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On harsh truths and the corporate website

Did you see 10 harsh truths about corporate websites?

It’s a great post by Paul Boag about some of the issues faced by people responsible for the corporate website in large organisations, and much of it had me nodding in agreement. If you saw it, I expect you had the same response. If you haven’t read it yet, go and do that now. I’ll wait here …

Back with me?

Here, in summary, are Paul’s 10 Harsh Truths:

  1. You need a separate web division
  2. Managing your website is a fulltime job
  3. Periodic redesign is not enough
  4. Your website cannot appeal to everyone
  5. You are wasting money on social networking
  6. Your website is not all about you
  7. You’re not getting enough value from your web team
  8. Design by committee brings death
  9. A CMS is not a silver bullet
  10. You have too much content.

Did you agree with all of those? I wonder if we agreed with the same things? Either way, it is a post likely to generate strong opinions.

I want to look at two of his 10 Truths today.

Truth #3: Periodic Redesign is Not Enough

putting it together

He argues that corporate websites go through a cycle of build:gradual deterioration:redesign, with the result that every few years the company faces a significant expense, and that it would be better to go for continual investment and a gradual evolution.

And to a large extent, I agree.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could identify those relatively low-cost changes which would improve your website significantly, without having to undergo a full-on redesign? The 80:20 rule works in most cases …

On the other hand, sometimes a site has had so many incremental changes – an extra tool here, additional pages there, a whole section bolted on the side – that it has become unwieldy and needs to be stripped down and rebuilt. Just sometimes, a redesign is exactly what is needed. Either for technical reasons or for business ones: perhaps the company is rebranding, or is launching a new strategy; perhaps they’ve merged or sold off a chunk of the business. The site should serve the needs of the business, and if the business is being redesigned, so too should the site be.

However, I agree that periodic redesign isn’t enough – between these rebuilds, there should be a process of continual improvement and evolution, as the needs of the business change and new best practices in corporate communications emerge.

Truth #4: Your Website Cannot Appeal to Everyone

Swiss Army Knife

The target audience too often includes a long, detailed list of diverse people … and that the website should be primarily aimed at a clearly defined audience.

Unfortunately, for the corporate website, the prospective audience just is diverse.

For a retail site, you can say that the audience is – for example – teenage girls (or buyers for the teenage girls, usually their mothers). The corporate site, however, has as its primary audience a mix of:

  • investors (potential and current; professional, with thousands of shares, and retail, with a handful of shares)
  • analysts (investment and social responsibility)
  • journalists (mainstream media – broadcasting and print – and the new media)
  • job-seekers (from top to bottom of the organisation, from the inexperienced to the non-executive director, the short-term contractor to the full-time careerist)
  • suppliers (of a whole range of products, services and people)
  • business partners (current and prospective)
  • customers (browsers, purchasers, those seeking support)
  • employees (current and – sometimes – alumni).

And it has to provide information for most of those people most of the time, as well as provide additional information, perhaps about corporate governance and compliance, about its social responsibility actions, or about its subsidiary businesses, or mergers and acquisitions – even corporate messages in times of crisis.

This potential audience can be reduced, though why would you want to? How else are you going to communicate with all these different people?

Do you really want to reduce the breadth of your target audience?

There are ways of reducing the diversity of the audience; companies take different approaches to this, and this will vary by the business strategy of the company.

  • Sometimes a company tries to meld its retail and corporate site together, and in that case usually the customer is seen as the primary audience, and the corporate information is hidden behind an About Us link. Others don’t address customers at all.
  • Some companies don’t address suppliers on their site; most don’t address their employees. Some don’t even put information for job-seekers on their corporate sites.
  • For some, business partners are all but irrelevant; for others, partnering is a significant part of the business strategy, and spelt out in full on the site.

And so the size of the potential audience can be reduced a bit, possibly, and even when you’ve done that, there still remains a wide range of interest groups, which as an absolute minimum includes investors and the media, each of which is a widely diverse group in itself. A financial print journalist may not be interested in the same material as a feature journalist or a broadcast journalist; and print journalists are not necessarily interested in the same information as a small-scale shareholder.

Is providing information for investors and journalists really more important than for the other stakeholders in the company? And scaling down the target audience in this way doesn’t take into account the required information that a company must provide on its site.

So what should those responsible for the corporate website do?

Authorised

It is very difficult to say which of this assortment of interest groups should be seen as the target audience; and that is why the corporate website is almost always broken down into silos, with a section for each interest area.

That way each section can be targeted to the interests of that group, providing them with the information that they need quickly, and providing easy access for them to find information elsewhere on the site if needed.

Even so, the overall site should be consistent in appearance and message, so that the brand and strategic message of the company is conveyed effectively across the whole site.

And that brings us to an issue touched on tangentially in the list of Harsh Truths: branding, and the debate over who gets a stake in the home page territory. Prime real-estate up for grabs – and of course everyone wants a share. Imagine the committee meetings in a Harsh Truth company to decide how many pixels each should be able to fill with content … and imagine the confusion on the home page if each division were allowed to fill their 250px*250px with whatever seemed best to them.

This is where Paul’s suggestion of a Web Division with adequate resource, experience and responsibility, led by an experienced manager with real control is interesting, and brings together a number of the Harsh Truths, particularly #1. Someone has to be in charge.

But who has control of the message? Who matches up the web strategy with the corporate strategy?

None of this is easy, and leads us to Harsh Truth #11: the corporate website is more difficult to manage than you’d think.

Which Social Media Platform is Right For Your Business?

Is it Twitter? Facebook? What about MySpace or Plaxo? It’s hard to say that one, (if only one and if any ONE) is right to use for your business. Why? Because every business is different and every business owner is different. Deciding what works well with your business is relative, again, to the business.

Social media marketing is a hot topic these days for most all businesses. Showcasing your wares and services is pretty exciting on some sites, and if it is properly strategized, can go beyond what seems like “work” and can be a lot of fun. A lot of blogger journalists are finding that having a voice in the blog-o-sphere empowers them and can make an impact with readers.  Corporate businesses often hire bloggers to write in a marketing style voice that will attract readers to their site(s) by providing rich, relevant content.

Social sites help businesses and individuals get “discovered.” A lot of the conversations and groups that exist on these platforms are useless or in pursuit of spam action, however, quality leads are the goal of the serious user. Many of the platforms also have a somewhat detailed registration and maintenance landing page, often discouraging spammers from signing up. But, ignoring the spam clutter and useless requests, there are users and companies who take the sites very seriously and work hard to build solid networks.  

Twitter is by far one of my favorite networking sites and can be a powerful networking tool. It’s designed as a micro-blogging tool to give quick, dense updates on news and developments within your niche area, on anything. How can businesses benefit from the Twitter site? One idea is to post links to good, quality content on your site or other sites to share with your followers. If you provide good content and good links, half of your marketing job is done. Take great care to provide good links and good information since most of Twitter readers are limited on time (who isn’t?) and really don’t want to waste their time.

At one time, I really thought that Facebook was for social networking for friends and light acquaintances only. How wrong was I? Since I’ve been on Facebook, I’ve made some very good connections and am poised to present to a local business organization as a result of it. More than just “hi, how are you”, Facebook is a powerful platform for finding those that niche with you. In other words, you can network and build networks of people and companies who embrace the same things that you do, have the same business goals that you do and are in pursuit of the same types of business developments that you are.

LinkedIn is another professional platform tool that your business can use to really expand and make an impact in the online world. Connections are the term that LinkedIn uses to qualify their members, and members can request to be in a network or to request to have someone of interest join their network. LinkedIn has a process design that is quite sophisticated and removes most of the spam that can clog up a site. They require members to take the time to flesh out their profiles and to be a thorough as possible in order to make good connections. Herein is the key. Good connections are essential to the LinkedIn member’s success, and with careful implementation, can be quite profitable for the member.

So which platform is right for your business? How do you know if it’s right for your business? Mack Collier at SearchEngineGuide.com wrote this post about deciding just that. I didn’t really agree with everything that he had to say, but that is my point. Without the platforms to voice opinions and ideas, there would be many boring blog reads! However, knowing where and in which direction you’d like to take the media contacts is important in determining in which direction you will go.

The goal of any writer is to provide information to the reader. If you are an individual business owner or building a business, you would undoubtedly benefit from these three and from the numerous many more. If you are a corporate entity or manage one, again, they could all benefit you. There really is no magic or special formula when it comes to social media networking. It works when it worked right and it doesn’t work when it’s not worked right. Period. Use social media platforms in your business, no matter what the business is and what the platform is. A lot of people may not agree with me on this, but customers, readers, contributors or whatever they’re pegged do not classify themselves as one or the other. Treat them as buyers and act like they’re buyers. When you do this, you reap the rewards of having addressed buyers. Why should there be any less?

Which platform does your business use? Is one really better than the other or more effective than the other? What do you think?

ExxonMobil: reflecting on industry issues

You’ll have seen the news over the weekend that ExxonMobil have called for a carbon tax to tackle global warming … interesting, isn’t it?

So what changes have they made on the website to reflect this change of heart?

ExxonMobil

Impressively, there are not one but two items about this on the site home page – a press release, and a direct link to the speech transcript in the focus area at the top of the page. This demonstrates the importance of this news, both to the company itself, and to the wider community.

We believe that corporate websites should be reflecting the issues that are facing us at the moment:

  • demonstrating that the company is considering the issues
  • and mirroring the issues, refracted through the different stakeholder areas, to communicate with the people affected by those issues.

This speech (and speedy update of the website) demonstrates that ExxonMobil are deeply considering the best way forward in the current global warming crisis. Whether or not you agree with their strategy, it can’t be denied that they are thinking about it, and are prepared to change their minds in the light of new information.

And from our point of view, the high profile placement of this on the corporate website – and the speed with which it was done – is exactly right, indicating the importance that ExxonMobil place on this issue, and keeping all stakeholders informed.

Philip Morris

Another corporate website that has expertly handled a significant change in the industry is the Philip Morris site. We all know about the difficulties the tobacco industry has faced over the last few decades, yet the Philip Morris site faces these difficulties squarely. Their home page is almost completely devoted to information about health issues, stopping smoking, persuading children not to smoke, and the Settlement Agreement.

Granted, this isn’t a site that needs to include investor relations, say, as that is handled by the parent company, Altria, but nevertheless, Philip Morris are working hard to provide positive messages about their product and their approach to the industry issues.

Yet, on visiting some corporate websites, you might get the impression that the major issues affecting – say – the economic climate are imaginary, or at least that the company is not willing to discuss them. Why not? You know that the visitors to your website will be thinking about them, and wondering how you are affected …

SEC Interpretive Release Part 2 – Antifraud

One of the SEC positions taken in 2000 when they addressed company web sites was that companies are responsible for the accuracy of statements made on their websites that could reasonably be expected to reach investors or securities markets.  This in turn makes statements made on a company’s website subject to antifraud provisions of federal securities laws.  Noted specifically is Exchange Act Section 10(b) which prohibits making material misstatements and omissions of fact.

The Good News

In the 2000 Electronics Release, the SEC noted possible liability arising from accessing previously posted material on a company’s web site.  The SEC notes that “some companies” continue to be concerned about whether or not previously posted materials that are accessed later by web site users would be considered “republished”.  In 2005, the SEC addressed this issue, but only in the context of registered offerings under the Securities Act.  Now, it seems, the SEC is ready to put this issue to bed.

The Interpretive Release states that the SEC does not believe that “companies maintaining previously posted materials or statements on their web sites are reissuing or republishing such materials or information for purposes of the antifraud provisions of federal securities laws just because the materials or statements remain accessible to the public.”

Yippee!  A straight answer!  Maintaining historical materials on a company website is not considered republishing.  There is a catch, however.  In circumstances where it is not apparent to a reasonable person that materials are from an earlier date then things might be different.  So, previously posted materials should be identified as historical by dating them.  Most companies tend to do this already.  But, also, the SEC recommends that such materials be “Located in a separate section of the company’s web site containing previously posted materials or statements.”

Investor Relations Web Site Best Practices

Not all companies were taking the hard line approach discussed by the SEC in regards to posting historical materials on their web sites, but none the less, the elements contained within the Interpretive Release give some guidance as to how the IR portion of the web site should be constructed.

In addition to the items outlined from the first section of the release, we have two new items to add to the best practices list.

First, all items should be dated.  For the most part, all official materials are already dated.  However, by making a date a requirement for anything posted to the IR pages, a company can ensure continued compliance particularly with materials that are “current” today, but will be “historical” sometime in the future.  An existing date when the material is first published eliminates the possibility that materials will inadvertently be archived without a date later.

Second, all historical or archived materials should be kept in a separate area.  Though not explicitly stated, a separate page with a large “ARCHIVE” or “HISTORICAL” heading across the top will be a great way to prevent any “reasonable person” from being unable to distinguish between new and old materials.

Chances are most IR web sites are at least somewhat on board with these issues already, but for those that aren’t, your reason to make some changes has arrived.

Must Visit Business Information Sites

Anyone who uses the Internet for research knows that there is lots of fluff in search results. However there are some real gems and I’d like to share a few.

The first is ManyWorlds

Topics include the full spectrum of business issues — planning, marketing, organization issues and more. The content is delivered in a variety of formats — whitepapers, presentations, tools, blogs and articles.

Some example topics, “Where is advertising going?”, “When benchmarks don’t work.” To obtain full access registration is needed, but well worth it.

Here is another great site ChangeThis–” We’re on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds.”

Here is a sample of topics —

  • How can you tap the transformational power of the truth? How can you use it to turn ordinary relationships into extraordinary ones?
  • Business Improvisation: The Diving Catch of the Corporate World
  • People Don’t Hate Change, They Hate How You’re Trying to Change Them
  • Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 Marketing Lessons from the Cast of the Show About Nothing

How can you resist a visit? There is a wide range of subject areas. Definitely unique and thought provoking. No registration, but you can sign up for news updates.

Here are a few more —

Need Marketing Information try the MarketingTeacher covers just about anything about Marketing including Bowman’s Strategy Clock.

Another unique site is ConceptSpace from the London Business School. It is a visual search tool. Gives you basic information on virtually any business topic.

Finally this site is the KitchenSink of links to anything you need to know about business and more. It has many external links and spreadsheets and whitepapers to download.

Now you may get through the fluff and find what you need.

Piercing The Corporate Veil

Publicly traded companies are extremely careful about what information they release to the public. There is an obvious need to protect proprietary information. However there are a number of sites that help peer past the “corporate veil”. Yes, big companies like to show their good side, but some have misused the extensive power they have to do downright nasty deeds.

I just found a new site Glassdoor that permits employees and former employees to post comments about their companies. Registration is free and permits you to post your views.

You get top management ratings, salary information for positions in the company and company reviews. This is an unusual peek inside of the company. One caution there is always the possibility that disgruntled employees may do a dump. While I haven’t done an extensive analysis, the CEO ratings seem to be in line with the companies ratings on “Best Of” lists.

Another interesting site is Crocodyl.org (Collaborative Research On Corporations). Free registration is required. The input pool is larger than the Glassdoor, “Our aim is to stimulate collaborative research among NGOs, journalists, activists, whistleblowers and academics from both the global South and North in order to develop publicly-available profiles of the world’s most powerful corporations.”

The site has rich content and detailed reports on companies. It also has research tools and a whistleblower section. Another example of the Internet providing an information source for exposure of good and bad company practices.

Seems that the new David just got his cyber sling to battle with corporate Goliaths.