With many IR and communications departments either upgrading a fledgling web site or fine-tuning a mature one, the thirst for guidelines on how to present IR information electronically is unabated. Luckily, this is one area of IR where it’s fairly easy to find out what others are doing. Just load up your browser, point it in the direction of some peers and start taking notes. Raiding other web sites for tantalizing ideas is part and parcel of today’s investor relations game.
Analysts, fund managers and private investors consistently praise web sites that generously provide diverse information: annual reports, press releases, spreadsheets, historical SEC filings, corporate histories and FAQs (frequently asked questions – and answers).
What is the best way to display your current share price, for example? Most companies simply post the price on the opening page of the investor relations section. General Motors (www.gm.com) goes a step further, putting the price on the first corporate page as well as in the shareholder section.
Schlumberger (www.slb.com) provides the current price and adds two tasty morsels linked by a mouse click. One page – the ‘recent stock quote’ – shows two graphics provided by Direct Report Corporation: a simple table of recent prices and a chart of the one-year history. The other link also provides a graph and a bar chart of Schlumberger’s stock performance over the previous 100 days. These graphics are supplied by Silicon Investor, which is also linked via a hyperlink. The charts can be printed, if required.
Bankable improvements
Taking another tack is one of the UK’s newly-created banks, Halifax (www.halifax.co.UK). Last June, the former building society went public creating a bank with £130 bn in assets and a market capitalization greater than £20 bn. It presented its first annual results as a public company in March.
‘Electronic communications are a fundamental part of our IR strategy and we are committed to developments in this area,’ says investor relations manager Robert Hemson. This commitment is evident in a web site that is at once modest and, on the evidence of a video, ambitious.
The video is a clip of chairman Jon Foulds’ presentation at the special general meeting for the vote on demutualization. The web site also contains a series of 30 slides shown at, and posted simultaneously with, the preliminary results announcement in March. The video and the slides are each available on three technical levels; users select the option that best matches their computing capability. ‘Every time a new browser comes out, it poses a new problem,’ says John Wilcock, Halifax’s internet manager.
Users do not need plug-ins (extra software) to access the video or the slides. Users with outdated PCs (these days, a year-old computer may be ancient history) or slow modems will miss out entirely, but every technical option has drawbacks.
Halifax carefully considered the question of technical capability. ‘Function and capability are limited if you try to satisfy everyone,’ asserts Wilcock. ‘Most regular internet users update their browsers. There are problems for pre-Pentium 16-bit users, but people with new PCs will invariably have high-spec Pentiums which are equipped with advanced browsers,’ he s
Halifax is ‘building the site incrementally, proofing it to see what works. Instead of spending megabucks at a site from day one, we are growing it gradually,’ he adds. Halifax also monitors user reactions.
A slide that works well – or is at least harmless – as a backdrop to spoken text may be woefully uninformative in other contexts. Halifax’s ‘post-implementation review’ uncovered comments from web site visitors frustrated by slides which consumed download time and after the wait provided no data or hard information.
Halifax absorbed the lessons. The bank’s web designers are examining several new labelling and identification possibilities, such as a ‘contact sheet’ depicting many slides simultaneously. Committed to continuous web site improvement, Halifax is already harnessing sophisticated multimedia capabilities.
Full tank
Full marks to Canadian Methanol-monger Methanex (www.methanex.com). Never heard of it? Know little about methanol? No problem. ‘Methanol is a primary liquid petrochemical….’ Yes, you can read all about it on the Methanex web site, where your curiosity about formaldehyde, acetic acid, MTBE and fuels, and ‘methanol in our lives’ can also be sated as you browse.
Although not an IR section per se, the Methanex site provides regularly-updated worldwide prices of methanol per ton, and average realized prices for the past two years. Under shareholder information services, one screen has links to related web sites: Nasdaq; the American Methanol Institute; and something called COFA.
COFA? Several attempts over a one-week period to activate this link failed, as did efforts to open www.cofa.ca. Ultimately, the link worked, but to a site identified as www.cleanfuels.net under the auspices of the Oxygenated Fuels Association, an American site. This points to an issue that web site managers would be wise to take into account: for companies linking to other web sites, an ever-present danger is that you have no control over their fate. Neither you nor your site visitors may know if they have closed, moved or failed temporarily. Regular checks are the only way to keep it clean.
Liberal in displaying its share price, General Motors is also generous in creating web sites to drive financial and corporate information to the press and other media. GM’s main investor relations section is on the corporate website. Another GM site, entirely separate from the general web site, works in tandem with IR: media.gm.com. Note no ‘www’ which indicates that this site is not open to all. ‘We preceded gm.com by a couple of months,’ explains Ed Tillingsworth, GM’s communications technology manager. ‘This site is run by the media department. It contains some material which should not be on a public site.’
Press privilege
In fact, this three-year-old password – and identity-protected site contains a vast amount of information primarily for pre-registered journalists. The site contains links to annual reports, sales/production data (mostly press releases but also historical information), media archives and more than a dozen other categories. US residents even benefit from a toll-free helpdesk.
‘We consulted our journalist customers and learned that some wanted historical material, while others asked for archived press releases,’ says Tillingsworth. ‘But all of them wanted speed, so we purposely kept graphics to a minimum. That’s why it is not at all slick.’
‘This site contains massive databases of archived material, along with embargoed material for publications with long lead times,’ explains Len Marsico, GM’s director of communications technology. GM’s electronic news distributor, PR Newswire, is not set up to offer what this site provides, either in the kind of material or the amounts.
Marsico notes that the site is not limited to American visitors. ‘Holden, our Australian subsidiary, shares the web site and the ID with us, Saab also joined, England will join, and Opel has a similar site in Germany. We are looking not only to expand but also to better serve the electronic media.’
To date the site has 1,600 journalist subscribers and new ones are still being added. GM advertised the site and, adds Tillingsworth, ‘We spread the word at trade shows and events sponsored by groups like the automobile press association. Now primarily our divisions mention it in their press releases. That has been the most effective.’
Some companies simply cannot afford to have anything less than a web site stunning in design, rich in content and easily navigable (design is stunning precisely because it is functional as well as aesthetically strong).
These sites are regularly and justifiably cited for their excellence, but other relatively obscure sites are similarly outstanding. The size of the web – countless corporate sites containing an infinite number of pages for all intents and purposes – means the usual suspects turn up again and again.
But great cooks are still working wonders in their garages and sheds.
