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Mind mapping website data

Sometimes the simplest things in life are so darned simple it’s like running full tilt into a brick wall.

Take data presentation for example.

In the brave new world of data journalism, I spend much of my life digging around in corporate websites trying to put together facts and figures.  Usually I don’t care about the surrounding story: just nice articulated figures.

Like carbon emissions: how many plants does a manufacturer have and what are their respective emissions?  Or, supposing I was into IR, what are the business’ product lines and their respective turnover and net profit?

It’s not that the figures are hidden or even deliberately obscured.  It’s just that getting hold of them quickly and easily is like throwing yourself at the ground and expecting to miss: impossible.

Then I stumbled upon a site which made it all so wonderfully simple using one of the simplest of tools around: mindmaps.

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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 31: Annual General Meetings

Companies are of two minds about Annual General Meetings of Shareholders; some view them as a necessary evil to be dispensed with as quickly and with as little fanfare as possible; others see it as an opportunity to reach out to their owners and present the Board and management in the best possible light while giving the shareholders a good overview of the company and its goals. If your company is in the first camp, you can stop reading now, because unless you have a compelling Annual General Meeting, simply placing it on your investor web site won’t gain you much.

MSFT Annual Meeting

On the other hand, if your Annual Meeting has a high information quotient, it makes sense to place a video of it on your web site where investors that were unable to attend can view the information presented. Any number of companies now place videos of their entire meeting on their web sites. Microsoft, the computer software company, is one that does just that.

While you can put the entire meeting up on the web site, you don’t really need to.

BASF annual mtg

Annual Meetings break down into three basic segments: the business meeting (the boring stuff), management’s presentation (the interesting stuff) and shareholder questions and answers (the stuff that can be anything, from the banal to the insightful).

Obviously, what investors want to see is the interesting stuff, where management reviews the past year and discusses their outlook for the upcoming year. BASF, the German chemical company, handles the differing parts of the annual meeting in an interesting way. As can be seen in the screen shot, the business part of their meeting is presented in written documents, while their CEO’s speech and accompanying slides are available in video format. (In the case of BASF, I could find no record of any shareholder questions at the meeting.)

However you choose to divide up and present the annual meeting, you should consider placing a video of it in the investor section of your web site. Chances are it contains information investors will find valuable.

In this series:
Previous post: Glossary
Next post: Governance

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 29: History Provides Context

Although sometimes not within the investor relations area of a company’s website, a section on the company’s history can help investors understand the company better by providing insights into a company’s culture and past. Many large capitalization companies have been around for quite a few years, and as a result, have gone through a number of permutations, either with respect to the products they offer, the markets they serve or as a result of mergers and acquisitions.

Take, for example Rolls-Royce. The image that immediately comes to mind when the name is mentioned is that of a luxury automobile. Yet the company has not produced automobiles in quite a long time. This is where their company website proves quite helpful in understanding how they got to be a producer of engines and power systems, by providing a history timeline that goes back over 100 years. This allows you to step through in chronological order and understand when Rolls-Royce entered and exited major portions of their businesses. Doing so lets you start to understand the company and its emphasis on engineering better.

Rolls-Royce timeline

Another good example of a company that provides background to help people understand its long history is Imperial Tobacco. Although the modern predecessor of the current company was founded in 1901, the roots of the business go all the way back to 1786. Much has occurred since then, and the company provides a section on its history that gives you an appreciation of how it came into being.

Imperial Tobacco history

I would be the first to admit that this type of information resides in the “nice to have” category rather than being absolutely critical to making a decision as an investor, however, culture and context are important in how companies operate. The more companies can provide investors with such insights into the company, the better investors can make informed decisions.

In this series:
Previous post: Analysts
Next post: Language

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 32: Governance

boundariesIt’s hard to know where the boundary of investor relations activities ends and that of corporate governance starts up. Many of the things each area is concerned with tend to overlap. It is the investors (shareholders) who vote upon management that runs the company and major decisions such as mergers and changes to a company’s charter documents. If for no other reason than good public relations, corporations wish to appear to be sensitive and responsive to shareholder concerns about how the company is governed.

Yet when you are in the trenches of day-to-day investor relations, it is hard to find analysts that get very concerned about corporate governance. The vast bulk of investor relations activities are concerned with what the company has recently done to impact earnings, cash flow and the balance sheet and what the company plans to do in the future to affect those items. Governance is almost never brought up by institutional analysts unless there is a major vote pending. Even then it is more likely that the company will initiate the conversation about governance, seeking to understand investors thinking on the subject so as to avoid the embarrassment of losing a vote.

What all this means in the context of investor relations web sites is that the information of governance should be readily at hand, but not necessarily cluttering up your main IR site where everyday information is the stock in trade. In the past ten years most companies have created separate governance sections on their websites, covering everything from the composition of the Board to Articles of Association. These sections can be quite extensive and it makes sense to have them in a separate section. But it also makes sense to make them easy for investors to find without wandering all over the main site in search of them. The best way to do this is simply to create a link on the investor relations home page (and other relevant pages within the IR section) back to the governance section.

Vodafone, the telecoms company, does a nice job of executing this strategy. When you first arrive at their investor relations section, scrolling over the top banner causes a drop down menu to appear, as shown below, giving the reader the opportunity to go to the governance section, if that is their need.

Vodafone investor page

Clicking on the link brings investors to Vodafone’s extensive governance section, shown below, and saves them the hassle of trying to figure out whether Governance is listed under sections with different names such as “About Us” “The Company” or some obscure tab. It may be a small thing, but when an investor is interested in your governance issues is not the time you want to annoy them by making the information hard to find.

Vodafone corporate governance

In this series:
Previous post: Annual General Meetings
Next post: Management

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 33: Introduce Management

One of the catch phrases from the Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was the question “Who are those guys?” asked by Butch to Sundance as they were being relentlessly pursued by lawmen following a train robbery. I bring this up not to prove that I am a fan of old movies (I do admit that I will watch almost anything with either Paul Newman or Robert Redford in it), but rather as a way to think about how shareholders may feel about the people running their company if some efforts are not made regarding management visibility.

Modern corporations are complex organizations and it is understandable that management should feel that it is the entity and not individuals that should garner the attention of investors. And to a degree, I think this is correct, as one does not want to cultivate the cult of the CEO as the be all and end all of the firm. Yet investors are people, and people relate to other people, not a faceless business entity. So some effort should be made to introduce management and the board to investors. Putting a name and face to the people in charge of running the enterprise is a simple thing that companies can do to help humanize the investing process.


Click to enlarge

One very simple approach to this is taken by Associated British Foods.

Accessible from a list of links on the left hand side of their main investor page is a link to “Key management biographies”, which takes you directly to a page, shown right, with the biographies of the Chief Executive, Finance Director and the Board of Directors.

Following the classical economics theory that “More is better”, my personal preference is for companies to show more of the management team than just the chief executive and the finance director. After all, a finance director usually doesn’t know much about marketing or sales.

I find that when companies offer an expanded list of management, they place the listing in a separate section, usually within the “About Us” section and labeled “Our People”. I don’t wish to seem dogmatic about investor pages being the center of the company’s website, so this approach is perfectly acceptable as well.


Click to enlarge

Set out right is an example of an “Our People” page from Marks and Spencer’s web site. Clicking on each individual brings up a short pop-up biography of the member of the management team, and it gives you a good sense of the experience underpinning the management of the company.

As a final thought, I think that a simple link on the investor main page to the Our People section would allow investors to quickly navigate there and to have an expanded list of management, although I have not seen this approach used.

In this series:
Previous post: Governance
Next post: Video

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 34: Video

I heard a startling statistic the other day; every minute, 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

When I tracked this down on the YouTube web site, I discovered that not only was the statistic correct, but that 2 billion videos a day are watched on YouTube. I confess to being shocked as I rarely look at a video uploaded to the web. This may be because I spend my day looking at financial web sites and not sites devoted to funny videos about pets. But it did spur me to thinking that perhaps the future of investor web sites should incorporate more video. There is a saying on Wall Street that “You need to feed the ducks” and what the ducks seem to enjoy these days is video.

So I went off in search of finance related videos on investor web sites that went beyond merely running a video camera during the annual meeting or the latest analyst presentation. It was somewhat like hunting for truffles in that I had to nose around a bit (I did not have to use a pig, however), but I managed to come up with a couple of interesting examples.

Dell uses video not only to have their chairman introduce things, but also to feature periodic interviews with management about a variety of topics ranging from quarterly results to business unit strategies.

The videos are usually posted on their investor relations blog, Dell Shares: this is a screen capture of their video featuring a discussion of their storage strategy.

Another company that does a good job with video material is SABMiller, the brewing company. I found that SABMiller had an extensive collection of videos, 147 in all, in the presentations section of their investor site. The subjects of the videos ranged from interim results discussions to interviews with the management team to analysis of the markets for their beers.

In fact, they have so many videos available that they separate them into topic for the viewer to browse, as you can see from the screen shot.

With the technologies and bandwidth available to investor web sites these days, it seems that more companies should be making information available in this manner.

In this series:
Previous post: Management
Next post: Acquisitions and Divestments

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