Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 3: Share Price Information

Having established last time that a roadmap to the relevant investor information is essential on the main investor relations page, this piece will discuss one of investor relations more popular destinations – the share price page. You might think that this would be a simple enough thing to do – throw a graph of the share price up on the screen and let it go at that. But there is a lot more to it than that and companies that pay attention to this area can save their shareholders (particularly individual investors) quite a bit of frustration by thinking the site through.

The first thing to realize is that there are several distinct sets of information that investors are looking for when they visit your site for share price information. First, there is immediate information: what is the stock price doing now? Next, there is graphical information: what does the price chart look like? Third, there is historical information: what was the stock price on a certain date? I will be breaking down all of these parts in due course, but today I will be concentrating on immediate share price information.

There is a standard set of information that investors expect to see when looking at current price: last trade, open, high, low, change, volume and whether the information is real time or delayed. Below is a screen shot from the web site of ENI, the Italian energy company that does a good job setting out intraday information. Because ENI is traded on multiple markets, they also provide tabs to view the information for the particular market you may be interested in.

ENI-stock-price

Another good example comes from BT, the telecom company, and below is a screen shot of a portion of their page on share price information. Note that BT adds in the P/E ratio and the dividend yield as additional pieces of information on the stock. Further, BT also shows what the relevant index, the FTSE 100 did on the day in question, so you have a reference point, although if they are going to do that, they should include the percentage change for both their stock and the index rather that the pure price change in order to facilitate understanding of the stock price change relative to the index.

BT-share-price-information

Having established what the current trading in the stock is, companies should then move on to placing the stock price in historical context by the use of price chart graphs. In addition to the basics, there are many interesting things companies can do to help investors and I’ll be covering some of them next time.

In this series:
Previous post: Provide a Roadmap
Next post: Share price charts

Stop Trying To Hold Back The Ocean

Ever wondered if you’re truly making the most of the resources available to you?

I recently invited Zack Grossbart, who is expert in telecommuting and works with high-tech companies to help them create strong teams that span continents (see The One Minute Commute) to write a post for us.

zack grossbartZack has been working with and coaching remote teams at organizations like JP Morgan, 3M, Nortel, Hewlett Packard, and the United States Navy since 2001. He has served as a consultant to numerous Fortune 500 companies and is a consulting engineer for the Novell Compliance Management Platform.

Zack began loading DOS from a floppy disk when he was five years old. He began working professionally with computers when he was 15 and started his first software company when he was 16. He has also been an IT administrator and a member of an advertising firm. Zack lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about a mile from Harvard University.

Over to you Zack…

Stop Trying To Hold Back The Ocean: Harness The Writing Talent In Your Company

In the old days the marketing department was the public face of your company. Your sales team talked to customers, your channel team talked to partners, and your marketing department talked to everyone. Marketing departments were judged by their ability to control the message and stop leaks.

water overflowing dam

The perfect example of the old way is Apple’s marketing department. They released what they wanted when they wanted and not before. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod reporters had been lured into the room with only the knowledge that Apple was releasing something and it wasn’t a computer. Today even Apple is springing leaks.

Companies all over are trying to plug up the little leaks in their corporate messaging while the roaring ocean of Twitter, Facebook, and personal blogs overwhelms them. They need to stop holding back the leaks and start seeing the world differently.

A few facts

Fact 1. You have writers in places you’ve never looked. Bob from Accounting has a blog about model trains. Sherry from Engineering manages a community of scrap-bookers. Your company is full of writers.

Fact 2. Bob and Sherry are scared to write about your company. There have been too many bad stories about employees who were sacked for complaining about their jobs online. Most blogging tutorials advise you to never mention your company and most companies have strict rules about it.

Fact 3. Bob and Sherry are passionate about their jobs. They work hard, know your products inside and out, and like them enough to keep working to make them better.

Put these three facts together and you have people who want to write about your company and can’t do it.

Stop plugging the leaks and build a dam

You can’t stop the ocean. Your people will keep writing so direct them. Your marketing department must change from being the sole providers of content to mentoring other writers. Focus the power of those writers like water through a dam.

Step 1. Find your writers. Ask around the office and see who has a blog. Use Google to search for your employees and see what they’re saying online. Look for the ones who write consistently and well.

Step 2. Create a place for them to write. You might create a single corporate blog, an employee blog section, or just organize their existing blogs.

Step 3. Guide your writers. Pair them up with someone from your marketing department who can guide them about what content you want and help them review and edit their work.

Step 4. Enable them. Google famously gave everyone 10 percent of their time to work on special projects. Give your writers four hours a week to write.

Step 5. Incent them. By the word, by the article, or on a bonus plan, pay your writers for doing the extra work.

Step 6. Get out of the way. Move roadblocks out of your writers’ way. If the legal department needs to review everything then take care of it for your writers. Make it easy for them to write.

Harness your ocean of writers to generate market power for your company. Let them talk about you, show your customers what an exciting company you are and where you need to improve. Your people really are passionate about your company, and passion sells.

Thanks Zack!

Naming standards and the FTSE100

So what do you think is the best term to describe businesses behaving responsibly within their various networks and communities? (See, its difficult even to describe without prejudging or loading the scales, and almost impossible without using the word ‘stakeholder‘).

Fabian Pattberg recently ran a poll, asking which of the following would be the best term to describe this:

  • Corporate Responsibility
  • Corporate Social Responsibility
  • Sustainability
  • Accountability
  • Corporate Citizenship
  • Corporate Sustainability
  • Responsible Governance
  • Sustainable Responsible Business
  • Corporate Social Performance
  • Others – Ethical Business / Business Ethics, Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, Sustainable Business Culture, ESG (Environment, Social and Government), Business Ethics, Responsible Business.

On closing the poll, the most preferred term was Corporate Responsibility, with 21% of the votes, though as you can see it was a very close-run thing, with four main contenders and Sustainability coming a strong fifth.

fabian-pattberg-poll

(image snagged from FabianPattberg.com)

Now, when we started the Corporate Eye blog, we were unsure what to call this category of posts. We went for Corporate Social Responsibility – CSR for short – because that seemed to be what most companies were calling it, but at the time some on the team were arguing for Sustainability as a title.

But over the summer Chris MacDonald ran a series of posts on Business Ethics arguing against each of the elements of ‘CSR’ in turn. In summary:

CSR “isn’t (just) about corporations, isn’t just about social questions, and it isn’t just about responsibilities”.

So: what to call it?

This is where I confess that my vote in the Pattberg poll went to Responsible Governance, because I think it’s important that Responsibility – or whatever you care to call it – is embedded within the management and strategy of the company. (More on this another day). Clearly nobody else agreed with me, and it isn’t a term I’ve ever seen used in the wild.

So I reviewed the current FTSE 100 corporate websites, to see what was actually going on out there, and found that most companies – by a long way – are calling this section ‘Corporate Responsibility’ (no ‘social’). There are a few unusual cases, as you’d expect: companies that try to find a uniquely tailored title, or companies that don’t have a dedicated section to cover all ‘CSR’ topics, but choose to have separate sections such as Environment and Society.

But overall, the picture is clear:

ftse100-names

Perhaps this isn’t surprising; standardising the names of sections on corporate websites makes it easy for the visitor to find what they’re looking for. What is interesting, though, is the difference between what the FTSE100 companies are actually using, and what the people taking the Pattberg poll thought. The poll results were much more evenly spread among the four front-runners, which aren’t the same as the four front-runners of the FTSE100 usage.

Possibly this comes down to a difference in what terminology people use in speaking or writing about a topic day to day, and what terms people expect to see on a corporate website.

But it is difficult to choose a term that doesn’t carry unintended baggage, because all those phrases mean something slightly different. I think this is why we see FTSE100 companies tending to adopt the same term, so it is easily recognisable by visitors, but people working within that sector will use the term that means the most to them. The corporate term will tend to become bland and inoffensive, and may lose its specificity because of being stretched in many different directions; individuals will use – and will argue vehemently for – the terms that mean exactly what those people want to convey, because the terminology matters.

So, given that we aim to parallel the corporate site, should we change to ‘Corporate Responsibility’ to follow the majority? Or – being pragmatic – to ‘Responsibility’ because it is short, and will fit well on one line in our navigation? I’ll accept that Responsible Governance doesn’t mean enough to enough people to be a sensible choice.

What do you call this on your website?

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 2: Provide a Roadmap

Having started with the premise that an effective investor web site should give a clear and concise description of what your company does, the next logical thing to do is to provide an easy-to-use roadmap of where the relevant information lies. Most companies choose a format that places a column of links or tabs in either the upper left or right hand side of the main investor relations page. Set forth below is an example of this type of layout as used by Standard Life.

Standard Life investor relations

In looking at a number of websites, I could discern no standard list of what linked sections appear or in what order they are listed. Given that the objective is to enable investors to get the information they need quickly with a minimum of hunting, I would suggest that effective websites think in terms of priorities.

First, certain things are essential to investor relations and an understanding of the company and therefore access to your share price, financial statements annual and interim reports and press releases should be considered a first priority and go to the top of the list.

Of next importance are more discretionary disclosures such as investor presentations, Webcasts, upcoming investor events and the company’s financial calendar. Links that help answer questions for specific groups of investors, such as debt holders or information for individual shareholders administrative items are the next priority that should be included.

Finally, depending on the inclination of the company, the composition of its investor base, and a myriad of other factors, there are links to more specialized information that may prove helpful, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (often seen as a section on its own), corporate governance (also often seen as a separate section), links to the Annual General Meeting materials, and, in the United States, links to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Because the subject headings are not uniform and information is often buried two or three links deep, I am a proponent of the use of popup menus as you scroll over the list of links. This enables a visitor to quickly see where information has been placed. It also helps avoid the back and forth hunting for information and waiting for web pages to load that often happens when you click on a promising heading only to find that it doesn’t lead to the information you want. It turns out, that on the web, as in life, you can’t tell a link by its cover.

In this series:
Previous post: What does the company do?
Next post: Share price information

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? (Part 1)

At the suggestion of our Executive Editor, today’s entry marks the first in a series of interrelated pieces examining what makes for good corporate investor relations web sites. The intention is to try and lay out a template for companies to think about as they communicate with their investors via the Internet by highlighting good examples from across the web.

compass group investor relations page

It’s always best to start with the basics, and for investors that means giving them a clear understanding of what it is your company does. It is surprising how many companies omit this first step, perhaps working on the assumption that because a person has made it to the investor page, they know what the company does. However, this overlooks several factors. When an investor does a search on a company name, many search engines show a link directly to the investor relations page of the company, bypassing the company’s home page and all of the explanatory information that resides there. Second, people coming to the investor page may be familiar with the brand name of a company, but not fully understand the entire range of products or markets the company serves. Finally, truly savvy investors will peruse a statement to get an understanding of how the company thinks about itself.

What I look for is fairly straightforward: simple declarative sentences, devoid of consultant-speak, which accurately portray the company and its markets. It doesn’t have to be too lengthy or detailed as there is certain to be much information elsewhere on the site, but it should give a clear and concise picture of the company. This is often harder to do than it appears, as many companies have evolved into complex entities in disparate markets, but with careful thought diligence and editing, it can be done.

For example, I found the Compass Group did an effective job on their Investor Centre Homepage:

“Compass Group is the world’s leading foodservice company. Our 388,000 employees specialise in providing food, vending and related services on our clients’ premises and we generate annual revenues of over £11 billion.  The company operates across the following core sectors of Business and Industry (B&I), Defence, Offshore & Remote Site, Healthcare, Education, Sports & Leisure and Vending with an established brand portfolio.”

In three short sentences, Compass Group has told us the industry they are in, how large they are in terms of sales and employees, their market position and the industry sectors they serve. Further, you get the impression that they are efficient and direct in the way they think about things. That’s a pretty good introduction to their investors.

Next post in this series: Provide a Roadmap

Scare Tactics? Debating the “Perils” of Social Media Recruitment

Workforce

Workforce Management has come up with another surprising article.  (The first one was discussed here recently in Cut on the Bias.)  And this time, the fur is flying.

The article is Discriminatory Twist in Networking Sites Puts Recruiters in Peril.  If the title seems a bit melodramatic—it really doesn’t hold a candle to the contents.  Highlights:

  • “Sourcing from professional network sites such as LinkedIn carries a risk that the method could be challenged on discrimination grounds,” says Pamela Devata, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago. “It represents a hiring pool that is not open to the general population.”
  • “Networking sites, including Twitter, exclude whole populations,” says Jessica Roe, managing partner at Bernick, Lifson, Greenstein, Greene & Liszt in Minneapolis.  “The social networks represent limited social groups and very small labor pools. It’s an enormous issue.”
  • Paul Mollica, partner at Meites, Mulder, Mollica & Glink in Chicago, has another warning for heavy users of networking sites:  “When the OFCCP [Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs] or plaintiffs’ attorneys come along with a discovery request and want to see the trail for recruiting, these employers are going to come up short,” he contends, because “the records are in a digital mist.”

And it’s not over when the sourcing is done.  In the selection phase, “using social networks to screen candidates generates additional legal risks,” according to the article.  Explains Mollica,“the risk is that visiting Facebook or MySpace pages or even Googling candidates may reveal information that no employer should have in a properly constructed application or interview.”

There are even more perils to be feared, such as the dangers of changing job descriptions and laying off people who were “hired into bad positions.”  But if you want to be thoroughly warned, read the whole article.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at the blowback.  Commenters are mixed in their responses—but one of them (solubrious1) offers this heartfelt response:  “Stop freaking out about pretend legal issues when the real issue is workforce design, the concept of ‘permanent’ work, and the decisions made by political and business leaders (many who also do not use Twitter and Facebook) to de-value Human Resources in the core mission and vision of their organization.”

Meanwhile, one of Workforce Management’s featured blogs (Fistful of Talent) takes aim at the “Discriminatory Twist” article and lets loose with a full-scale rant:  Hey Employment Law “Experts”, You’re Killing My Profession . . .

Worth reading, including the comments.  Choice quote:  “Oh, I forgot.  You only care about promoting your little section of the world, which is risk management from a legal perspective.  In the meantime, you scare, intimidate and generally freeze the average HR person from adopting tools that can help them do their jobs better . . . “

What’s the relevance of all this for the corporate Careers site?  I suspect that similar concerns come up in the context of using social media and blogs as part of employer branding and online recruiting.  The problem is (for all concerned) that Genie has left the bottle, and won’t be going back in.

So the inevitable outcome is “a period of adjustment.”  Those are never fun.