By B.L. Ochman
Corporate/investor websites have outlived their usefulness. It’s time for companies to blend their corporate and investor information into their consumer-facing websites.
A handful of the Fortune 50 are leading the way. Hats off to them. The rest of the corporate world needs to follow their example.
These days, any information a company would put on a corporate or investor website is available in many other places online – generally with expert analysis.
AT&T, General Motors, Home Depot, Target, Walgreen’s, Johnson & Johnson, State Farm Insurance, and PepsiCo have blended their corporate and investor information into their consumer sites – making a full picture of the company available to anyone who wants one.
Make the corporate info accessible
The corporate and financial information tends to be in categorized links on the bottom of the homepage – easy to find, easy to access and leading the trend toward corporate openness.
Along with a couple of other Fortune 50 companies, Wal-mart still has a corporate site, but it’s consumer site, also contains all of the corporate and investor information. It’s time to take the corporate sites down.
A chance to have the corporate message heard
If you have Internet access, you can find an enormous amount of information about every aspect of a company’s operations, sales, products, and philosophy. The problem is, some of the information online is wrong, entered by people trying to discredit companies, or out of date.
A company that wants to present an accurate and current picture of itself should be putting all that information in one site. That way, their view is heard, their numbers are considered, and their news is seen. Because these days, that’s as close as any company is going to get to controlling the message.
Bonus link: Let’s ban the “About Us” page on websites