Nokia: Leaving old connections open

An unflattering insight into a governance issue within a company website.

The Site

Nokia, the Finland-based telecoms company, has links on both its Press and Investor home pages to a media release about the merger of its Networks Business Group into a joint venture with Siemens of Germany.

Both links go to identically worded releases in the Press section, but there the similarity ends. While the link from Press goes to a Press releases sub-section of the current site, that from Investors goes to a Press sub-section of About Nokia on an older template (and at a different URL). The same happens with other highlighted press releases from the Investors home page.

The Takeaway

Nokia follows the convention among big companies by highlighting news and press releases about market-sensitive news in both the media and investor sections of its site. This ensures that analysts and journalists can find the information quickly and easily. Unfortunately, here investors in particular are given an unflattering insight into a governance issue on the Nokia website.

Clearly, the investor relations people have control over their own home page and are uploading latest news to a different, older template than are their colleagues in press relations. This can hardly go unnoticed as, quite apart from the separate URLs, the two templates have strikingly different colour schemes – predominantly green for the current template, blue for the older version. Allied to the differently configured main navigation section, this is at best unsettling and at worst confusing.

First published on 20 June, 2006