Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

Are you blanking your customers?

Is it difficult for customers to understand what you’re trying to communicate on your website? Are you showing them a blank screen, or hiding key sections of your site from them? It can happen to the best of companies without them realising …

lack of communicationI can think of a couple of reasons why you might decline somebody’s custom: but only people that you no longer wanted to have as customers. You surely wouldn’t refuse to serve those people you do want to retain or exclude them from your corporate communications.
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Want to know what the corporate giants do?

Are you interested in corporate intranets? What about finding out what the world’s biggest blue-chip companies do behind their firewall? How do they manage information and communication across such big organisations?

IBF are hosting a 24 hour online collaborative event focused on intranet innovation, and are expecting hundreds of the world’s largest organisations to join in, sharing best practices and learning from each other.

Astonishingly, this is a chance to visit some of the world’s most advanced intranets, corporate portals and information workplaces – behind the firewall! This should be an extraordinary event …
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He got paid how much?

Signet Directors Remuneration
Signet

We recommend that for transparency and openness, information about the remuneration of management and their share options, should be drawn out and specified explicitly on the site, not left buried in the annual report.

Ideally, this would also be linked to information about the remuneration policy, and to information about the directors’ dealings in the company shares.
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Probably the best IR site in the world

Carlsberg IR home page
Carlsberg

Of course, Carlsberg do have an investor relations site, and theirs is pretty good … but let’s go with the famous fantasy of “Carlsberg don’t do X, but if they did, it would probably be the best X in the world”.

The best IR site in the world would probably look like this:

Personalised

Recognising me, the best IR site in the world would present me with personalised information. Perhaps it would:

  • welcome me by name
  • tell me how much my shareholding had changed since my last visit
  • offer me news items based on my interests
  • and, knowing whether I was a retail investor, professional investor, journalist or analyst, be able to present me with relevant sections of information to read first.

Customisable

The best IR site in the world would let me choose the information I wanted to see as a priority on my regular visits.

I’ve already suggested that the site could personalise its presentation of information based on who I am, but I’d also like to be able to tailor the presentation for my personal preferences.

I could select elements from the range of information available that I would like to see on my IR home page, and on each visit, that is the information that would be presented first. Clearly the rest of the information should also be available, but if I have chosen to have, say, a three-month share chart, details of the latest AGM and the 5 most recent news headlines on my home page, that is what I would see.

Interactive

The best IR site in the world would help me to:

  • analyse the financial data for that company, either online, or by downloading spreadsheets – preferably both.
  • contact an IR representative immediately to answer those urgent questions, by live chat or IM – or whatever my preferred method is.
  • choose which companies I’d like to compare to this one for charting
  • receive a regular feed of the latest analyst estimates for this company.

Such a site would also let me know if there were significant changes to the data on the site, or to the share price (based on boundaries that I had set) and would remind me of events that I might want to be aware of, or to attend, using whatever method I preferred (RSS, email, text message, IM …)

Easily accessible – and pleasing to the eye

I would also want the site to be available to me whatever the tool I am using to read it with (or listen to it with) – and whatever my personal physical abilities might be. I would also want to enjoy using the site, so it has to be stylish as well as accessible.

I suppose asking for a cold beer on top of all that might be a step too far – even for the best IR site in the world?