What geek could look upon BASF’s web site without feeling a tingle all the way to the root of his C drive? It’s got everything: podcasts and vidcasts, RSS, the annual report in both HTML and PDF, a Google-quality search function and a bit of animation. This is German engineering at its best, a sleek BMW on the info autobahn that retains the folksy charm of a Volkswagen. This chemicals company web site has chemistry.
The geek’s practical side recognizes that bells and whistles alone don’t satisfy. Yet BASF’s site also deftly fulfills the core values that IR magazine surveys repeatedly show investors everywhere want: an enormous depth of information organized so it’s all easy to find. No wonder the company won best use of the internet at the most recent IR Magazine Continental Europe Awards.
The lesson from BASF: flashy features make a site memorable, but they must not hide the underlying information or make it difficult to get at. Added features should increase transparency, not hinder it. In other words, they should be tools, not gimmicks.
Matsushita Electric’s IR web site has some fun animation and a Flash-based annual report, apparently in keeping with its Panasonic brand. But Makoto Mihara from Matsushita’s Osaka-based IR planning team makes it clear that ease of use, not a desire to look cutting edge, is behind these features. ‘We have made improvements targeted at making the IR site easier for investors, analysts and others to visit and use,’ he says. ‘Animation is one idea that we implemented to make what we wanted to say easier for visitors to understand.’
Matsushita has offered both PDF and HTML versions of its annual report since its first IR site was created in 1999, and produced the first Flash edition in 2005. ‘By that time, users had more powerful PCs with broadband connections,’ Mihara says. ‘We made the decision to use Flash technology as a means to make the annual report’s content more readily accessible to everyone.’
Tipping point
Broadband is indeed the fuse that set off the explosion. ‘Multimedia on the web took off in the last year because broadband penetration reached a tipping point,’ says Al Loehnis, a former equity analyst and founding director of Investis, a European online corporate communications firm.
Website Optimization, a web marketing firm, confirms Loehnis’ assumption with its prediction that broadband penetration in US homes would hit 80 percent in February 2007, up from about 55 percent in March 2005. More than 92 percent of US workers are already connected. Meanwhile, 64 mn people in the European Union now have broadband access, and in the UK broadband internet is cheaper than dial-up.
Video and other bandwidth-intensive features just weren’t very practical until recently, though video has already become widespread in Europe, with executive interviews and CEO speeches, or finance directors walking investors and analysts through their results using online presentations. Benetton’s last annual report had links to audio and multimedia content. ‘Companies are thinking about using the web for direct, dynamic, interactive communications; showing rather than just telling,’ Loehnis says.
And with YouTube and other video-based sites spreading fast, look out for more video on North American IR web sites (see Disclosure in the digital age, page 48). One expert suggests the online IR ‘arms race’ promotes a philosophy of ‘build it and they will come’. But the companies IR magazine talked to for this article all keep careful track of what investors and analysts want – and what they use. ‘Before the world needs more attention-grabbing technology on IR sites, it needs a clearer, more concise and consistent communications process,’ points out Troy Ussery, CEO of B2I Technologies.
Track and learn
Like Thomson and Shareholder.com, the other two leading builders of North American IR sites, B2I ties in traffic tracking with web site management. New features, Ussery stresses, should be driven by the behavior of analysts and investors, not the size of the IR team’s budget.
Andrea Wentscher, BASF’s junior IR manager responsible for the German company’s IR web site, tracks clicks to guide new innovations. ‘For example, we noticed that a lot of people were interested in the PDF file of our equity story so we decided to set up an HTML version,’ she says. ‘We started podcasting in August 2006, and after a year we’ll see how many users there are, then decide whether to keep doing it.’
Wentscher uses a tool that tells her which pages are most popular with visitors, and whether visitors are internal or external, English or German. She recently put a survey on the site asking web visitors such questions as whether they’re retail or institutional investors, and soliciting suggestions for improvements. She is now evaluating the 1,000 responses.
Petro-Canada, one of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies, enjoys a luxury not shared by many: a whole e-business team of six to create and manage all the company’s external web sites. ‘Good metrics are essential to good health on your web site,’ says Lorne Lerner, Petro-Canada’s director of e-business. ‘They tell you what people are looking at, for how long, what they’re not looking at, and what they’re looking for that you don’t have. They tell you how well your site is meeting the needs of your visitors.’
Matsushita Electric, in a search for more ways to improve its web site, is getting user opinions through an outside IR consultant. ‘That kind of feedback is a very useful reference tool for us,’ Mihara says.
Devon Energy recently started offering its conference calls as MP3 downloads in direct response to an analyst’s suggestion. ‘We like to hear feedback, good or bad, and analysts are never bashful with suggestions,’ says Shea Snyder, IR supervisor at the Oklahoma City oil and gas company. ‘In this case, offering MP3s made good sense considering analysts often have dozens of conference calls to listen to every quarter.’
Some new features don’t need to wait for any prompting; they’re simply ‘no-brainers’, as Loehnis says. For example, when it’s time to rebuild the press release section of your web site, it’s simple to add an RSS feed. It may be possible to add it to an existing press release section. RSS also makes sense for an events calendar, white papers and executive speeches.
Loehnis suggests a good FAQ section would benefit from RSS, too. ‘If the same questions are being asked many times after a release, add them to the FAQ and send out the answers through an RSS feed,’ he says. ‘A lot of these advances are small things that just help people to use web sites more easily. You end up sending the message: we’ve thought about what you need and we’re trying to provide as many options as possible.
Techno wish list
Blackberry-friendly sites
Chat Executive blogs
Flash investment story
Google-quality searching
HTML annual report
Interactive charts
Podcasts
RSS
Shopping cart downloading
Tailored alerts
Traffic-tracking tools
Vidcasts
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