Themes and trends

The broad story from the FT Bowen Craggs Index 2009 is that corporate web estates are getting better. Although the average score is up by only four points, many more companies have high quality sites.

Last year, 23 companies scored more than 180 points in the overall index; this year 32 do so. That is explained partly by the injection of new blood (see Methodology) but also by genuine improvement. Looking at the 62 companies in both the 2008 and 2009 indexes, 40 have seen their score increase, 20 by more than 10 points.

This has also brought great bunching near the top. Coca-Cola, which was ranked 10 last year, has dropped only a handful of points but is now at 22. Not fair, but it shows the general progress. It also makes the individual metric tables particularly interesting, because these are where the real differences show.

The geographic story is shifting, slowly. The Europeans still dominate, but the Americans are picking up fast. This has opened up a worrying gap with the ‘Rest of world’, where there has been little progress.

Points of improvement

The improvements come from three sources. First, new entrants. Schlumberger has a site that defines our favourite word, ‘appropriate’. It is not flashy but knows what it wants to do – give business customers what they need – and does so with impressive efficiency. Rio Tinto and StatoilHydro are interesting, too, particularly through their exploitation of video.

Second, relaunches. Roche shows how to do them: with huge attention to detail but also imagination. The site’s navigation system is unusual but intuitive, while its multimedia press releases – not just sticking the paper version online – take a rather tired format onward and upward. It looks good, too. Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi-Aventis, Unilever and Wal-Mart have also relaunched successfully.

Third, polishing away. BP ’s colossal estate is more than five years old. It always had impressive content, but also usability glitches; steadily these have been smoothed out. Novartis, too, has climbed up, by making small improvements across the board. General Electric, which tumbled down the ranking last year after a poorly managed relaunch, has already fixed most of the problems and is back in the top 10.

Balanced scorecard

GE is not the only one to stumble on relaunch. Siemens, leader for the past two years, has introduced a navigation system that can most kindly be described as proprietary. Same for Shell, where the need to put ‘messages’ (innovative, responsible) at the centre has caused bafflement to its users. That both still make the top 10 shows just how good their content is.

One of the points of the index is that it rewards companies that do well across all metrics. This could be regarded as a weakness, but it is the fairest way, and the metric-by-metric lists allow companies to concentrate on particular areas if they wish. It explains why the three leading companies – Roche, BP and Nokia – stand out several points above the others: they have no significant areas of weakness. By contrast the next group of sites let themselves down in at least one area. Shell and Siemens took their eyes off the ball with the navigation, as noted, while Schlumberger ’s superbly built site is weak in social responsibility, ENI falls down on careers and Unilever on its press centre.

Reflections of the company

There is a particular problem with many US sites: they reflect the way the company operates and, if this is decentralised, it just does not work on the web. Google and Microsoft are both in the top 20 overall, but come way down the table on the construction metric. That is because their web estates are a gathering of dozens or hundreds of sites, with only a loose attempt to hold them together. You (or they) could say this does not matter, but it does. First, it creates a brand-damaging sense of confusion as people try to find their way round. Second, it can cause real problems for some visitors. If you are looking for a job at Google, you will probably want to check out the company – try finding your way from the jobs areas to corporate information; it is not easy.

Other US sites suffer from a similar problem, though we suspect for a different reason: the web estates have grown up piecemeal since the mid-1990s and have never been relaunched fully. AT&T, Bank of America and Verizon Communications all have loose federations of sites that are easy to get lost in. By contrast, Citigroup used to be similar, but has just been relaunched as a coherent whole. This is intriguing. The financial crisis means that corporate information (is the company going bust?) is much more important than it was; simply providing routes for customers to find and buy products is no longer enough. Citigroup must have planned its revamp before the crisis, but it will be interesting to see if other companies now go down the same path.

Changes for the better

Having said that, some of the best news in the index comes from the US. General Electric has been polishing its site vigorously, while Intel has risen sharply with the launch of a new investor section: its weak area is now one of the best we know. The real change has comes at the bottom of the table, which is now free of US companies. Last year’s laggards, American International Group (AIG) and PepsiCo, have been relaunched. Both still have much room for improvement, and we suspect that AIG’s troubles have caused a particular hiatus. The customer-facing areas are now slick, but the weak corporate information has not been touched. Its last corporate responsibility news item was from January 2008. Unfortunate, given that many visitors will want to see what it is saying for itself.

Slow progression in emerging states

Improvements among US companies have accentuated the problem of groups from emerging and developing economies. They are now significant in the index by virtue of their number: two Brazilian, four Russian, one Indian, eight Chinese and one Mexican. But the highest placed, Vale, is ranked 48. There has, furthermore, been little development: only Russia’s Sberbank has relaunched itself.

What is the problem? The clue may lie in the investor relations scores, which are almost without exception respectable. This suggests that many companies think of their websites as simply being communications channels with investors. This was common enough in Europe and the US 10 years ago, so we can infer that the Russians, Chinese and others just have to catch up? A specific issue is the absence of any careers information on several sites (we checked the local language version). This may be a matter of policy, but does not appear to come from local regulation: every country has at least one company that is putting jobs information online.

And the news is not entirely bad. As we noted last year, China Mobile ’s state-owned parent site (chinamohbile.com) is an altogether slicker affair. The quoted site we look at acts pretty much as its investor relations section. Look to Latin America and there is a different class of site in Brazil. Neither Vale nor Petrobras score particularly well overall, but both have strong features. Petrobras’ social responsibility material is up with the best from the West.

Positioned outside the mainstream

The poor performance of Japanese sites continues to baffle, however. There are fewer listed this year, because of stock market movements, but there has been no sign of progress and the new entrant, Nintendo, reinforces an unhappy picture. There must be exceptions, but in general Japanese companies have not taken the web as seriously as others. Why not? Probably for the same reason that most companies do poorly in the table: senior managers have yet to see it as a mainstream communication medium. Let’s see if that changes in the next year.

Tips from the Index