Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

Starbucks: how to communicate change

Starbucks provides us with a demonstration of a great way of communicating the significant changes under way (changes in their approach and in their senior management structure).

The home page has been replaced with a letter from Howard Schultz, addressed to all customers. At the bottom are links to copies of a letter and a voicemail from him to all Starbucks partners (employees), together with a link to a Questions and Answers page dealing with the changes, and to the Investor Relations pages, which shows the press release at the top of the list. If we click through to review the details of the Board of Directors, we can see that the changes have been reflected on this page, which is up to date. Even potential job applicants have been provided with a link to the letter/voicemail to partners and letter to customers in the careers section.
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Demonstrating product evolution

Proctor and Gamble have a very pleasing diagram of the evolution of their products – a variant on the usual history timeline. Since products spawn in multiple directions, it obviously isn’t as linear as a history timeline tends to be.

Proctor and Gamble product history

The small blue circles expand on rollover to explain – for example – how their knowledge of bleaching as used in detergents led to the development of dental bleaching kits. Very interesting indeed; so much so, that I’d like to see the image expandable, so that I can see the images of the products properly.

Could you use this sort of diagram on your site? Almost all products go through this kind of evolution. It might have other applications, too, such as the evolution of the company through mergers, acquisitions and disposals.

Spoof all too close to reality

Seamus McCauley points us to a delicious spoof of a corporate website at Buy n Large. Thing is, even the name sounds plausible.

Buy n Large home page

The design of the home page is just right (for today’s view of an up-to-date site – the view in 2057 may be very different): curvy web 2.0 content elements, clean design, lots of white space and a bit of movement to add vibrancy.

Do check out the small print at the bottom: by visiting the BnL web site you instantly relinquish all claims against the BnL corporation …

Buy n Large mission statement

I’m not going to quote the mission statement; go and read it for yourself by clicking on the image. Better yet, go and visit the site itself – read the privacy statement while you’re there.

If I were reviewing this site for real, I’d recommend using fewer stock images, though here they’re part of the joke.

Buy n Large news

The news section is laid out with different sections for the different audiences, and all the news releases are there. I think it unlikely that a corporate site would have so many adverts on their media page – even if they were for corporate products. But the adverts all work, in that they load further pages with product detail on.

As a spoof site, this is fabulous, and I’m already looking forward to the film. As a real corporate site, I’d have a few concerns … but who’s to say what the great corporate sites will look like in another 50 years?

My prediction is that they’ll be much more interactive (by whatever means will be available then) and customised for the visitor. This has no interactive features, and that would be my main recommendation, were it a real site.

What do you make of it?

Are you looking in the right place for recruits?

David Wilson at Social Media Optimisation points to a very interesting article in the India Times. In this article, HCL Technologies estimate that over the next two years, two thirds of their recruits will come from social media.

2/3 of recruits will come from social media

We all know that these days recruiters are quite likely to Google recruits … and that this could come up with their dodgy Facebook profile, or the inappropriate comments that they made on a forum. A few companies set up areas in Second Life to help with recruiting; others establish forums and live chat on their own sites.
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