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Archives for March 2011

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 42: Periodically Hit the Refresh Button

Every now and again, something happens that drives home to me generational differences. Usually, I wind up feeling really old when they occur, and just as usually it is my children that make me feel that way. And trust me, they are merciless in reminding me that I am no longer the slim, dark haired go-getter I remain in my mind’s eye.

Today, however, I was brought up short by one of my students. We were discussing a case in class and how to improve a company’s visibility with investors when one of my students suggested that one thing the company could do was to improve its web site. As the case occurred in 1993, I suggested to my student that most companies did not have web sites back then. She looked at me as if I were from Mars. The concept of a company not having a web site was utterly foreign to her.

Generational differences are fun to poke fun at, but I bring this up to make a slightly different point. That is, things can go from being considered an uncommon luxury to being to commonplace and essential in a very short period of time. So it is with investor relations web sites. Those of us that began our careers before the growth of the world wide web tend to think of such sites as adjuncts to ‘real’ information, which comes on pieces of paper or by talking to somebody. Consequently, the web site is often pushed down the chain of command as almost a clerical function or it is outsourced and forgotten about. Either way, the information content tends to languish.

However, if you have almost always relied upon the internet to feed you data, it’s your first default option to get information and it’s sure real to you. Everyone below the age of 25 that I’ve talked to feels this way. And these will be the analysts and portfolio managers of tomorrow.

So today’s thought on how to make your investor relations web site more effective: to look at the information you are providing to investors on your site with a critical eye at least once a year. The scope and pace of change on the internet is such that good companies have to regularly take a fresh set of eyes to the information they are providing to investors to make sure they are meeting the expectations of internet savvy younger investors.

And trust me, they’re getting younger every day (or at least it sure looks that way to me).

In this series:
Previous post: Shareholder’s FAQs

Twitter Audience Is Fragmented and Led by a Small Group of Power Users

New research from Yahoo! about Twitter tells us a bit more about the evolution of Twitter usage and confirms some facts we already knew.

It’s not a surprise that a small number of Twitter users are responsible for the most consumed tweets. The Yahoo! study, “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter,” reports that 0.05% of Twitter users account for nearly 50% of all attention (meaning that almost half of the tweets that are published and actually read are published by just 0.05% of Twitter users). These power Twitter users are dubbed “elite users” and include primarily celebrities, people from the media, organizations, and bloggers.

One of the most interesting findings in the study reveals the trend in fragmenting the Twitter audience. In fact, Twitter use is reported to have “fragmented over a wider pool of content producers than classical models of mass media.” However, as the statistics in the preceding paragraph state, that fragmented attention is “highly concentrated” among the people that elite users reach through their tweets.

Another finding from the study that isn’t surprising is the fact that, “almost half the information that originates from the media passes to the masses indirectly via a diffuse intermediate layer of opinion leaders, who although classified as ordinary users [i.e., not elite users], are more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers.”

Finally, the report provides evidence that links to evergreen content like videos and music have longer lifespans thanks to continued sharing and discovery than other links shared on Twitter such as media-originated content links. Again, this is not a surprising finding, but it’s always good to have research to provide evidence to support what we already think.

So what can brand managers learn from this study? First, Twitter is an information sharing tool. It’s a content marketing tool that provides a social media element. However, it’s the publishing of original content and sharing of content that makes it so popular. The best brand Twitter feeds offer useful, meaningful information and links that the target audience actually wants to read, share, and engage with. Diversify your Twitter content to include original content, shared content, text, video, images, conversations, and so on. Be sure to include evergreen content in the mix and don’t be afraid to tweet  your best content again to ensure more people see it (Twitter streams move very quickly). Third, connect with online influencers and offer useful information that they are likely to want to share with their own audiences and are “more connected and more exposed to the media than their followers.”

Bottom-line, Twitter is just one tool in your marketing toolbox. Don’t expect it to drive a flood of business your way (although it can happen), but your brand should be represented and engaged. Take the time to understand how it works. This study offers great insight that you can use to better plan your own Twitter marketing strategy for your brand.

Image: deviantart.com

5 Steps for Greater Brand Focus and Long-term Growth

The strongest brands are highly focused. Consumers know exactly what the most focused brands promise to them the second they hear those brand names. These are the brands that offer a sense of security and stability to consumers which lead to brand loyalty and long-term brand growth. However, making sure your brand stays focused over time can be challenging as the world, consumers, and competitors change around you.

Following are five steps to continually test your brand strategy against to ensure you stay focused. They might seem rudimentary, but corporate executives forget them every day.

1. Know your target audience.

As time passes, your target audience is likely to evolve. You need to analyze these changes and determine when your brand needs to change as well. In other words, flexibility is key but don’t change for the sake of changing. Remember your brand focus and change only when it’s appropriate for the long-term success of your brand.

2. Test brand focus viability.

As the macro-environment changes, your brand focus might have to change in order to survive. Consider newspapers today. They’re a dying breed that didn’t change when technology and the widespread accessibility of digital information through the Internet exploded. Those brands stayed too rigid in their brand focus and ignored or denied the fact that the viability of that focus was coming to an end.  Today, many of those brands are struggling to stay relevant and stay alive.

3. Keep tabs on your competitors.

What differentiated your brand and gave you a competitive edge in the past, might not work in the future. You need to actively track your competitors’ activities to ensure your own focus continues to provide the differentiation you need for consumers to choose your brand over others. Competitive analysis doesn’t stop after your brand is launched.

4. Make sure your brand focus isn’t shortsighted.

Unless you want to reinvest a lot of money into launching a new brand or revamping your existing brand significantly in the future, you need to make sure that you’re always thinking in the long-term when it comes to your brand strategy. Strong brands can survive through far more obstacles than weak brands can. Therefore, make sure your brand is viable in the short-term, as you learned in #2 above, as well as for years to come.

5. Extend your brand carefully.

Brand extensions are the easiest way for a brand to lose focus. Don’t let the hope of entering a new market or expanding your product line in order to reach new customers and boost profits destroy your brand focus. Brand extensions should always appropriately reflect your focused brand promise. If you extend your brand in ways that confuse consumers, they’ll turn away from your brand in search of another that meets their expectations based on the brand promise. In other words, instead of making more money and getting more customers through a brand extension, you could lose money and customers.

No matter what you do, make sure you know what your brand’s focus and promise are and evaluate all marketing opportunities against that focus and promise to ensure they’re right for your brand in the long-term.

Image: stock.xchng

Corporate Character: Interviewing Professor Gary Davies

russian dolls personalityIf your company were a person, who would it be? Are you seen as ruthless, and is that good or bad? What is your corporate level of machismo?

Such questions are often used as part of branding exercises. At Manchester Business School, Professor Gary Davies and his team have taken this further, and devised their own personality test for companies as a way of measuring corporate reputation.

Companies, like people, are multi-dimensional, and the Manchester Business School measure enables your company character to be assessed in 7 different dimensions.

Corporate Eye recently interviewed Professor Davies to talk about corporate reputation and about how companies should portray their corporate personality online, where—necessarily, at the moment—the range of senses that can be engaged is narrower than in an offline experience.

Do listen: the interview also covers emotion, credibility and CSR, and ends by discussing the impact of western business culture upon China – and the future impact that Chinese brands will have upon us.

I’ve broken the interview down into bite-size pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about, but I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1:Seven dimensions of the corporate character

Key topics:

  • corporate branding:product branding
  • measures of corporate character
  • seven dimensions of corporate personality

Soundbite:

“If I say that Company X is trustworthy, I’m giving you two pieces of information – I’m telling you how I think that company will behave towards me in the future, and I’m also telling you how I think I will behave towards that company”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-1.mp3] Length: 14:57
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 1

Part 2: Communicating corporate personality

Key topics:

  • mission, vision and values can express personality
  • current transactional nature of websites
  • building in enjoyment and pleasure

Soundbites:

“[The corporate website is] the easiest place to go to try and find out an answer to the question ‘Well, who are you?’…

“How many websites are a joy to use? Give you a real emotional buzz when you use them? Not many.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-2.mp3] Length: 8:24
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 2

Part 3: Personification and the corporate story

Key points:

  • the appeal of the personality
  • making it personal: BG Group, Stora Enso

Soundbite:

“[The website] told me here’s the company, here’s the MD, the CEO, the founder—probably only a two-man business anyway—but recognising that the CEO literally personifies the company.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-3.mp3] Length: 3:27
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 3

Part 4: Social media and companies

Key points:

  • learning from what people say about you and changing behaviours as a result

Soundbite:

“Start looking at what are people saying about you, and how they see you. And it’s no good saying ‘They are wrong’: they have their point of view”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-4.mp3] Length: 3:53
Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 4

Part 5: Using emotion for credibility

  • credibility in a crisis
  • a lawyer’s response or a reputation management response?
  • dealing with emotion

    • Soundbite:

    “You can only, in my view, approach a crisis by recognising that the people that you’re talking to are in a state of high emotion and you’ve got to use emotion back. They’ve got to believe that you are as bothered about this issue as they are.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-5.mp3] Length: 2:53
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 5

    Part 6: Impact of CSR on employees and customers

    Key topics:

    • should corporates have a social role other than maximising profit?
    • impact of CSR on employees: Marks and Spencer
    • building CSR into the business: Land Securities

    Soundbite:

    “The biggest impact of CSR reports and CSR actions – which is more important than the report itself – is on employees … We think there’s a chain effect here. CSR influences the employee and the employee in a service organisation influences the customer.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-6.mp3] Length: 5:30
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 6

    Part 7: The human face of major companies

    Key points:

    • importance of video: talking head vs. interview/conversation
    • fun and the corporate brand: United Airlines, Zurich Financial, Virgin, British Airways
    • person to person interaction vs. online

    Soundbite:

    “If I go online and I can’t find anything from one of the heads of the organisation, I think ‘Well, why not?’ Because you go onto YouTube and you can find it … Why can’t we see the human side of the head of these large corporates?”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-7.mp3] Length: 8:03
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 7

    Part 8: Western influence on Chinese business

    Key topics:

    • Entrepreneurs in China
    • Cultural weight carried by brands
    • Cost of establishing global branding

    Soundbites:

    “That’s one reason perhaps why there’s so many Chinese in the West now, just trying to understand how we think. Because we will be the consumers for their brands that are going to follow in the next wave.”

    “Deng Xiaoping, I think, had this lovely saying…’We’re crossing a river and we’re feeling for the next stone under the water’. Lovely metaphor. So we know which direction we’re going in, we’re not too sure about our footing.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-8.mp3] Length: 6:53
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 8

    Part 9: Culture shock and loss of control

    Key topics:

    • Showing people the power of the media: Tiananmen Square; Egypt
    • The power of the internet mob: Cooks Source

    Soundbites:

    “Of the 1,000 students doing Masters degrees at Manchester Business School this year, 400 will be Chinese.”

    “When companies could assume that if there was something that they were trying to hide they could at least hide it for a year or two, you can’t now rely upon hiding it for a minute or two.”

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mbs-part-9.mp3] Length: 6:48
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview: part 9

    Here’s the whole interview, for you to listen to while driving home, or while jogging in the park; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

    [audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/prof-gary-davies-full-interview.mp3] Length: 1:01:25
    Download: Professor Gary Davies interview (whole interview)
    Download: Transcript (PDF)

    Many thanks to Gary for taking the time to talk to Paul.

    Who were we speaking to?

    Professor Gary DaviesGary Davies is Professor of Strategy and Director of the Reputation, Brand and Competitiveness research group at Manchester Business School (MBS). He is currently Director of Post Graduate Taught programs (all taught MSc programs) at MBS. He joined MBS from Templeton College, University of Oxford in 1992. Before entering an academic career in 1975, he had commercial experience with British Aluminium and the Mars (now Master Foods) Group. He works as a freelance consultant in strategic analysis and corporate reputation.

    Gary teaches strategy, corporate reputation, marketing strategy and crisis management, and his current research interests focus on reputation management, branding, employer branding and spillover effects from corporate to product branding.

    Corporate Eye Summary March 26, 2011

    • Thinking Socially: Convincing the CEO
      I invited Gregory Shumchenia of Modern Pigeon to write a guest post for us – do take a moment to visit his site. Greg started out five years ago as a photographer and just began offering marketing and social media services. He loves the outdoors and will never eat canned tuna. Over to you… 7 […]


    • 2 out of 3 Americans Use Social Networking Sites
      New statistics from eMarketer reveal that in 2011, 63.7% of American Internet users (147.8 million people) are using social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. By 2012, that number will increase to 66% and by 2013, it will hit 67%. According to these statistics, the days of double-digit user growth for social networking appear to […]


    • Brands Launch Tablet Optimized Websites
      The current hot gadget is the iPad and other tablets are launching quickly to compete with the iPad. It makes sense that brands would want to revamp their websites so they work well on tablets, but brands like MTV and VH1 are leading a new redesign trend. Instead of simply moving website elements around so […]


    • Corporate Eye Summary March 19, 2011
      Launching a Career in Corporate Communications Today we have a guest post from Lauren Bailey offering advice for college students wanting to get started in corporate comms. Lauren Bailey is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about online colleges. She especially loves hearing back from her readers. Questions or comments can be sent […]


    • Google Breaks Web 2.0 Logo Design Trend with New Chrome Logo
      Over the past decade, more and more companies have been investing in logo redesigns in order to create logos that seems more modern and digital. The glossy, 3-dimensional redesigns have been called the Web 2.0 logo redesign trend. However, that trend might be coming to an end if a new design for Google’s Chrome brand […]


    Turn Negative Reviews into Positive Word-of-Mouth Marketing

    The Retail Consumer Report research conducted in January 2011 by Harris Interactive (commissioned by RightNow) revealed some interesting information about online shoppers’ experiences and thoughts. As you might expect, consumers who have bad experiences with online retailers won’t buy from those retailers again, and more and more of those dissatisfied consumers are sharing their negative reviews online.

    However, the news isn’t all bad. Businesses have an opportunity to turn those negative reviews into positive word-of-mouth marketing by keeping track of online conversations about their businesses and responding to them.

    The Harris Interactive study revealed that 68% of consumers who published a complaint or negative review about an online business on a social networking site or a review site were contacted by the businesses they complained about. 18% of those people were so satisfied with the responses they got from those businesses that they made additional purchases and became loyal customers.

    Of course, the best case scenario is that your business only gets glowing reviews online, but when a negative comment about your brand and business makes its way online, respond to it. Reach out to the customer and make the situation right with them. As the Harris Interactive study reports, 33% of consumers who were contacted by businesses about their online complaints turned around and published a positive review about that business and 34% deleted their original negative reviews.

    The opportunity to respond to negative reviews and fix problems is wide open. 61% of consumers surveyed by Harris Interactive who did not receive a response from a business about whom they published a negative review said they would be shocked if a retailer responded to a negative complaint or review that they published on the social web. Go ahead and shock them!

    Keep in mind, the Harris Interactive study determined that 21% of consumers who had positive shopping experiences with an online retailer recommended that retailer to friends and 13% published positive reviews about that retailer online.  The study also reported that nearly 1 out of 3 surveyed consumers conducted their own online research on social networking and review sites while they were shopping online. You need to monitor your online reputation, respond to negativity, and make sure the information consumers find about your brand and business is positive and accurate. Online reviews are extremely important. It’s vital that you know what is being said about your brand and business online, so you can jump into conversations when it’s necessary and show your appreciation when it’s appropriate.

    Image: stock.xchng