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Best Practices

When it all goes wrong in the FTSE 100

Standard 404

Standard 404 Page

You know how they say you can judge someone by their shoes? It’s often the little things that let us down. FTSE 100 corporate sites tend to be big and complex to match the organisations they serve, but can be seriously underpowered when it all goes wrong.

Being presented with a 404 page is irritating at the best of times, but there are different ways of handling this, and – predictably enough – the FTSE 100 demonstrate the full range of options available.
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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 39: What Makes You Unique?

company profileWhen most people are children, they want to be someone special when they grow up; nobody ever wants to be just another anonymous person. So growing up and even later in life, we all foster a belief in our unique combination of talents and characteristics that make us a special person (at least to our spouses, children and dogs).

And so it is with companies as well. Every company strives to be unique. In business school they give it the fancy name of differentiation, but the concept is clear: your product or service offering needs to stand out from the competition. Even if your product is simply a ‘me too’ offering, there needs to be something that makes it more attractive in some aspect, whether that be price, delivery mechanism or simplicity of use, that will cause the customer to part with their money.

To take this analogy one step further and apply it to investing, if investors can be shown that a company occupies a unique position in the marketplace, they are more likely to understand the underlying investment thesis of the company and buy the stock.

Burberry's Company Profile
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Take for example Burberry, the British apparel company. The firm has traditionally been thought of as a manufacturer of traditional trench coats, but more recently has pushed into fashion. How is an investor supposed to think of this?

Burberry addresses this in their corporate profile page, which I’ve set out here. After reading the page, an investor has a pretty good idea of why Burberry thinks of themselves as unique, and how they plan to use that attribute to grow the company.

So the takeaway here is clear: by telling investors why your company is special, you can help them focus on the reasons to own your stock.

In this series:
Previous post: Investment Case
Next post: Key Performance Indicators

Eni : A Leader in CSR Websites

It’s not often I look at websites outside the UK … partially because it’s always difficult to mash CSR language through a translator, and partially because Corporate Eye’s core market is UK based.

However the Italian oil and gas supplier Eni has caught my eye several times.  Their online reputation is, quite simply, massive.

Other Corporate Eye bloggers have written enthusiastically about their Corporate Governance and Investor Relations and the company’s CSR site regularly wins plaudits from Lundquist, an Italian website benchmark consultancy along the same lines as Corporate Eye.

Now the website has also come second in Lundquist’s online branding analysis for Italian companies (Pirelli came first).

So what is it about the six-legged, fire-breathing dog which makes them such a colossus in the online world, and why is their CSR site in particular such a hit?

[Read more…] about Eni : A Leader in CSR Websites

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 37: Help Your Visitors Find What They Are Looking For

I suffer from what some people think of as a typical male problem: I hate to ask for directions. Fortunately, in the case of travel directions, GPS technology has cut down on the number of times I look like a complete idiot by getting lost. Unfortunately, I haven’t overcome my aversion to asking for directions when it comes to looking up information on a computer.

There are perhaps a number of reasons for this, including preferring the thrill of the hunt in chasing down the exact piece of information I’m searching for and, the belief that if I have to work for the information, I’m more likely to remember it.

However, I think there are probably more deep-rooted psychological reasons at work as well. In my youth I had to devote a lot of time and effort learning how to comb through card reference cabinets in libraries using the Dewey decimal system. Not only that, but when I got to college, they changed the library reference system to something called the Library of Congress classification system and I had to spend more time and effort learning that system. So I have a lot invested in the manual search method and even though it’s now forty years later, I intend to get a return on my investment. Besides, in the old days, where you could get help in your search was at the reference librarian’s desk, and the reference librarians that I dealt with always seemed to be rather imposing ladies with thick glasses who I was afraid would look down their noses at the things I wanted to look up.

So I continue to be weighted down with the baggage of my youth when I search for information about companies on their investor sites and would rather spent fifteen frustrating minutes searching for information than let a computer do it for me.

Fortunately, younger people who have grown up with computers (and people less bull-headed than myself) are not so handicapped and will gladly use a search function. So placing an investor specific search function will help site visitors find what they want quickly. Many websites have general search functions for the entire web site that can be helpful, but often they will return far too many results and you find yourself no better off than if you had pursued the manual search method. A better solution for finding financial information is a function that focuses only on the investor area of the web site.

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One site that has an investor specific search function is Dell, which I’ve set out here.

One of the interesting things the Dell search function does is to allow you limit your search by content type, report type and year. If you were looking for something very specific, such options would allow you to home in very quickly on what you were looking for.

Even an old-timer such as myself might be lured into using it.

In this series:
Previous post: First Impressions
Next post: Investment Case

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 38: Make the Investment Case

It’s a curious thing, but most company investor relations sites do not come right out and state why you should invest in the company. In marketing terms, most sites engage in what can be referred to as a “Soft Sell” where they lay out information for the visitor and allow the visitor to come to their own conclusions. This is a perfectly valid approach, but in certain circumstances a more direct approach may be more effective.

When a company devotes a page on their investor relations site to making the case why investors should invest in their company, they are really telling the investor what they think is important about their company. This is valuable information as it allows an investor to quickly see if the company’s priorities line up with his own. For example, set out below is the “Why invest” page from Aviva, the insurance company. As you work your way through their statement, you quickly get a sense that cash flow, diverse offerings in a large market, growth and increasing dividends are where they put their emphasis. It is a good example not only of what the company offers for investors, but also of the way the company will run its business.


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At this point I should point out that it would be unusual to see such forthrightness on an American listed company’s web site. This is because under the United States legal and regulatory scheme, companies are not allowed to make a solicitation to either buy or sell a security, unless that solicitation is either preceded or accompanied by a prospectus.

As a result, most companies choose not to venture into the regulatory tar pit that might expose them to claims of soliciting for the purchase or sale of their securities. It’s yet another example of the unintended consequences of well meaning regulation.

In this series:
Previous post: Search
Next post: Differentiation

Does an excellent CSR report mean an excellent website? Part 2

Three weeks ago I started this off with Part 1.  The rationale is taking the excellent Elaine Cohen’s list of Top Ten CSR Reports of 2010 and seeing what these company’s websites look like.

The first five included a few surprises, including probably the most innovative report/website I’ve ever seen (AHA!) and one with no independent website at all (Imphala Clothing).  What will the next five bring? [Read more…] about Does an excellent CSR report mean an excellent website? Part 2