Customs Street Advisors is a full service investor relations firm based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Under-used & Under-rated: Are Corporate Websites Wasting Assets?

This week on Street Talking in NEXT, I look at how companies passing through challenging phases use their websites as a channel of communications to build stakeholder support and address their concerns, using the case of the rescued Nigerian banks as an example.

Everybody I know remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, had summarily dismissed the chief executives of five banks for various infractions. That date is now known by a string of colourful monikers: Black Friday, Operation Sting, Codename Demystify, Sanusi Sanitization and  Sanusi Tsunami. There may well be other more dramatic titles. Since then, it has become normal for commentators to speak of a pre- and post- August 14, 2009. Watersheds precipitate these kinds of mental cut off point.

I vividly recall my precise coordinates. I was stuck in traffic that afternoon at the Rumens Road- Kingsway junction, listening in disbelief to the news over Wazobia FM. In front of me, a hawk-eyed LASTMA official leapt out of nowhere to order the motorist in front of me to park for using her phone while driving. Who knows, perhaps, she was calling to confirm the news. I even remember what I was wearing. A light blue shirt and burgundy tie.

A million thoughts raced through my head. Though unsure of the market implications of the regulator’s drastic actions, I quickly saw that public perception of the CBN move would depend to a large extent on the competence of the communications teams serving the governor and newly appointed chief executives.

What I did next underlines the truth that habit will trump numbed senses during an emergency. Daring the vigilance of the traffic officers, I picked up my phone and called up my assistant. I instructed her to go to the websites of all the affected banks and take full screenshots of every page. In that hectic transition period, I wanted to monitor how the institutions would use the web to communicate with the public, and importantly, investors. After one week, my verdict was straight Fs.

Regrettably, today, seven months later, their grades have not improved. These banks have completely ignored their websites as effective channels for pushing out key messages. With barely any mention of the CBN’s strategic intent for the institutions or management’s provisional plans, their websites might as well have been frozen on August 13, 2009. Excluding summary biographies of the new management and generic letters to stakeholders that were uploaded to their sites, one finds no content on a credible roadmap at each institution, that takes into consideration its unique challenges and opportunities.

But this is not for lack of their discussing it elsewhere. For example, I recently watched a CNBC Africa interview with Oyinkan Adewale, an executive director at Oceanic Bank, and another frank video chat with John Aboh, the managing director, on YouTube, the video sharing site. Both videos, which were shot in December, ought to have been embedded on the bank’s website. They have not. Sadly, the Press page at the Oceanic Bank website is blank. The news pages on the other bailed out banks’ sites fare no better. It is impossible for the stakeholders addressed in those letters to buy into what they have not been sold on, and increasingly, a lot of them use the web to search for information.

Compare the situation there with two UK mortgage institutions, Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock, which were taken over by the government. Not long after their takeovers, both companies’ launched new sites with dedicated sections on their new ownership. Importantly, the sites had extensive frequently asked questions (FAQs) pages, Strategy discussions and management priorities to address shareholder concerns. How hard can it be to replicate these?

Newspapers will always be a great medium. A few even form part of the breakfast diet for many people. But companies do not control it. Editors do. They determine when and where stories run, the length and tone. Besides paper, by definition, is disposable. How many people still have copies of last month’s paper? This is where the corporate site excels. It is always accessible, malleable to textual and video formats, archives perfectly and is under the company’s control. What better broadcast platform can a company wish for? None I can think of.

Gone are the days when the corporate website was a sandbox for the IT department. Today, it is an integral part of every institution’s corporate communications toolbox.

Anyone who uses tools like Google Analytics and Visistat on their sites for tracking visitor statistics and search engine queries knows too well the gold mine of information their dashboards reveal. Do any of these banks monitor these? If they do, what are they doing about it? How is their web content evolving to match search parameters?

Thinking about the full power of a corporate website unleashed reminds me of the lyrical US Marine recruit Rifleman’s’ Creed in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 classic, Full Metal Jacket: ‘This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend.’ No exaggeration here. At critical times, the fully loaded website can be the choice assault weapon in the company’s arsenal.

The original article may be read here on the NEXT website.

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