SOCIAL MEDIA AND IR

Now that I’ve worked in digital communications for a number of years, one thing I’ve realized is that websites exist primarily in two states – newly launched and in need of an update. I’ve also noticed that the time between those two extremes seems to grow shorter with each repetition of the cycle.

Like so much of what I’ve covered previously in this column, the ‘speeding up’ can be largely attributed to two factors: the pace at which information is consumed, shared and considered obsolete by target audiences; and the technology used to serve up the information, making it easier to find, easier to share and easier to replace.

All of which is to say that sometimes it feels like you’re running on a treadmill while a race take place around you. Even making the decision to go ahead with a website overhaul can feel overwhelming; never mind when you actually start to address the various questions that will come your way from your IT team, content owners and other internal stakeholders, Content Management System supplier(s), graphic designers, and so on.

Recently, my company, Agnico Eagle Mines Limited, undertook a complete website (www.agnicoeagle.com) redesign in tandem with a brand refresh. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share how we approached our redesign project and highlight some areas you might want to watch out for the next time you tackle your website. Ready? Here we go!

Start with the end in mind

When you first kick-off your redesign or update project, the most important thing to keep in mind is not what you want the site to look like, nor the new features or functionality that you’re keen to add. The most critical factor is to understand who currently uses your website and why.

Most sites have at least a rudimentary analytics reporting tool built in, so have your webmaster run you some reports. One each for a typical month, quarter and year ought to do the trick. Analyze the reports to get a feel for what the ebb and flow of traffic to your website looks like.

What pages, containing what information, get visited the most? How long do visitors stay there? Is your bounce rate high or low? A bounce rate is the measure of a visitor landing on a web page and almost instantly leaving again – the implication being that he or she clicked there looking for something and obviously didn’t find it. 

The purpose of this exercise is to identify the areas of your website that are clearly favoured by visitors and which they already find useful. It is all too easy to think you know best and assume that what your audience should want from your website is what you would look for personally. The reality is often quite different and unless you check you may find after launch that you’ve actually lost more ground than you’ve gained in terms of meeting the needs of your stakeholders.

What else to consider?

Do you want investor relations-specific functionality available on your website?

• This includes features such as SEC filings, which can be available in a variety of formats and specially tagged for easy analysis. Interactive stock quotes with historical look-ups, dividend and split history are available from some specialized Content Management Systems. Choose your supplier carefully and make sure that its product will meet your requirements.

Will you have a newsroom or media centre with links to social media tools? If so, what tools do you want to integrate?

• Some of the most common are Facebook (social network), Twitter (micro blog), SlideShare (presentation) and YouTube (videos). Most Content Management Systems will offer plug-ins or modules that make the inclusion of this functionality fairly straightforward.

Should your website be tablet-friendly? Will you need to accommodate visitors using a variety of internet browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer to view your site? Will you need to ensure that even those in remote areas, possibly still on dial-up internet connections, can still easily access your website?

• These requirements should be specified upfront and included as key criteria during design as it’s highly difficult, if not impossible, to do so retroactively.

Who is your webmaster and what skill set is offered?

• You will want to determine what resources you will have available to maintain the website post-launch and the degree of technological competency of these resources.
• What Content Management Systems (CMS) will you use? CMS come in a wide variety of flavours. Some require the ability to understand screens of computer code (HTML) in order to make edits and format content. Other systems employ ‘What you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) user interfaces where editing is done on a page that looks almost identical to how the actual website page displays.

Some sage advice

I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on a couple of other items that pertain less to websites generally, or investor relations specifically, but are vitally important to any update or redesign project. So before I sign off let me draw your attention to these final two points:

• Project management is king, change control is queen. In short, this is no minor undertaking. The costs are usually significant, especially if you are doing a full redesign and have budget enough to afford all the bells and whistles in terms of features. The timeline to delivery is often tight, and you will have a variety of stakeholders and suppliers, internal and external, to manage. Have a single point of contact, ideally someone skilled in project management, and make sure proper  processes for controlling the scope/schedule/budget triad are in place so you’re not caught out when scope creep starts to happen, schedules start to slip or costs start rising.
• Communicate, communicate and communicate! I highly recommend the implementation of cross-team daily calls, especially as you head into the critical final month before launch. These calls don’t need to be complicated or long – just a 10-minute touch base first thing each morning with the project manager and webmaster as well as the design company, Content Management System provider and other stakeholders as required. This one small act can be the difference between development and implementation moving forward that day or stalling out because a timely decision that could have been dealt with during the call instead takes all day to sort out via email.

And there you have it – our one year-plus journey to update www.agnicoeagle.com condensed into just over two pages!

I hope when you next find yourself looking at your website and realizing that you too have gone from ‘newly launched’ to ‘in need of an update’ that some of these thinking points prove helpful. I would also encourage you to get in touch with me if you’d like to discuss the process in greater detail.

Additional Resources:

Analytics and Reporting

For help understanding where best to spend your time and money when doing future redesigns as well as monitoring and measuring the impact of changes you’ve made post-launch, consider building analytics functionality into your website. Two good options that are straightforward to use and provide a good variety of metrics are Google Analytics and Webtrends.

Design and Usability

For those interested in what goes on behind the scenes during conceptual development, usability planning and design of a website, a great (and fun!) read is Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.

Industry Benchmarking

The IR Global Rankings uses a comprehensive ranking system for assessing investor relations websites, online annual reports, corporate governance practices and financial disclosure procedures. Here you can review a list of the Top 30 Global Results for investor relations websites and purchase studies that provide insight as to how the winners won.

Sonja Galton is Web and Communications Specialist at Agnico Eagle Mines in Toronto.