Give your annual report readers what they want
December 6, 2007
People browsing an annual report want to see the financial spreadsheets and find out about the dividends paid.
Investoreports recently collated some interesting data about the popularity of different areas of the annual report, based on nearly 30,000 searches of online reports …
It turns out that the most common searches are:
- shareholders
- dividend
- balance sheet/ income statement
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Provide analyst estimates for a level playing field
December 3, 2007
Are you sharing information with your retail investors as well as your professional ones?
Institutional investors should already know the market expectations, but providing analyst estimates on your website enables retail shareholders to consider their options with the same information to hand. Surprisingly, this isn’t done on many corporate sites, though the numbers are increasing. Examples of those that do provide such forecasts are Prudential, Carphone Warehouse and Petrobras. All provide a variety of different measures.
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But why not go a step further, and provide an automated feed of broker forecast information? This would mean that your investors can have the latest information very easily - and don’t have to keep returning to your site.
RWE does this very neatly: they provide broker forecast information on their site in some detail, and have archives going back to 2003. If requested, they will email the latest information out to you every 2-3 weeks.
I think that is a great service.
5 stages of development of corporate RSS Feeds
November 30, 2007
Not all companies have yet ‘got’ the value in providing RSS feeds, and don’t provide any at all; at the other extreme, some companies provide multiple RSS feeds, including feeds of podcasts, speeches and other tailored streams of information.
There is definitely a trend towards providing more RSS feeds, and providing feeds tailored to a particular audience.
people delete feeds that aren’t tailored to their needs
I’ve noticed that major companies tend to fall into one of five different groups, depending on where they are on the RSS curve:
Read more
7 types of recruit you need to serve online
November 13, 2007
There are 7 different kinds of recruit you need to identify and serve online, as part of your recruitment strategy.
No, I don’t mean 7 different skill-sets: obviously there are many more than that … I mean that there are 7 different life-stages that your potential recruit may be at.
Some of these won’t be relevant to your industry - perhaps you only recruit graduates and experienced professionals. However, you shouldn’t forget that any visitors to your site may become a potential recruit in the future (or customer, supplier or contractor), so you don’t want to give them a negative impression about the company or how you treat people. Read more
8 ways of charting your share price (or not)
November 5, 2007
Ever wondered what everyone else was using to chart their share price? Here are eight different ways of charting the share price.
Many if not most FTSE 100 companies now provide interactive share charting facilities, so that visitors can see the trend over the last day, week, month … or whatever period interests them.
Some companies provide the option to compare the performance of their stock with indices and sector - perhaps the FTSE or equivalent, or a set of related companies.
A subset of these companies make it easy to compare their own performance with that of their direct competition. For example, Roche make it easy to see how they are doing compared to Bayer, or Pfizer, GSK or AstraZeneca (among several others).
A very few companies make it easy to compare their performance against apparently any listed company. Read more