Tips from the Index

Can you use these tables to improve your website? Certainly, and not only if you work for a large corporation. The principles – and many of the specifics – are relevant if you work in a smaller company, in the public sector, in an NGO or wherever.

Begin with the general trends that will keep you up with the leaders. Although the great buzz has been about social media (of which more later), the real driver has been the spread of broadband. If you are communicating largely with people in the developed world, it makes good sense to exploit your new high-speed audience.

That explains the explosion in video and multimedia: a few years ago, Flash animation was obligatory on home pages. But it was also worse than pointless, because it slowed loading so much. Broadband has removed that issue (though a static alternative should always be provided), while Flash has obliged with a slick video format that allows films to be shown embedded in the page.

Johnson & Johnson has hung its entire new home page on video, with a choice of three films. StatoilHydro has an embedded video in its top panel. Others mix animation, text and video to make the site come alive. The new PepsiCo site is an example, with four features that often include video. Shell ’s unusual home page has four quadrants that can include multimedia. And Siemens, the grand-daddy of multimedia home pages, continues to produce an impressive online feature every month or so.

Put on moving picture shows

The great thing about video is that it allows companies to tell stories – a sign that the corporate website is no longer seen as simply a brochure, or perhaps a giant filing cabinet, but as an engaging publication/production that people actually can enjoy visiting. Like a good commercial, visitors should come away feeling they have got something from the experience: information, certainly, but also a sense that this is an organisation they feel happy with.

It is, of course, possible to tell stories in text, but web users tend to skip through text and also jump around, so a classic narrative is hard to sustain. Not so with video. Johnson & Johnson ’s home page has three nicely produced films telling stories of how the company has been helping people. General Electric ’s Innovation section is packed with short videos – try ‘Healing hearts in the Arctic’. Statoil has links from the home page to films of artists and musicians it has supported. Watch the Ida Maria video and you can see the way corporate websites could – should? – go.

Catch the YouTube bug

It is difficult to talk about video without including YouTube. A YouTube video that ‘goes viral’ – gets passed from person to person, by the million – is the most powerful online device yet invented. Several companies post their videos on YouTube as well as on the corporate site. Google does – not surprisingly as it owns YouTube. Cisco and Nestlé have videos aimed at graduates. Novartis, Nestlé and Rio Tinto cover health and social responsibility with shared films. GE has a YouTube channel to accompany GE Reports (See below).

But there are also signs of a lack of coordination: Johnson & Johnson has a ‘health channel’ on YouTube, but it does not post its home page videos there. Even if they are not appropriate for this channel, they should surely be given an airing somewhere.

Keep it under control

The question of coordination underpins the next lesson: the secret of an effective web estate lies in good ‘governance’ – in essence, how it is managed. Companies such as Bank of America, Microsoft and Verizon have web estates that work well enough for customers, but let other visitor groups down because they have never been pulled together into a coherent whole. They also give the impression that they – the groups – are somewhat chaotic, which is surprising for such brand-dependent organisations.

The problem is that websites are like weeds: they spring up anywhere. Some companies – more in Europe than the US, though Schlumberger is probably the best of the lot – realised this and relaunched their web estates as coherent wholes. They appointed head gardeners, they have strict rules about what can be planted where and they are vigorous with weedkiller should a random site appear. This is a matter of organisation, of governance, and it is the biggest issue Bowen Craggs deals with as a consultant.

Coordinate with off-screen activity

What of social media, blogs, Twitter and their like? Most of the activity is happening away from the corporate website, and links to this activity are surprisingly slight. Johnson & Johnson has a blog, Johnson & Johnson BTW, but we found only two tiny links to it on the corporate site and none the other way. This again is a matter of governance: it is clear that even though some companies have active social media programmes – with their own managers – there is a lack of coordination with the web team. This makes little sense, because they are both part of the same online communications effort, but is another sign that communications are rarely well joined up.

We did find blogs, though, and many more than a year ago. The IT groups are busy bloggers – they are lucky in that they have a big community of experts (customers, developers, journalists etc) with whom they can communicate and from whom they can learn. It is hard to see other companies being able to replicate this.

Follow the experts

But there is also an intriguing collection of non-IT blogs. The ones that work best are often the more specialist. Shell has a serious one by its climate change adviser, including video of his trip to Antarctica; it has been promoted heavily on the group home page. Procter & Gamble has a blog by Greg Allgood, who runs the Children’s safe drinking water program. Coca-Cola goes for a lighter touch with its Coca-Cola Conversations. This is written by the company archivist and includes items such as ‘Diet coke fashion bottles’ and ‘The animated history of Coca-Cola’. Like the others it is written by an expert, and this is what provides the appeal.

A nice variation on the blog comes from General Electric. GE Reports is flagged as ‘Your source for what’s happening at GE’. It is written in blog format, but is in essence a newspaper, though with video as well as printed content, and is widely promoted on the corporate site.

Twitter – the big fashion of 2009 – is being used by some companies, though again links with the corporate site are limited. We found references to Twitter feeds only on Intel, Rio Tinto and Vodafone. Intriguingly, this is an area where the IT companies do not seem (yet) to be forging ahead. Next year there will be more. Or Twitter will have run out of steam. We shall see.

What the index judges