Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

TNT: third party comments available

TNT in the news

Are you confident that all the news published about your company is good news – or, at least, that there aren’t going to be any unpleasant surprises?

TNT display confidence in themselves as they publish reports written by external sources about themselves on their own site.

Provision of this kind of third party news and comment about a company can be a useful source of information for both investors and other journalists, and certainly makes their research easier.

TNT will naturally review all mentions of themselves in the newspapers and other journals, and I trust that there is no veto on publishing critical third party news articles on the TNT site.

Just as important as reviewing the newspapers and financial journals for mention of your company is review of what is being said online. Does your company have someone who monitors what bloggers and other online commentators are saying? Did you pick up this post through a Google Alert?

Please contact me if you would like more information on how best to monitor what is being reported about your company online.

Share charts in accessible formats

Why not provide your share charts for investors in accessible formats?
Halfords accessible share charts
Halfords provide large font charts, and charts for people who are colour blind. Given that many investors must need charts of this nature, this seems like a good and helpful service.

I notice that Serco, who used to be among my favourite examples of companies who did this, because they even included an option for a chart accessible to voice browsers, have now removed all these accessible charting options. I wonder why?

Serco - old share charts
Serco’s accessible charting, dated six or so months ago.
Serco - new share charts
The same page today.

Investor information available anywhere

aviva pda/mobile browser

Increasingly, listed companies are providing their share price and news available to people on their desktop, PDA or mobile.

This means that investors and journalists can find out the latest information without necessarily being tied to their computer. Aviva have had this service available for a while now – as have some others.

Reckitt Benckiser trackerAs a rather different approach, Reckitt Benckiser offer a desktop share price tracker on their corporate home page. This stays on the desktop when the original window closes, and updates periodically when the share price changes. So you could move on with the day’s tasks, without having to return to the mother site.

Fuzzy Search: Corporate Use

Yell: fuzzy search

You will have noticed that Google asks whether you really meant to search for “Your Search Term”, and suggests that perhaps you meant “A Different Search Term” instead. This is, of course, because people get the spelling wrong, or only know part of the term they are looking for. And, of course, different companies can use different terminology for the same thing.

People searching on your corporate site are just as likely to get things wrong as people using Google. Perhaps they search for ‘jobs’, when everything on your site is called ‘job openings’, or for ‘AGM’ when you’ve called these annual events ‘Shareholder Meetings’, and then leave, frustrated, when they don’t find what they want.

This fuzzy search option at Yell is an interesting solution to the problem of visitors not knowing what to search for. It is the only place I have spotted a fuzzy search on a corporate site.

If you’ve seen any others, do please let me know.