Alcoa: Missing the point of contacts

Raising expectations of a facility then failing to deliver serves neither journalists nor the organisation.

The Site

Alcoa is the world’s leading producer of aluminium and aluminium products. On its central website’s main navigation bar a dropdown menu under News leads to a Media Contacts page. This gives three named contacts with their (US) telephone numbers and a link labelled ‘email’. In each case this leads not to a ready-addressed e-mail to the contact but to an enquiry form identical – bar the heading – to contact forms elsewhere on the site.

Alternative links on the Media Contacts page, to Other Contact Information and Email Alerts, are to the site’s main Contact Us list and the investor news alerts feature respectively. News releases have no story-specific contacts, giving at most the main website address for follow-up enquiries.

The Takeaway

Given how adept most companies are at distributing news releases and setting up press conferences it is surprising how relatively poor many of them are at building relationships with the media online. Alcoa is a particularly striking example because it sets up the expectation of a service it then fails to deliver, leaving journalists frustrated and an opportunity to add to its own contact book unexploited.

Journalists are usually in a hurry or under deadline pressure so they want to be able to find or follow up information quickly. Alcoa’s news releases are a contacts dead-end, while its Media Contacts enquiry form dashes the expectation of getting through to the nominated contact (especially frustrating for journalists outside the US who are quite likely to be trying to get in touch outside American office hours).

Alcoa is missing the chance to initiate a relationship with journalists through its online form. A customised version could gather basic information, such as a journalist’s publication or specialist ‘beat’, which can then be used to target information or set up an ‘A’ list of prime contacts. The same can be achieved with a media-specific e-mail alert system.

First published on 07 December, 2004