EightBlack.

This article courtesy the Financial Times, London.

Companies are failing to take advantage of the unique opportunities the internet offers for communicating with shareholders, in spite of lobbying long and hard for the privilege, according to a survey of FTSE 100 companies.

The survey found it was often difficult to search the information provided online by large companies.

Most FTSE 100 companies put their annual reports online in large PDF files that were slow to open or download. Only a minority used the interactivity of the internet to help users find information and to attract the interest of investors.

Jonathan Hynes of Smith Partnership, the business communications consultancy that carried out the survey, said companies had campaigned to be allowed to take advantage of the savings in paper and money.

“You’d think the long-awaited revisions to the Companies Act that allow them to supply their annual reports to shareholders via their websites would be embraced with enthusiasm and vigour. Not so, however.”

I actually stumbled across this story in a clients reception area last week. It refers to Aviva as leading the Smiths Online Reporting Index and it was in fact, a subsidiary of Aviva I was seeing.

My observation with companies and the net is not that the key stakeholders don’t understand it, they just don’t want to take the risks associated with marketing online and are still clinging to the belief that they can influence what their customers and market think of them.

They can’t. Period.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 9:18 am and is filed under Corporate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.