Corporate Eye

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Site Reviews

Sites For CEOs

Things have changed in the last 15 years. In the mid-1990s, I remember hearing about a CEO from a major company when he was getting briefed about the Internet, brought his secretary since he did not know how to use a keyboard. Now CEOs are necessarily technology savvy and are increasingly using the internet. A number of surveys confirm this.

Forbes magazine’s survey “Day In The Life of C-Level Executives” (2004) found –

Web Usage

  • The internet continues to be the most influential and important source of information on business for C-Level executives around the world.
  • The Web is a pervasive presence in the lives of C-level executives: 38 percent of C-level respondents said the Web is their single most important source for information on business. The next most prevalent source of information was daily newspapers by 26 percent of respondents.
  • Among large company executives, the reliance on the Web is even greater with 51 percent naming the Web is their most important business information resource, followed by newspapers at 22 percent.
  • C-level executive respondents also stated they are spending less time with other media, including newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and industry trade publications as a result of the time they spend online (not including email): 59 percent are spending less time with magazines, 50 percent say they are spending less time with newspapers, 48 percent less time with TV, 46 percent less time with radio and industry trade publications respectively.
  • 26 percent of large firm respondents said they are knowledgeable about Wi-Fi technology and they are reporting some current usage of the technology.

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Annual Reports: the new-look British Library

British Library annual reportBowen Craggs point out the great new approach that the British Library have taken to their annual report – the inclusion of video profiles of their executive team in the corporate governance section, discussing the Library. The chairman and chief executive have separate pages, each with several more video clips on. The video profiles for the management team all come with transcripts and biographies.
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Banks Demonstrate Casual Approach to Sustainability

HBOS Homepage

On 19th September 2008 I realised something rather profound … I’m now a Lloyds TSB customer. Both my wife and I have always had a Halifax account (although it’s not my main one) but I’ve always had an aversion to Lloyds TSB.

Now the two are coming together to create the UK’s first SuperBank. For no other reason than this I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon and make Banking, specifically Lloyds TSB and HBOS, the first of my FTSE 100 Website reviews. [Read more…] about Banks Demonstrate Casual Approach to Sustainability

Use Your Website to Promote Your Culture

Some of my posts touched on the importance of Corporate Cultures. Culture affects how employees behave. It also has an influence on how the company is perceived by external stakeholders. So making your Culture visible is imperative and an effective method is to simply use your website.

Some of the “Best Companies” lists published by magazines, consultants and other sources are useful sources of competitive intelligence to get started. However, “Best Company Cultures” ratings are virtually non-existent. I was able to find one in Canada. It is Waterstone Human Capital’s Canada‘s 10 Most Admired Corporate CulturesTM . The 2007 winners are —

1. WESTJET AIRLINES LTD. www.westjet.com
2. FOUR SEASONS HOTELS INC. www.fourseasons.com
3. BOSTON PIZZA INTERNATIONAL. www.bostonpizza.com
4. ROYAL BANK OF CANADA. www.royalbank.com
5. YELLOW PAGES GROUP CO. www.ypg.com
6. MAPLE LEAF FOODS INC. www.mapleleaf.ca
7. MANULIFE FINANCIAL CO. www.manulife.com
8. PUROLATOR COURIER LTD. www.purolator.com
9. TIM HORTONS INC. www.timhortons.com
10.TORONTO DOMINION BANK FINANCIAL GROUP www.td.com

Step one would be to visit the websites of the top rated companies to get some ideas on how to organize your Culture section. Visit the top company, WESTJET and you will see the essential ingredients –

You need to post a short description of the Culture statement, mission vision and values. You could stop here but anything that reinforces these items should be included.

If you visit Toyota Motors, a company that appears on various “Best Company” lists, you find a more glitzy and subtle approach. TOYOTA MOTORS

There are some issues with the Toyota approach, the essential ingredients not as explicit as WESTJET. You have to search to find any mention of culture. I finally found a culture statement buried in Environment Section . Toyota has a good story to tell, they just need to flaunt it.

The lesson learned is that if you want to display your Corporate Culture, keep it focused and make it easily visible.

Interesting Features in Investor Relations Websites

Palm, the company that more or less started the mainstream PDA movement, has an interesting little feature on their Investor Relations page called the “Shareholder Briefcase.”  It is nothing too complicated really, but a nice touch in the realm of user interaction.

The Shareholder Briefcase is a way for an investor or potential investor using the Palm IR site to collect several documents or files as they explore the information available and determine what they want to take with them to research further.  In many ways, it operates very similarly to the shopping cart feature on most e-commerce sites.

Of course, such a feature requires a user to register.  Actually, it doesn’t, it could easily be handled by cookies, but that wouldn’t work across multiple browsers or computers, and why pass up the chance to get an obviously interested person’s contact information?

Once registered, the user can navigate the IR portion of the site at their leisure.  When they find something that interests them, they just click the “Add to briefcase” icon. This keeps the user from having to click and open every PDF file, DOC file, or PowerPoint file they are interested in while they are on the site.  Instead, the user keeps a running list of what they have found of interest and then when they are ready, they can either download all the files, or even email all the files to themselves.

Either way, the users of the Palm investor relations web site have a great way to collect all that information and then go through it at their leisure instead of maybe skipping important information due to time constraints, or worse, forgetting a useful document that they wanted to review, but did not open initially.

Can something like this work for any Investor Relations page?  Yes.  The software to handle something like this already exists in many formats.  It may actually be possible to use your company’s existing shopping cart software with just a few modifications to handle functionality similar to this.

You can never go wrong giving the user another way to get what they need.

Banking For Everyone, Made In Heaven

Freddie Mercury Made In HeavenIf you’re of a certain age and plugged into social media, a certain milestone may not have escaped your notice during November: the 21st anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury.  A cracking excuse to get the old vinyls out an give them a spin .. or browse over to YouTube, whichever takes your fancy .. all the way from the original Queen album through to Made In Heaven.

Made In Heaven.  A practically unique album, in that it was released posthumously with much of the engineering work also being done after Freddie’s death.  You may have realised I’m something of a fan (“nut” has also been used) and I still have a little difficulty listening to the album.

Something I don’t have difficulty with though is the Spanish banking group Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, or BBVA for short.  Yes I know it’s a tenuous link but when I came across their CSR website, Banca Para Todas (Banking for Everyone), I really was mightily impressed by it.  It just so happens that I’m writing about it with Freddie very much in my thoughts… so there you go :)

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