Themes and trends

It is the nature of the Index that it is best studied in detail. Among the many specifics in this year’s analysis, some shone brightly.

If you have to be stranded on a desert island with only two corporate websites, take General Electric and Google. They are the kings of content, with more interesting stuff on them than any others. GE offers videos, its Ecomagination site and a lively GE Reports newspaper/magazine/blog. From google.com, find your way to google.org, and see how its technology has been used in Japan, or analyse the environment with Google Earth Engine, track disease with Google Flu Trends….

That neither site is atop the Index is because their management is weak – no one is trying to make them work as smoothly running machines. Its CEO has said that GE must focus responsibility away from the centre. Lovely, but a mistake with the corporate web presence. The feature links on ge.com’s home page all led to separate sites – no joined up message and something of a nightmare to navigate.

On the other hand, too many companies make no attempt to bring their sites to life, treating them more as filing cabinets for official documents. Banco Santander’s is an example – lovely for investors who do not mind ploughing through legalese, tough for everyone else.

In defence of reputation

The web has given companies a way of explaining their case that they simply did not have before. Blogs, tweets and the like are increasingly important – but there is only one place where you can be sure of the official line.

BP.com did not rescue the group’s reputation in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster last year, but it must have limited the damage. Backed up with social media and a jointly run crisis site, it acted as a giant information machine. Here the oil company gave a blow-by-blow account of what it what was doing, it provided a mass of practical information (download a fisherman’s claim form in Vietnamese), it spawned state-specific sites.

General Electric used its GE Reports site to give detail on the Fukushima reactors in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake of March 2011, correcting what it saw as flaws in newspaper reports. Chevron continued to battle to avoid paying massive reparations for pollution in Ecuador, making notably energetic use of its website and YouTube– it has posted film purporting to show the other side misbehaving, as well as a professionally made ‘documentary’ putting its point of view. This is the right battlefield because the web is where its opponents are also putting most of their energy.

Relaunch into confusion

A particular problem this year is the number of companies that are moving towards new sites, but are creating chaos in the process. BNP Paribas has always had a quirkily different site – now it has several quirkily different sites all pretending to be part of the same thing and making life difficult for users. Similarly, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have strong individual sections, but they are handling migration to new templates clumsily. HP’s tumble down the rankings, to 37 from 28, is almost entirely to do with this chaos.

Back to the future?

The corporate home page is arguably the most important piece of real estate a company has. It is still the main entry point for a site, and there is still no consensus on how it should be used.

Siemens, the leader of this year’s Index, reinvented the home page in 1997 by turning its into a series of multimedia microsites. Now it is trying again, with a ‘story’ approach that features a new short film every week or so. By deliberately avoiding any obvious marketing message, it presumably hopes the YouTube generation will take to it. Will it spawn a host of imitators, as its last one did? Too early to tell, but it is nice to see a giant corporation prepared to take such risks.

Following the herd not demand

Why do so many investor relations teams happily spend on elaborate online annual reports, when there is plenty of evidence that analysts – the only audience they tend to say they are interested in – prefer PDF files? Partly because there is a vendor industry persuading them; more because other companies do – following the herd is always a safe option.

There is a good reason to produce a nice online report – to engage individual shareholders. But this seems not to be the motivation. Companies that do take their private shareholders seriously will often offer something exciting in the annual report: Barclays’ integration of video is a nice example.

Moving off platform

The arrival of a new machine that does not run Flash would once have caused big headaches. Yet as the iPad, built by Flash-averse Apple, has become massively popular, most web teams have taken it in their stride. More impressive, some companies – Nestlé and Shell, for example – have used the arrival of the iPad (along with iPhone and Android phone) as a challenge and have produced ‘app’ versions of their sites.

The real significance of the app is that is does not use the worldwide web. Its great joy – that it was one standard that would work on anything – is starting to fade. That means more opportunities but also more complexity for often tiny web teams.

So to social media

We classified 22 of the Index’s 75 sites as ‘social media friendly’. IT companies have a natural community of experts, so can easily exploit the social side – see Cisco’s Newsroom for how far that can go. Elsewhere, most companies limit themselves to displays of networking and bookmarking icons plus, perhaps, some Twitter feeds.

Deeper integration of site and social media is concentrated in careers, where Facebook’s demographic makes it a no-brainer. Otherwise, spot Siemens’ brave decision to show how many social media comments have been posted about its home page videos and Walmart Stores’ coverage of social media channels by its search engine. This last may be the most significant sign of all – let’s see if others follow.

Read state of the corporate web