What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 22: Tell Investors When They Can Expect Things
July 29, 2010
Many years ago, I had a sell side analyst tell me, “One of the hallmarks of a well managed company is when you see they publish a calendar of earnings releases… and they stick to their dates”. This leads me to today’s thought on effective company investor relations sites: tell your investors what’s coming up on the calendar… and stick to those dates.
Investors need to know about certain dates, particularly as they relate to dividends, earnings statements and annual general meetings. A well-organized financial calendar will help them find things quickly and with a minimum of fuss. And it will cut down on the number of calls coming into the investor relations department from investors who are interested in those dates. Particularly individual investors concerned about when the dividend is payable. More particularly, retirees living on a fixed income who rely upon the dividends.
With respect to dividends, investors need to know the record date, the ex-dividend date and the payment date. Financial results should be released according to a schedule established before the start of the fiscal year. And just as obviously, the date for the Annual General Meeting should be established well in advance of the event and published on the calendar.
A good example of how to do this is the Financial Calendar placed on the Marks & Spencer web site.
This is not rocket science; it’s just good planning and the communication of that planning to those who need to know. Take it from someone who used to run an investor relations department for a company with a high percentage of individual investors in the days before the internet – a company can save itself a lot of pain and suffering having to do with volume of phone calls if they clearly place on their web site when they expect important, but routine, corporate actions to be taken.
Something to learn from BAE Systems?
July 28, 2010
In May this year BAE Systems launched their new website – a website dedicated to education. Aimed at fostering an interest in engineering from an early age, the site features a selection of fun online educational resources. These complement the ongoing activities that BAE Systems do in schools around the UK: road shows, school challenges and BAE Systems Ambassador visits.
The BAE Systems UK Education Programme website extends above and beyond the call of duty in recruitment, nurturing the next generation of engineers. In order to do this successfully, BAE Systems tailored the site to cater for the 5-8, 9-13 and 14+ age groups.
Taking advantage of interactive technology the site offers young people the chance to rate news stories, play games and watch videos to learn about the history of engineering. It adapts the BAE Systems corporate image to appeal to young people – trying to showcase its cool side. It also has educational material available for teachers to download.
BAE Systems previously offered games and educational materials but it wasn’t all together under one roof, so to speak, instead constituting a collection built up over time and spread out over different sites. The new site brings all this together in an accessible way; well-planned and easy to navigate. The new site mirrors the main corporate site in its layout but varies in its colour scheme – a slight tweak of image.
The games and multimedia section includes, amongst others, an addictive blockbuster game which requires you to answer science questions to make your way across the board. A recommendation could be to enhance this gaming experience by offering small postal rewards (key rings, model-building kits…) for successfully completing the games – providing an incentive to get involved and generating even more brand awareness.
Jumping on the education bandwagon is something that most corporations can do, as no matter what the industry is, surely there is a wealth of information on science, history and certainly business case studies that can be shared. Not only does this boost CSR credentials by giving a little back, but putting a familiar brand and snazzy website alongside learning can make it a lot more exciting for young people. Who else is going to take the time to target young people with the development of interactive educational software on engineering other than the industry leaders?
Since young people are all digital natives they are a good place to begin in using digital channels to develop not only a high level of brand recognition but also creating a long-lasting positive image.
So, should every big corporation divert a little of their funds into producing some educational material? It gets their name out their in a positive way; to customers, suppliers, investors and job-seekers of the future, as well as supporting their corporate responsibility programme. What do you think?
If You’ve Got It—Flaunt It!
July 26, 2010
Recently, the Boston advertising agency Conover Tuttle Pace started its second annual Summer Sublet desk swap. As reported by the Boston Globe, the Summer Sublet is a combination lottery/draft, in which employees maneuver their way to better quarters for a month. This year’s big winner traded his spot in the communal workspace for the president’s glass-walled corner office–complete with TV and a garden view
Summer Sublet requires everyone, from the newbies to the bosses, to sit in a different place until Labor Day. As a small company (just 35 employees), Conover Tuttle Pace is in a position to move folks around without too much hassle, and obviously, this kind of exercise would be logistically impossible in a big corporation. But Summer Sublet is a playful idea that stimulates cross-functional interaction by mixing up the creative types, the technies, and the execs in new ways. According Amara Bassiri, the company’s “workflow, wellness, and broadcast guru,” an “exchange of ideas happens organically.”
When the Boston Globe wrote up the Sublet caper, Conover Tuttle Pace swiftly put a big link to the story on their company’s home page. (That’s it in the post illustration.) Which brings us to the point: This is a knockout story for their employer brand.
Again—this particular idea would not translate easily to a corporate milieu. But there are plenty of clever, creative activities going on in big companies, and as a rule they are not exploited. A few typical reasons:
- The Careers/Jobs section is in a silo, not integrated with overall PR and marketing efforts.
- The PR and marketing folks don’t pay much attention to employer branding.
- The Careers/Jobs section is focused on job posting and application gathering, with only sporadic attention to the employer brand.
- The Careers/Jobs section is updated infrequently, and may have no easy way to add newsy items.
Takeaway: The (very) slightly more relaxed pace of summer offers a good opportunity to find out about innovative ideas and activities in your company. Even if there is no currently convenient way to report these activities on the corporate website, they make great blog posts, and can be included in social media—Facebook loves this type of item, especially if there are photos. And “cool” stories provide an opportunity for recruiters to tweet something other than routine job postings.
To see fun done right, it’s always worth stopping by Southwest Airlines. Check out the SWA Facebook page.
Phenomenal Facebook
July 22, 2010
I am (at last) getting into Facebook. For some reason, Twitter made sense to me immediately, while Facebook has remained largely a mystery. But after a few weeks of floundering around, I’m starting to understand a little better.
Biggest help: Oddly enough, a talk by David Kirkpatrick on BookTV. Kirkpatrick (formerly senior technology editor at Fortune magazine) is the author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World, which came out just a few weeks ago in the US, and will soon arrive in a UK edition.
Needless to say, The Facebook Effect has its own Facebook page, where you can read an excerpt, watch an interview, and (of course) “like” the book. More than 5,000 likers so far, and the book is well-ranked on Amazon niche lists for E-Commerce (#3) and Company Profiles (#7). In addition to an in-depth retelling of the well-known dorm-to-dominance story of Facebook’s creation/evolution, Kirkpatrick provides thoughtful analysis that applies not only to Facebook, but to the whole social media landscape.
The second biggest help in my Facebook education was stumbling over what I now think of as the “friend tripwire.” As an individual, you can plunk along for quite a while just adding friends occasionally for some seemingly good reason. Then–you add one well-connected activist, and you find yourself with a generous pile of recommendations and requests. (If you open the door at this point, you need to understand about lists . . . )
So all of a sudden, I began to think of Facebook as something like a fractal generator—i.e., a self-similar replicating system that creates intricate patterns. From a slightly different perspective, it’s like a complex system organizing itself in response to initial conditions (“me”) and various attractors (“friends”).
If that works for you, happy to be of service! But if not it doesn’t matter, because probably everyone finds their own point of entry for Facebook, and no one really needs to think of it beyond the practical applications anyway. Which brings us to the real point: Facebook for recruiting.
In 2008, there was a lot of hype around “Facebook for recruiting,” and companies like Jobing and Appirio introduced apps and services to build out that potential. So far, however, these approaches have not seen spectacular success in performance or adoption . . .
So how is Facebook being used effectively to find talent? That turns out to be a longer story, so stay tuned for two more installments: Corporate Recruiting via Facebook (with a useful case study) and Recruiters on Facebook (with some interesting examples).
(And yes, that’s a lovely Julia set, shared by Eequor.)
What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 21: Annual Reports – Give Readers a Choice in How to Access Them
July 20, 2010
Time was, back in the dark ages of about twenty years ago, people only had one option when it came to annual reports – ink on paper. Nowadays we have a multitude of ways to read things: traditional paper, web based, PDF files and e-readers. And people who are visiting your web site to read your annual report expect to have a variety of ways to access the report. Good investor web site design seeks to incorporate a variety of delivery methods for their investors.
A nicely integrated approach for delivering both a web based report and the ability to download PDF files of the report is demonstrated by Standard Chartered, the financial services company. They start with an electronic cover page, which allows you to navigate to various sections of the report.
Each section in turn allows the reader to easily get to relevant subsections, whether it be by opening a new page to the Chairman’s statement or by clicking and expanding a sections such as operational highlights. One can easily navigate the report in this web-centric manner.
For those readers that wish to read the report in a more traditional, linear fashion, Standard Chartered also provides a download centre. The download centre allows an investor to either choose the entire annual report in a zipped file for quicker download, or pick and choose which sections interest them most for downloading.
In one final interesting piece of design work when you click on the two tabs on the right hand side of the page in the download centre, additional capabilities become visible, such as the ability to email the page or to create a customized PDF file.
Overall, this is a nice piece of design work that addresses the way people navigate for information on the web with the way more traditional readers seek information.
In this series:
Previous post: Annual Reports
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