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?
Spin and Story: 2 Different Things Entirely
June 25, 2010
Regular readers will know that we sometimes host guest writers. I invited Ian Berry from Differencemakers Community to contribute his views on being remarkable.
Ian Berry CSP FAIM is a writer, mentor, and international business speaker. He is the Founder of Differencemakers Community, an online and in person home for individuals who wish to increase their differencemaking and who want to find collaborators to work with in order to increase the scale of differencemaking in the world.
Over to you, Ian.
Yesterday I drove past the BP service station where I normally do business and went to a competitor. In the process I wondered how many people are doing the same, even if unconsciously?
BP’s story of beyond petroleum signaled an intent at least that the giant company was different to the rest and prepared to create a future without oil. Of course because of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, BP’s story now looks like spin and their reputation is in tatters!
Remarkability
Role model companies are such because their story is not spin.
Role model companies differentiate themselves from the rest because they do business in remarkable ways, think Virgin or Cirque du Soleil, or any of the companies I have referred to in previous posts.
How we are remarkable is a key to our story however unless there is relevance, remedies, backed up by reputation our story can soon become remarkable for all the wrong reasons or worse spin that we all take to mean as a story without substance.
Relevance
What is your cause? Are you impacting the communities in which your business operates in positive and productive ways? Are your products and services relevant to the needs, expectations, and desires of people? Is all that you do good for our planet? A no answer to any of these questions means you are not 21st century relevant and soon it won’t matter what you do because you will have declining customers and less than the required high levels of engagement from your employees. It is a long way back from here.
Remedies
Do your products and service/s provide solutions to your customers’ and society’s challenges and problems?
Design in its simplest form is the activity of creating solutions says former Vice President and Chief Designer at Nokia Frank Nuovo.
Are you designing your products and services so that they provide genuine solutions for your customers? And do your products and services provide solutions to society’s challenges as well?
As Bjorn Stigson, the President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development says: Business cannot survive in societies that fail.
Reputation
Conducting business in remarkable ways, being relevant, and providing remedies to customers’ and society’s challenges are all reputation builders; however what you do in moments of crisis, or when you are under pressure can either enhance or kill your reputation.
BP has so far failed to rise to the occasion. How about you? When the pressure is really on, when trouble is all around you, do you rise to the occasion with your story enhanced or do you need spin to seemingly get you out of your mess?
Remarkability, relevance, remedies, and reputation are all keys to creating and sustaining a compelling story, and for me a compelling story is the first thing we need to ensure our businesses stand out from the crowd.
Be the difference you want to see in the world
Ian
Thanks, Ian!
Oil Companies Among The Best | FTSE 100 Website Reviews
June 3, 2010
There are some business sectors for whom sustainability is a hot issue, and with oil spilling all over the Gulf of Mexico and Shell recently admitting it hadn’t done enough in the Niger Delta, oil producers are definitely among those with the greatest CSR problems in the world.
So perhaps it’s not surprising then to find that they have some of the most progressive CSR websites around.
One of the facets which leads to this conclusion is the sites’ interactive data provision. This was pioneered a few years ago by Shell but, in a fine example of site content competitiveness, BP has also introduced its own set of interactive data tools as have several others.
However, if this innovation is left to one side, how else do the websites perform? In a slight change to previous FTSE 100 Website Reviews, this one looks not just at two big hitters within the UK, BP and Shell, but also one from continental Europe, Total, and one from the USA, Exxon Mobil.
Interestingly, these are also respectively the fourth, first, sixth and second largest companies in the world, according to Forbes. Will their websites reflect this?
BP
BP at present is all over the news because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and it’s interesting to note that other oil companies have not been shy in issuing press releases about what they think BP should be doing to “plug the leak”.
It’s unsurprising therefore to find that the BP site has a special “Gulf of Mexico response” section on its top level menu bar. I have long bemoaned the fact companies rarely react to bad news on their websites, simply because it’s a perfect stakeholder engagement opportunity which should not be missed.
BP make the case for such bad news sections admirably, with daily updates, technical briefings, regional responses and all sorts of maps and data. Admittedly there are few bad news stories worse than Deepwater Horizon, but then not every one needs such comprehensive coverage. Just ignoring the issue, however, tends to alienate stakeholders, not engage them.
The company’s more traditional CSR section, headlined “Environment and society”, covers a wide variety of issues from traditional Environment management to Alternative energy and the “BP Energy Lab”. This latter includes an energy consumption calculator, a fun energy quiz and the ability to share an energy fact with other website users.
The site, in BP’s green and yellow livery, is surprising on the eye rather than shocking, but with every page throwing up context sensitive links in the right hand column there’s more than enough to keep you interested in discovering more.
Shell
Shell is one of the few websites these days which does not have a main menu banner across the top of its pages. Instead it has a more traditional breadcrumb trail and uses solely the headings in the left hand column to provide visitor navigation.
This can give the impression there is less content on the “Environment and society” site than there really is as, quite sensibly, the left hand menus contract as you move from section to section. However the full set of section headings is presented in the page footers and visitors may navigate from there.
Interestingly, Shell maintains dedicated country-based independent websites (presumably based upon its operational locations). Each of these conforms precisely to the Shell corporate layout but each has its own “Environment and society” content focusing upon the specific issues which that country faces.
The content isn’t allowed too far off the leash and most of the subsections refer the reader to the global site, for further information, and the company’s overall sustainability report. However, this is a nice nod in the direction of acknowledging that different communities need very different engagement from a corporate multinational.
Like BP, Shell follows its corporate livery and has designed the site around the red and yellow of its logo. However this is barely noticeable and the majority of pages are a simple and unobtrusive affair of black text on a white background with a splash of colour at the top.
Total
Unlike BP and Shell, Total’s website is not based around its logo colours. Instead it uses a big bold frame to surround its content whose colour is determined by the section being viewed: for example orange for “About Us”, blue for “Investors” and green for “Environment and society”.
The sections the company uses approach the material from a slightly different angle to most. with two of the sections titled “contributing to host country development” and “operating in challenging environments”. There’s even a section on socially responsible investment within the investors section.
Probably the most interesting part of their website though is the innocuously named “Expert infos” section. This contains some brief Q&A sessions held with some French luminaries, such as the co-winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the European Chair of Sustainable Development – Environment, Energy and Society at Collège de France.
A fair few of these are involved in Total operations in one way or another, so a small bit of salt needs to be taken with the information. However by no means all of the detail is aimed at puffing up Total and it is refreshing to see information provided for information’s sake. Very French, given the country’s tradition of philosophical discourse.
It is this slightly different approach to sustainability which draws you into the Total website, alongside the accessibility innovation of having most if not all of the website pages available in audio form as well.
ExxonMobil
Exxon Mobil’s website is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that it has one of the most comprehensive corporate News sections on the web. Press releases are not limited just to Investor Relations matters but cover all aspects of the company’s operations, ranging in May from the appointment of directors to the preparedness of Red Cross volunteers ahead of hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico.
However these are just the tip of the iceberg. The section also includes “thoughts”, “publications” and “features”. Although these are not categorised, because energy and oil is very much under the sustainability spotlight practically all are relevant in one way or another.
In addition, the company’s “op-ed” section is categorised. This holds an archive of all the opinion pieces the company has had published in a variety of journals and newspapers, such as the New York Times.
It is this thoroughness which pervades the rest of the company’s CSR offering, which eschews the European categorisation and is split between “energy and environment” and “community and society” sections. Each neatly and succinctly keeps the section’s main headings and quick links in the left hand column with sitewide widgets in the right hand one and main content in the centre.
In total, a well presented site whose blue-grey design and mix of words and white space makes it easy to spend time on and investigate further.
Conclusion
It’s difficult to pick one site over another simply because different points of emphasis creates such a variety it would be manifestly unfair to say one way better than the other.
However, the oil extraction and refinement business has long been under the sustainability spotlight and if other companies wish to find out how to write the perfect sustainability website they could do a lot worse then scrutinise these.
Picture Credit: Classic Oil Rig by epredator from flickr under Creative Commons Attribution License, trimmed by Chris Milton.
What Is Greening The Corporate Website?
March 31, 2010
Once upon a time, Ugh raised the deer’s thighbone high above his head and brought it crashing down upon the head of a passing rabbit. Yum yum, rabbit stew for dinner and a nice new woolly patch to keep the cold from his nether regions.
At that moment in time, had Ugh and all his species killed one rabbit simultaneously the rabbit population wouldn’t even have been dented.
Fast forward a hundred thousand years or so, and if all of Ugh’s adult descendants in the UK killed a rabbit, there’d barely be any left.
This, put simply, is sustainability. The desire … nay, imperative … to take out of natural cycles only what can be replaced. It is not a solution for all time but we’re currently using 3 times the number of rabbits which actually exist. That, surely, can’t be sensible.
What has this to do with green websites though?
Read more
Consumers Want Transparent, Honest, Socially Responsible Brands
March 31, 2010
Earlier this year, I wrote a post here on the Corporate Eye Blog called 2010 – The Year of Brand Transparency, Honesty and Trust, and now, research is in that supports that prediction. Weakened economies and uncertainty have caused consumers to be less naive in terms of simply believing marketing messages, and the power of the social Web in boosting global communications to new heights of access and information sharing has created a new world where consumer expectations are less accepting and more “prove it to me” than ever before.
According to an article on Brandweek, A new study by Landor Associates, Penn Schoen Berland and Burson-Marsteller reports that, “75% of consumers believe social responsibility is important, and 55% of consumers said they would choose a product that supports a particular cause against similar products that don’t.”
The study also revealed some opportunities for brands to differentiate themselves from the competition not just with cause marketing and socially responsible programs but through education. Many consumers still don’t understand what “corporate social responsibility” is. At the same time, many consumers in the aforementioned study revealed they would be willing to pay more for products from a socially responsible company — as much as $10 more. The opportunity to educate consumers about a socially responsible brand, differentiate it from the competition as such, and attach a premium price to it could be significant.
Furthermore, 50% of 18-34 years olds surveyed in this study claimed that they would be willing to take a pay cut to work for a socially responsible company. That leads one to believe that socially responsible brand messages could have a bigger effect on brand building and sales in specific, younger demographics. Again, this is an opportunity to craft effective messages for specific audience segments.
Consumers have changed over the course of the past few years. Your branding and marketing messages need to change with them.
Get our updates
 |