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This year has seen a spate of surveys heralding the emergence of social media in the corporate sphere. The latest research suggests that 67% of the FTSE 100 is now actively engaged in social media; another survey pushed for 84% of Fortune’s Global 100. This creates the impression that a revolution in stakeholder interaction and dialogue is upon us. Yet it is worth questioning whether all this social media activity is strictly concerned with corporate communications.

To be fair, this is often a moot point – when, for example, does the communicating of a company’s sustainability policy move into a broader marketing exercise? BP America’s prodigious tweeting about their response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster (they were still averaging over 6 tweets a day in March) arguably has less to do with corporate communications and more to do with brand decontamination – yet this is also a valid CSR issue.

Assessing the extent to which social media is being used for corporate communications is not as easy as it first appears. However, applying some basic common sense does help to paint a more accurate picture. For example, social media channels that are used solely for marketing or recruitment should not be considered. We would also suggest that if a channel is not linked to and from the corporate website – even if it is concerned with corporate communications – it should be discounted.

This second point may seem contentious but we believe it is justified: a company’s social media strategy will quickly fall apart if it is not joined up with their other communications efforts – and none more so than with the corporate site, the company’s principal home on the web. As a previous post discussed, the corporate site is the only online source that a company controls directly. Therefore it makes sense to position the site as the recognised authority: to drive the audience to it from social media channels (where space is often limited) as well as connecting the website audience to those channels.

Our research, then, profoundly disagreed with the notion that 67% of the FTSE 100 were actively engaged in social media. By our criteria, 71% of the FTSE 100 was failing to use social media for corporate communications and to align it with their corporate website. Other European indices also showed room for improvement. The failure rate for the Finnish OMXH25 was 68% and for the Italian FTSE MIB, a staggering 90%. The best performing index was the German DAX 30 – but even here over half of the companies failed to engage.

So the revolution is coming but it’s not here yet.

Posted by Marcus

[Image: Creative Commons License / © Jordiet]

Are you tired of being watched by a multibillion dollar corporation and a 3,500 strong theatre of constantly muttering ‘friends’ feeding each other viral popcorn?

As Facebook fills up with noisy functionality, apps, ads and privacy violations, some people, notably Canadians, seem to be getting a wee bit fed up. One research organization suggests that 500,000 Canadians left Facebook in April alone.

Facebook has been commoditizing our sentiments and aspirations for years – growing off the back of our increasing predilection for snooping and self-promotion. After a decade of bingeing on spontaneous publication, viral content and surface networking, it might be time for a change. Some of us are evidently starting to detox on a new regime of less frequent, deeper engagement with better content in a quieter environment. Yes, people want to share, contribute and collaborate, but it seems they also want to navigate by means of simpler, more reliable coordinates.

Some have already migrated Facebook-type activities behind closed email doors (for example through Google Buzz), others are switching off completely. Most of us ‘like’ Facebook  in the same way we ‘like’ fast food: we keep coming back, not because we are ‘Lovin it’, but because we can’t be bothered to seek out the alternative. We know the menu; it fills you up; it’s everywhere; and it’s rarely closed. It’s not a perfect analogy but in recent years the likes of Starbucks and McDonald’s, wary of a revolt,  have cleaned up their act, gone a bit fair trade and a bit fat free and taken the trouble to work out what local tastes demand. Facebook will have to clean up too and soon. While no stranger to controversy itself, Google is revving up for yet another tilt at the social media top spot.

Posted by Gabriella

As corporate audiences become more complex and demanding in their use of corporate websites, one of our clients has simplified their communication programme to supply their key stakeholders with the most important information at the time they need it most.

An earlier blog post showed that websites receive the most traffic and are explored more deeply when financial results are first announced. To take advantage of this, we created an easy to use Results Centre for Keller Group that provides their users with the key highlights of their performance and a single page where the key documents of the day (Press Release, Webcast & Presentation) can be accessed in full.

At the same time, Keller’s approach to their Annual Report was to move away from the full standalone HTML format and to integrate a smaller amount of the most pertinent content into the corporate site: taking the form of a Year in Review, this very consciously focused on a narrative review of the past twelve months. It also allows immediate access to a video interview with their CEO – taking advantage of the web’s multimedia capacity – and offers a range of functionality allowing users to tailor how they view the annual report content.

Analysts and industry professionals who need to go deeper into the figures, or who insist on accessing a PDF version of a full report, are still provided for but the majority of users who don’t have as much time to spare are offered a flexible snapshot of the most salient information.

What allowed us to take this approach rather than delivering a standard HTML report, laden with lots of information about the company, is because this content is already clearly signposted across the corporate website – displaying their strengths as well as the breadth of their services – so there is no need for it to be repeated. This approach thus guarantees consistency of message and streamlines the delivery process at what is frequently a stressful time of year. Of course, it has the added benefit of concentrating Keller’s web audience on the corporate website rather than spinning them off to subsidiary sites. And their corporate site, after all, is where most of their web traffic naturally goes already. It’s a no-brainer really.

Posted by Niall

One issue we constantly come across with social media is that many companies, while happily to experiment, have baulked at fully integrating it into their communications strategy. One regional division might tweet about their sustainability commitment; another part of the group might set up a Facebook page to help their marketing efforts; but frequently there is no business-wide account. For anyone looking to understand and perhaps engage with a company, this slightly schizophrenic approach quickly leads to confusion, contradiction and frustration.

Of course it may be desirable to have several channels – and this may be essential if the company is global or operates in multiple fields. However, it is also vital to ensure that when your audience first looks for you out on the networks they are more likely to find a global or group account rather than a regional or divisional one. Similarly, your engagement with social media should be clearly indicated on your corporate site and, if you do have multiple social media channels, it makes sense to use your corporate site to provide structure and context.

Henkel, the German household goods company, understands this. One might expect this of a consumer-facing brand but it is surprising how many similar companies fail here. Henkel provides clear signposts to its principal social media accounts from their corporate site’s homepage. The same box also links to a dedicated social media page detailing the subsidiary accounts and channels. They’ve really gone to town here, with 14 Twitter accounts, 29 Facebook pages and 7 YouTube channels, not to mention Flickr, LinkedIn and several other networks and blogs. Each network is given a brief introduction while the individual accounts are divided into regions. The only thing missing, perhaps, is more explanation of what content will be found on each of the individual accounts.

Henkel’s main channels on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have all been branded to look similar in feel to the corporate site and they all present a compelling mixture of corporate and wider content. They all link back to the corporate site as well. The huge number of channels on offer means that there is no shortage of information and detail to be had – should you want to engage simply with the people who make Right Guard deodorant or those who make Pritt glue, you can. However, the first port of call, quite rightly, is with the group as a whole – and from there you are always directed back towards the group corporate website.

Posted by Marcus

Europe’s largest 300 companies were recently ranked by carbon emissions for the first time. The Environmental Investment Organisation report also evaluated these companies for their levels of disclosure and verification. According to the EIO, the best performing company overall was the UK financial giant, Aviva, while the largest absolute emitter for which information was available was perhaps unsurprisingly an energy company – E.ON.

We compared EIO’s ranking against our own IQ benchmarking scores for online CSR reporting in the last quarter – and found extreme differences between the two lists. In fact, not one company in EIO’s Top 30 appears in our Top 30. Aviva, for example, the EIO’s environmental golden boys, only rank 120^th for the quality of their online CSR according to our survey. Aviva do have quite a large CSR section – but while it contains plenty of information it’s almost entirely narrative-driven and fails to engage. By means of comparison, have a look at ENI’s Sustainability section (our top-scoring company for CSR but 103^rd in the EIO ranking).

On one level this disparity is unsurprising: after all, EIO was examining actual emissions and the substance of companies’ CSR reporting, while we were scrutinising the quality and efficacy of their online CSR communications.

But from another angle it is apparent that many companies, who are making strenuous efforts both to reduce their carbon emissions and to improve their disclosure practices, are failing to communicate those efforts. Online is now the first place people will look for this information and companies are doing themselves a disservice and missing a major opportunity if their stakeholders cannot find it when they come looking.

Some companies are managing the correlation between their online CSR performance and their environmental performance – to an extent. Ranked as the top British company in our survey, Kingfisher is 45^th in the EIO survey. From the other perspective, Deutsche Bank is ranked 9^th by EIO and manages 38^th in our survey. However, these companies are very much the exception.

The lesson is clear: if you’re doing good things environmentally, do make the effort to communicate it properly on your website.

Posted by Marcus

[Image: Creative Commons License / © Rob Patrick]

Research published at the end of last month showed that the number of consumers searching for retail information on mobile devices had more than trebled in Q1 compared to last year. Mobile now accounts for 11% of all retail searches.

So after two decades of hype, it would seem that the mobile revolution is finally upon us. According to Cisco, mobile data traffic is expected to increase 26-fold between now and 2015. Last summer, 88% of iPhone users and 92% of Android users were browsing the internet from their mobiles – and this figure will only have grown.

Nor is this growth restricted to the retail sector. The number of people using their mobiles to access corporate websites is also growing exponentially. Our own research revealed that in December 2009, just 0.75% of visits to our clients’ websites came from mobiles; by December 2010, that figure was 3.9% – an annual growth rate of over 400%.

For the corporate communicator, clearly, mobile capability is increasingly vital to ensure that investors, analysts and senior personnel are kept informed of key corporate information, wherever they are. And while corporate sites can be viewed on mobiles, the experience is often painful – they were, after all, designed to be accessed from a laptop or PC on a large, high-resolution screen.

The mobile environment is fundamentally different. Multiple screen resolutions, small screen sizes, small processing power and memory and the lack of a mouse all present problems. On top of this, mobile design and functionality varies hugely: what works well on one device may not even display on others. Mobiles are browsed ‘on the go’ so users tend to have a limited amount of time. Instant access is needed to time-sensitive information such as share price changes and the latest news – this is not the environment for more detailed browsing. Other requirements include ease of navigation and fast upload speeds. Anything that slows or disrupts connectivity is disastrous.

The solution we recommend is a dedicated mobile site that can display key corporate information quickly and clearly and on any mobile device. It’s also important that mobile users are automatically directed to the mobile site – one FTSE100 company received over 17,000 mobile visits last year, but less than 2% of those visitors found their way to the mobile-optimised site.

The actual content is of course a subjective choice – although most companies tend to opt for some combination of their share price, press and news releases, regulatory news, a financial calendar and contact details. Try searching for Phoenix Group on your mobile to see one of our mobile sites for yourself.

Posted by Marcus

[Image: Creative Commons License / © djwudi]

Danske Bank is not in one of the indices we regularly cover but its Corporate Governance section is well worth a closer look. The level of detail and the depth of content provided prove that this is no mere box-ticking exercise. Perhaps the most inspiring fact is Danske Bank’s willingness voluntarily to demonstrate how they meet both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Combined Code – even though there is no statutory reason for doing so. Danske Bank thus reconciles local market governance requirements with those of the wider international banking industry.

Posted by the IQ Team

Eni’s Media section is the highest scoring of all the sites we benchmark – along with Philips and Bayer. The highlight of the landing page is an interactive ‘news box’ displaying the most important recent stories – but the page also offers direct access to a comprehensive multimedia library and media archive. The archive itself can be searched by content, date and country – helping users to find the story they need quickly and efficiently.

The Press Tools section neatly delineates the content into sections such as News, Corporate Announcements, Speeches, Biographies and more. They’re almost making it too easy!

Eni have also added links to their social media presence – which they have wisely included both in their About Us section and here in the media section, offering journalists quick access to plenty of off-site material through, for example, their YouTube channel. This alone is worth a quick visit to see sand artist Ilana Yahav.

Posted by the IQ Team

Deutsche Post leads our ranking in Germany with a website that is up there with the world’s best. It is also the best we have scored anywhere when it comes to the Media and Multimedia categories. In Germany, Deutsche Post takes the top score in 8 of our 12 categories.

Visitors to Deutsche Post’s Careers section are presented with an engaging, interactive menu that neatly directs prospective employees to the relevant section. This menu succeeds in illustrating the breadth of job opportunities at Deutsche Post but does so with a human face.

The section contains numerous interactive case studies and video testimonials showing how talent is developed and demonstrating a real commitment to employees and the recruitment process. Relevant vacancies can be quickly identified and contact details are provided – regardless of the seniority of the position on offer.

Given the quality of their offering, it is unsurprising to see that Deutsche Post’s Careers section is only bettered by two companies amongst the indexes we survey – Philips and Centrica. Overall, Deutsche Post’s site has very few weaknesses, and is one from which companies large and small can take lessons in the benefits of open, transparent communications and effective use of the web medium.

Posted by the IQ Team