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Best Practices

Real CSR progress on Slavery & Human Rights

Most people know the London railway station Fenchurch Street because it was once important enough to be included on a Monopoly board.  Today, and quite bizarrely, it’s the only railway terminus in Central London which isn’t directly connected to The Tube.

Fenchurch, for those who are not Douglas Adams fans, is also the name of the lady who “finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place” but was sadly blown up (along with the Earth) to make room for an interspace bypass before she could tell anyone.

I have a certain sympathy with Fenchurch the lady.  I know how CSR can be used to make the world a better and happier place, but my solution has nothing to do with profits or the creation of wealth.

Thankfully I’ve not yet been blown up to make way for a bypass, but the way business continues to ignore human rights (as opposed to social engagement) is self defeating, This is why a new law in California, the eighth largest economy in the world, makes such a huge difference. [Read more…] about Real CSR progress on Slavery & Human Rights

Getting The Tone of Voice Right

Every site I visit has one or more of the standard set of links at the bottom. I’m sure you know the ones I mean: copyright, accessibility, legal, privacy… The difficulty with these pages is that the content is ‘off-message’. It doesn’t fit the main purpose of the site, but is essential. That’s why it’s often tucked away in the footer.

Typically, these pages are uninteresting, often written in ‘legalese’, and probably go largely unread. Except by me…

I was entertained, then, to come across Tyrrell’s Rather Dull Formalities page. Already, I’m interested: they’ve neatly captured their brand’s tone of voice in naming the link. Somehow, Rather Dull Formalities is so much more intriguing than Legal/Disclaimer.

I don’t know whether Big Fish developed the content for this site as well as the design, but whoever did has done a fab job. Look at the navigation menu for more: ‘Have a little browse’, for example, and ‘You can even win things’… Delightful.

What do I like about this? Four things:

  • highly unusually, there’s an image on the page – it’s consistent with the rest of the site and the brand, and very cleverly chosen to complement the page
  • the text introducing the page is unexpected—entertaining and personal—matching the tone of voice of the rest of the site
  • the main body of content, which isn’t simple material to communicate, is clearly written in straightforward language, making it easy to understand
  • And at the bottom of the page: social media share buttons, on one of these mandatory pages. That is unusual too.

And people have enjoyed this legal/disclaimer/privacy page enough to Like it on Facebook.

Hurrah!

It’s not a huge number of people, but it is astonishing that people have read the page at all, never mind enjoyed it enough to Like it.

After all, how many people have Liked other privacy pages?

The one in which I click on the link in an email

I know it was a marketing email from a stranger, but when I received 3 emails last week with a subject line of ‘Bet you’ve never seen a law firm website like this!’ I couldn’t resist clicking through. After all, looking at corporate websites is what I do.

And at the other end of the link was an interesting site. Quite a long way from my usual website diet, but worth noting for the following reasons:

  • the background image and welcome message change depending on the time of day.

    Not unusual across the web, but it is an unexpected touch for a law firm, and is very nicely done, with good quality images and understated time-framing.

    “We want to help you this morning” implies I would receive a speedy response – and most of their visitors are no doubt in a hurry.

  • the content is written in layman’s style (not law-speak) and many of the links are visitor- and problem-focused.

    For example: ‘you’ve been arrested’ or ‘a client of yours is in financial difficulty’.

    This makes it easy for the visitor to find the information they need. Writing content from the visitors point of view – not the internal point of view – is important. Visitors arrive with a problem they want to solve, and neither know nor care what you call the solution.

  • the content is informative and helpful.

    They’ve done a good job of case-studies across the site, and the explanations—for example, of what happens when you’ve been arrested—are clear and likely to be useful. (I wouldn’t know!)

  • the images are well-chosen: mostly the site depends on the background image for visual appeal, which seems to be a trend at the moment. Where there are images, these are pleasant stock images—I like the umbrella theme.
  • the structure, and therefore the navigation, is unusual.

    The home page clearly marks the different directions for visitors—personal customer or business customer—and the ‘corporate’ pages are available across the site (for the most part). Once the visitor has made a choice, there are further choices to identify the specific problem that the visitor has, at which point they are introduced to the appropriate members of the team. The process goes:

    • personal or business?
    • if personal, there are 16 choices – let’s choose, say, ‘defending you’
    • if ‘defending you’, there are 7 choices – one of which is ‘you have been arrested for an offence’
    • if we choose that one, then we arrive at a landing page with:
      • information about what happens in the police station
      • case studies of people they’ve helped
      • a ‘meet the team’ section with good biographies
      • information on paying for their services
      • and more.

    So the case studies and team profiles are tied to the visitor interest, rather than being grouped together, as we might typically see.

    And – to go back to the content point again – they are written in an appealing and understandable manner:

    • Case study: “Our client was arrested for the first time in his life following a tirade of abuse and threats which he received from a group of lads during a night out at his local snooker club with his friends.”
    • Biography: “He has acted for many clients and companies of previous good character charged with offences for the first time and with much to lose.”

    The unusual structure does make it slightly harder to navigate, and there’s little cross-site navigation. But then, most visitors aren’t interested in that: they just want a solution to their specific problem.

It’s not perfect, and there are a few snags: a couple of formatting issues and minor typos, some grammatical infelicities, and some difficulties in navigating, depending on which device you’re using to view the site. But overall, an interesting site to review.

Did the marketing work?

I don’t think that law firm websites are necessarily the pit of turbid grandiloquence that stereotyping would suggest. No doubt there are some stodgy ones out there, but a quick scan reveals other decent law firm sites. So the email was perhaps playing up the stereotype.

And I’m not sure why I received the email – still less 3 copies of it – but I’ll certainly remember that the firm exists. So to that extent, I’d say that the email lure did what was hoped – and maybe more, since here’s the link to the Darbys website, so you can review it yourself…

Corporate Branding Online: Interview with Adrian Day

In the latest of our series of expert interviews, Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) talked to Adrian Day about corporate brand, and how companies can express this online – via their own websites, but also via social media.

Maybe retailers do have an advantage: but how do you communicate your bricks-and-mortar brand online? And how do you communicate your brand in an online space which you don’t control?

Do listen: Adrian and Paul consider the websites of a variety of different companies—from Iceland and John Lewis, RyanAir and Greene King to Rolls-Royce and British Airways—and discuss how your corporate brand values are communicated by the things you do (or don’t do) online, whether intentionally or not.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Brand expression online

Key topics:

  • brand and brand expression
  • need for a clearly defined brand
  • parallels with retail: it’s the detail – look, feel, engagement

Soundbites:

“[The brand is] the positioning, the proposition and the personality… the expression is how that positioning, proposition and personality is then expressed verbally and visually”

“Firms have to have a clearly defined brand and a clearly defined sense of self – then it is much easier to express it”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-01.mp3] Length: 4:13
Download: Adrian Day interview: part 1

Part 2: Making it explicit

Key topics:

  • the website and the brand
  • providing brand expression tools

Soundbites:

“Those organisations that really understand their customer and are used to engaging with their customer are better at translating their brand into the online community”

“If you look at John Lewis, Tesco and Iceland… each one of the brand experiences delivered by those websites is in line with what I would expect, knowing about those brands”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-02.mp3] Length: 5:38
Download: Adrian Day interview: part 2

Part 3: Brand across the web estate

Key topics

  • corporate site vs retail site
  • consumer vs B2B

Soundbites:

“Companies can afford to be a bit braver because people who shop in Sainsburys for example are also shareholders and analysts and we don’t necessarily have these sharp divisions in our lives. I think the messaging can be slightly different, and I think there may be some subtleties in the tone of voice”

“Some of the corporate and the B2B sites are behind some of the more communicative consumer sites”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-03.mp3] Length: 7:04
Download: Adrian Day interview: part 3

Part 4: Getting it right

Key topics:

  • getting it right: content, social media and tone of voice
  • managing the site for an audience
  • demonstrating corporate values in practice

Soundbites:

“The most successful web-only brands – or digital brands, if you like – have been founded on a function… I just wonder if that trends gone too far… and that not enough of the brand comes through in the experience”

“Sometimes website content is overly controlled and you end up with something that is kind of bland, and you don’t notice the difference between one company or another”

“A lot of these corporate sites… you don’t get the sense they’re being actively managed for an audience.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-04.mp3] Length: 12:33
Download: Adrian Day interview: part 4

Part 5: Branding in a difficult economic climate

Key topics:

  • rebranding in an economic downturn
  • repositioning the brand for customers and for staff
  • repositioning for emerging markets

Soundbites:

“The time to look at your brand is when your market’s changing dramatically, when the organisation is changing dramatically, or in particular when your brand is out of sync with the business strategy and out of sync with consumers”

“Do you take a different approach because there’s a downturn? Only insofar as you take a different approach to your business. I mean the purpose of brand is to reflect the business strategy.”

“The number of organisations that have looked at their branding [in the last year] has gone up exponentially.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-05.mp3] Length: 6:33
Download: Adrian Day interview: part 5

Part 6: Brand, social media and mobile

Key topics:

  • being there as branding: making the deliberate choice
  • brand and employee behaviour
  • blogger engagement
  • mobile content: less is more

Soundbites:

“Those firms that really have strong brands: in the sense of brand, their people will do the right thing.

“Social media is only an amplification of what always went on… but I think organisations do need to embrace it”

“If you can get the American constitution on one page of paper and the Ten Commandments on one page of paper then why can’t you get the key points about an organisation on X number of mobile pages? I think it helps focus the mind and could be an aid to getting stronger brand presence online”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-06.mp3] Length: 12:09
Download: Adrian Day interview: part 6

Part 7: Making the emotional connection

Key topics:

  • future of brand experience
  • learning from other digital disciplines
  • importance of alignment with values and personality

Soundbites:

“There is an opportunity for better use of sound and video and colour and pacing… when you look at what television and cinema achieve in emotional connections through visual and sound stimuli I think there’s quite a way for websites to go”

“Don’t just update the website because you think you need a sort of image makeover; it needs to be founded in the organisational change and the organisation’s values and personality”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-07.mp3] Length: 7:52
Download: Adrian Day interview: part 7

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/adrian-day-interview-full.mp3] Length: 56:10
Download: Adrian Day interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript

Many thanks to Adrian for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Adrian is an experienced brand consultant and client director with many years experience working at leading firms such as Landor, Siegel & Gale, Ziggurat and Uffindell. He is now an independent brand consultant.

Adrian is experienced in conducting brand research, brand positioning, brand architecture, naming and creative briefing projects together with brand implementation programmes.

He has developed brand strategies and architecture solutions for a wide range of international clients including BP, RBS, National Bank of Dubai, Swiss Re, Telstra, and British Airways.

Authenticity and Audience – Being Human: interview with Mallen Baker

It seems obvious that not all your stakeholders are the same, with the same needs; yet for many companies it would seem that one size fits all when it comes to corporate responsibility reporting and communication. Simply producing a CR report isn’t enough to communicate with all of your audiences; and not all of them want all the information there is in your report.

Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) talked to Mallen Baker about the importance of identifying the different audiences for your corporate responsibility communications: about providing them with the information that interests them; about creating the opportunity to engage with them and to discuss the issues that matter.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Tailoring content and conveying authenticity

Key topics:

  • understanding the different audiences
  • tailoring content for those audiences
  • conveying authenticity and generating trust

Soundbites:

“The key distinguishing features between a good report online and a mediocre one are a couple of things. First of all is that the company is clear about who its audience or audiences are… and the second part is the integrity of information and the authenticity of the voice that you’re hearing.”

“If you care about your audiences, you use a medium and an approach that they will relate to as your starting point.”

“Consumers see through the fluff very quickly. And all of the polls show that they’re becoming more and more cynical about the claims that companies make in the environmental and ethical space.

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mallen-baker-interview-pt-01.mp3] Length: 8:40
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 1

Part 2: Communicating commitment

Key topics:

  • the Centrica report interviews
  • CEO commitment; embedding sustainability in the business
  • discussing issues that are in the public domain

Soundbites:

“[they] had the courage to step up and say ‘We are prepared to be placed in an area that’s just slightly outside of the comfort zone’ ”

“Whenever there’s a controversy in the press relating to a company the first thing that I will do is go to their website and see what they say about it… the mind boggles just how often the answer to that question is ‘Nothing'”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mallen-baker-interview-pt-02.mp3] Length: 4:13
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 2

Part 3: Authenticity and audit

Key topics

  • third party commentary
  • collaborating with the audience to solve a problem
  • using neutral spaces to exchange ideas and information

Soundbites:
“Having trusted third parties who have had the time – and the incentive presumably – to look carefully at what the company’s doing and to talk to them, and then to give their own reflections, good and bad… that generally plays pretty well”

“The other thing that provides authenticity is when people not only are admitting that something has gone the wrong way this year but actually seek to engage their audiences with problems that they face that they haven’t yet worked out how to solve”

“It’s shifted the focus a little bit from ‘the company is the star, the company is the centre of the universe’ and puts it into a position where there are sustainability issues and the company is one of the actors… one of the creators of environmental consequences alongside the rest of society”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mallen-baker-interview-pt-03.mp3] Length: 7:15
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 3

Part 4: Audience and integrated reporting

Key topics:

  • integrated reporting
  • importance of the audience
  • interim sustainability reporting

Soundbites:

“integrated reporting could be … a very positive thing, and potentially a dangerous thing in equal measure.”

“The encouraging thing is that… it will lead you to be clear about the communication that you send to one of your key audiences… the danger, the downside, is if you begin to believe that that integrated report is what you produce for all of your stakeholder audiences.”

“Many of your direct stakeholders do not get their information from reports.”

“Where you are engaging your customers or your supply chain or your employees with what you are doing and what’s happened, then the more up-to-date and current that is, and preferably more of a discussion and two-way flow that is, then the more likely you’re going to succeed.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mallen-baker-interview-pt-04.mp3] Length: 6:47
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 4

Part 5: Social media and CSR

Key topics:

  • the right social media mindset
  • going to where the audience is
  • expanding the audience for CSR

Soundbites:

“You can’t have a discussion with a corporate entity. You can only have a discussion with a human being or a highly trained parrot.”

“One of the big challenges for the companies who are used to corporate communications and to being faceless – except for maybe the CEO in certain contexts – is that they find it very difficult to shift to a medium where it’s personal.”

“If you really want to engage the people who are your stakeholders… you need to go to where they naturally gather. And social media potentially creates tools that enable you to do that.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mallen-baker-interview-pt-05.mp3] Length: 9:13
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 5

Part 6: Trends in CSR communication

Key topics:

  • conflicting trends in CSR communication
  • legislation and innovation
  • the human element; stories

Soundbites:

“The evolution of corporate responsibility reporting or sustainability reporting to date is completely unsustainable in itself, ironically, because… the current state of the art doesn’t connect with audiences.”

“The trend has been more and more GRI reports, more and more standardisation. And I start to see a counter trend now, which is from the leading companies [who are starting to say] “We’re going to find ways that actually communicate better with some of our key audiences… we’re interested in finding the way that works.”

“It’s the human element, the story. … and it is the most elusive element because it requires you to be prepared to corporately communicate on a human level. That will always be a minority sport. But I think there can be some very, very good rewards for those who will pick up the intelligence about how it’s done well and give it a go.”

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mallen-baker-interview-pt-06.mp3] Length: 7:32
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 6

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

[audio:https://www.corporate-eye.com/main/audio/mallen-baker-interview.mp3] Length: 43.43
Download: Mallen Baker interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript

Many thanks to Mallen for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Mallen BakerMallen Baker is a writer, speaker and strategic advisor on corporate social responsibility and Founding Director of Business Respect. He is responsible for the Business Respect email newsletter on CSR, which is the longest running CSR internet newsletter in the world.

He is a regular columnist and contributing editor with Ethical Corporation.

Mallen was formerly the development director with Business in the Community, where he was responsible for developing BITC’s approach to marketplace issues, which includes how companies manage issues that arise around their core products and services. He produced the Marketplace Responsibility Principles working with a leadership team of CEOs from major companies headquartered in the UK.

He initiated the Business Impact Review Group – the group of 20 companies who developed a common approach to CSR reporting, and was responsible for the work of the Business Impact Taskforce which produced the landmark “Winning with Integrity” report.

Mallen chaired Kingfisher plc’s Stakeholder Advisory Panel 2007-2010, and was a board member of CSR Europe 2006 – 2008.

Welcoming the New Year on your Corporate Website

It’s a brand new year: no doubt you have exciting new ideas for developing your corporate site in 2012. But have you taken care of calendar duties for the change of the year?

I spent yesterday reviewing various corporate websites, and was slightly surprised that they hadn’t all updated the copyright year in the footer. Many have, of course – but have you?

Some of the outdated dates I saw may have been due to caching; and today is still a holiday here in the UK – many people don’t go back to work until tomorrow, Tuesday 3 January. But the date can be automatically generated.

If it’s not automatically updated based on the system date on your site, ask your developers if they could sort this out for you – one less thing to think about next year!

Other things to consider:

  • adding in future dates for the new calendar year in your events calendar, and moving 2011 dates to the ‘historic’ section of the calendar, if you keep historic dates
  • making sure that you have a new tab—headed 2012, of course—for your news releases, RNS and any other time-specific sections, and that older material is moved out of the ‘current’ tab. Check your reports, presentations and webcasts pages too…
  • some of your content, inevitably, will refer to 2011 as the current year. It’s worth developing a spreadsheet with the URLs of pages that need to be updated on a calendar basis, so that you can find them quickly in the future. If you don’t have one yet, then likely pages to check quickly are landing pages across the site, and your strategy pages, including your CSR strategy page if that’s separate.
  • check the history/timeline page too. That might need to be updated…
  • do you have any text in the rotators on your landing pages or home page, that refers to 2011 as ‘this year’?
  • and while you’re having a tidy-up, are there job postings on-site that should be cleared out?

If you’re running a corporate blog, you may want to check that your archive page is working well, and think about your editorial calendar for 2012, making a note of any special company events that are coming up that could be or should be covered in the blog.

And here’s something that has caught me out in the past: if your blog software automatically creates new subdirectories for uploads, ensure that you have access to any new 2012 subdirectories. If your systems administrators keep tight control of access rights, you may find that they haven’t yet given you permission to update those subdirectories. It’s quickly sorted out, of course, but I expect you want to get a flying start on 2012.

What have I missed? Are there any New Year jobs that need doing on your corporate website that I haven’t mentioned here?