered—
  • Jobs in Pods, a product/blog that focuses on “jobcasting.”

(And by the way . . . if you’ve been wondering how things are going for Skittles—no one has yet analyzed the longer-term outcomes of their radical website makeover. But I’ll keep watching!)

Bad news, transparency and the corporate website

It’s not often that my two lives intersect: work and domestic … but late last week they did exactly that.

free-fromAlerted by email from the Food Standards Agency that one of our major supermarket chains had recalled an own-brand product due to a labelling error resulting in a potential allergen risk, I wanted to find out more. The Food Standards Agency site was down (no, probably not because of massive public interest in this particular allergy alert) so I went to the supermarket site.

Nothing. Not in the press release section, nor in the customer-facing sections.

I know this is a very small issue from the supermarket point of view, but the impact on the individual shopper can be significant.

I also know that very many companies would deliberately not post bad news about their product on their own site.

However, many companies have a page in their media section that provides coverage of the company in the papers, which could be good news or bad. A few (very few) companies post information about recalls too. The one that comes to mind instantly is HP, who have a page about recalls and replacement programs.

Since the supermarkets are sending information to the Food Standards Agency to let them know about a product recall, you’d think it would be easy to send the same information to the web team – and an easy job for them to post the information online when it arrived. And it’s not as though the information is secret, either, as the supermarkets usually put this information on posters in the shop, and on the shelves, as well as online at the Food Standards Agency.

Think how you could spin it: Supermarket X keeping you informed about the safety of our products; Supermarket X keeping you healthy and safe; Supermarket X is honest enough to tell you when we make a mistake.

That’s not so very far from the recent announcement from SC Johnson of their new website informing consumers of the ingredients of their cleaning products. Very transparent …

Burger King Whopper Bar Aims to Redefine the Brand

burger-king-the-kingWhen you think of Burger King, do you think of cheap, greasy, fast food?  Burger King hopes to change that perception with the new BK Whopper Bar where the tagline, “have it your way,” is being taken to a whole new level.

The first of what will become a chain of BK Whopper Bars opened at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida this month (check out the pictures from the Orlando Sentinel theme park blog here).  According to the press release, the new bars are intended to take the “fast food” brand image out and replace it with a more gourmet appeal:

“Elevating the HAVE IT YOUR WAY® brand promise to new heights, the WHOPPER™ Bar restaurant embodies the power of personal choice by offering guests a customizable, premium and indulgent WHOPPER®-based menu.”

But wait, there is more to this brand re-definition than just dressing up the interior ambiance of a traditional Burger King location.  Here is more from the press release: [Read more…] about Burger King Whopper Bar Aims to Redefine the Brand

Places I want to work (Surprise #2)

pearson-lead

Actually, example #2 turns out to be less surprising than #1 (Home Depot), since I have quite a bit more experience in communications than in home improvement. But I was in the publishing industry for several years at the beginning of my career, and wouldn’t intentionally look for an opportunity to return.

So the appeal of Pearson’s site actually was unexpected.  And the site is certainly a complete 180 from the sturdy look-and-feel of Home Depot, with an “employer brand” character that might best be described as beguiling. The tone is direct and sincere, the design is casual (even artless), and the information is simply but adequately presented.

There isn’t a great deal of practical detail, because Pearson is made up of several different components (Pearson Education, Financial Times Group, and Penguin Group) that hire independently. So the parent site focuses on a basic presentation of the company philosophy—and there it has great success.

The key message is stated on the landing page: “We have a simple but ambitious goal: to be the best company to work for in the world, so that our people have the skills to leave, but choose to stay.” Variants of this message are repeated frequently, and are backed up with a sort of detail that is frequently missing in recruitment rhetoric: qualities of the company, and the qualities they are seeking.

Pearson uses words that are not typically found in company self-description. Example: “At the heart of everything we do are three core values: bravery, decency and imagination. These define the culture of our organisation and have always underpinned the way we do business.” Although there are sections on the site that cover the usual matters (benefits, diversity, training, etc.) what comes across most powerfully is the sense that “core values” is not just a bit of jargon, but a real description of their operating philosophy.

Here’s one more quote from a section titled “What we look for in Pearson people.” That’s a very helpful topic to present, I think, and the first item on the list is: “We are in the information business so we expect people to be forward-looking and creative in their thinking. We also assume that they will have a genuine passion for our business.”

And that last sentence actually forms a bridge for my own thinking. One of the strengths I pointed to on the Home Depot site was an image placed squarely in the middle of the Careers landing page—a blackboard with the phrase “What’s your Passion?” written across it in a bold hand.

Not that every Careers site needs to sneak in the word “passion” somewhere! But in both these cases, the idea of passionate engagement is integrated into the messaging (visually in one, verbally in the other), and strengthens an overall impression that the company really cares about making a match that works for both employer and employee.

Delivering a meaningful message won’t overcome lack of functionality or nonsense navigation. But it will make a good site much better.

How to Control and Protect Your Company’s Brand

All PR is good PR, right?

Maybe not.

Anything or any advertisement that brings attention to your business theoretically should be good for business, you would think. Just because your corporation is being talked about in the news because of the financial scandal that it was involved in last week, could be enough attention to bring in a few more customers, right? What about the “questionable” employment practices that your company embraces that got them a court summons to explain said practices – – you would think that the attention from it would be flattering for your company. Not so. No, all PR is not good PR and your company should take measure to protect themselves and their brand in any way or ways possible.

But, is it really even possible to protect your brand and your brand’s image without getting a few nut jobs that could out-do what you’ve worked so hard to mold? Oftentimes, years of hard work and playing by the rules can all be undone with a couple of poor choices and not well-thought out decisions.

The Coke brand was affected in a positive way by two Facebook users who weren’t satisfied with what they were finding on their favorite social networking site in the Coke venue and decided to start their own following…without the express permission from the Coca-Cola executives that is. But, this story has a happy ending as Coke actually embraced their proactive measures and wanted to (of course) capitalize on what the Coke evangelists had started. Although Coke “didn’t want to have anything to do with it directly”, they still worked with the two writers and seemingly didn’t have a problem with what they were doing.

But all stories don’t have such a happy ending.

The Smarties candy company ‘smarted’ about what some young folks were doing with their brand. More specifically, they were smoking smarties. Not so good for the Smarties company and not so good for this type of viral YouTube messaging to be such a popular place on the internet. Things like this is what can give your brand a bad reputation and a bad name. Since you can’t control what people do and other people’s behavior, what can you do to limit the instances that your brand is mentioned in a negative context? What can you do to make sure that your brand gets good PR and leave the negative stuff for losers?

1. Sing praises

No, not to the Almighty, but to your brand. Take all available opportunities to shed positive light on your brand. Whether that’s through the engagement of social networking sites (like the Coca-Cola evangelists) or through your marketing efforts, know that you just cannot say enough good things. A little conceited? Sure but who else is going to do it if you don’t at least spark it.

2. Acknowledge the defectors

Some would say you should ignore them, but I say don’t. People who try and hi-jack your brand (in the sense) are often just vying for attention, almost like children. Like in the case of Smarties smart-pants – – they wanted to show that they could do something that wasn’t right with the Smarties candies. My solution would have been to issue a commercial or even another YouTube message that shows the dangers of teenagers and smoking. Counter-balance the negative attention with a positive spin.

 3. Lower your expectations.

Yes, your brand is wonderful. Yes, your product is amazing. Yes, there is no other business anywhere else who can work magic quite the same as you. But, no matter what, people are people and there’s not a thing that anyone can do to change them. For you to think otherwise or to try and change them is a fruitless effort and can bring on unlimited frustration.

When you protect your brand and control your brand’s exposure, you are not going out and “getting” everyone who dares to speak against it. This can make you look like a marketing bully of sorts. But what you are doing is simply controlling and keeping under control the amount of PR attention, whether negative or positive is in the consumer’s faces. Instead of playing media police, become their friend and work towards the effort instead of against it. It should feel a whole lot better.