continued from page 1

Who will you favor?
After the relatively straightforward task of identifying your audience comes the more subjective task of deciding which audiences are most important to you. The decisions you make here will have far reaching consequences for your site, so it is important to give careful consideration to the question.

Audience size is one factor to consider. Shareowners, particularly retail ones, are often an important audience because they tend to outnumber most other users. There is also a benefit to companies in catering to this group since an effective retail IR website can reduce both costs and impact on the IR department.

Influence is also important. Analysts and fund managers are obviously important to the company, but you need to consider whether that transfers to the IR website as well. Most of these people already have other ways to access information so they tend to use IR websites less often than other audiences, typically once every quarter. On the other hand, their influence is such that no website can ignore institutional investors and analysts completely.

The non-owner group should always figure prominently in your site design. That's because attracting new shareholders is, or at least should be, a fundamental objective of any IR program. How well you cater to this audience is obviously important to your existing shareholders as well. Not only do they want to see you trying to attract demand to the stock, but the same material used to proposition potential new investors also provides an argument why current shareholders should continue to hold their shares.

Using the same audience definition table above, identify which audiences will enjoy priority when it comes to deciding where to put the various content elements in your site's hierarchy. We've indicated the priority audiences with a one, while secondary audiences get a two.

In the above table, we have indicated that our priority will go to the non-owners group. Within the groups, however, we will give more weight to individual shareowners than institutional ones, and more weight to institutional non-owners that retail ones. So the objective of our site is to provide content which will be useful for institutional non-owners and to individual shareowners, in that order.

Prioritizing each group and subgroup in this way is important because it will help determine where to put various content items in the next part of the site structuring process.

Prioritize the content on your site
The first step in prioritizing content is to compile a list of the various elements that will populate your site. Think in terms of core and value-added content. Core content includes such things as stock quotes, charts, news releases and annual reports. Value-added elements may include content specific to understanding the company and its industry.

Once you have developed a list of all the content elements, you must consider the relative value of each element to each of your audience groups and subgroups. To assess the value of each content item to each audience, we use four criteria. These are:

• Entry Knowledge: How much do users already know about the content element when they visit the site?
• Frequency: How often will people in the audience group or subgroup use the information?
• Importance: How important is the information, not only to site users, but to the company itself?
• Uniqueness: Is the content unique to the site or is it easily available from other sources?

For each of these criteria, we assign a score out three to each content item, where three is the highest value and 0 the lowest. For example, if a content element cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet, you will give it a 3 for Uniqueness. Remember that the scoring works in reverse for Entry Knowledge; the more knowledge users bring with them, the lower the score.

This may seem complicated at first, but you'll soon get the knack of it. To show you how it works, let's run through a sample assessment of stock quotes and annual reports for the individual owner and the institutional non-owner groups.

Measuring the value of content for each audience
Our process of assessing each content element against our four criteria forces you to put yourself in your users' shoes. It makes you think like the people who will use your site, which in turn reveals some interesting insights you probably never would recognize otherwise.

Take stock quotes and charts, for example. Many IR websites place quotes and charts high in the site structure and in the navigation scheme. But by subjecting quotes to our test criteria, we find that quotes have low value and therefore do not deserve the prominence they often get.

We arrive at that conclusion of testing stock quotes and annual reports against our four criteria. We do this for both of our individual owner and institutional non-owner subgroups.

Value of stock quotes for individual owners
Entry knowledge. We gave stock quotes zero points for entry knowledge because we concluded that most individual owners would enter the site already knowing something about our current stock price.

This is fairly obvious when you consider the huge number of investment resources available to shareholders on the Internet. These other sources - everything from online brokerages to investment portals like Yahoo! Finance - offer a much more convenient way for shareholders to monitor share prices. They can set up lists which give them delayed -- or real-time -- quotes for all of their holdings on a single screen. Our site, on the other hand, provides a delayed quote for only our company.

It's also likely that individual-owners will come to our site via one of these other investment sites, rather than directly. So the likelihood is very high that individual shareowners visiting our site will be forearmed with some knowledge of how our stock is performing.

Frequency: We gave a score of 1 point to stock quotes for frequency. This assumes that people who have been at our site for a while may check to see if there has been any change during their visit. Of course, they will most likely only do this during market trading hours, so use of the quote will still be infrequent.

Importance: From the individual shareholder's perspective, our share price is obviously important. For the sake of optics, we graciously assign the quote 2 points for importance.

Uniqueness: Since quotes are two-a-penny on the Internet, we give them zero points for uniqueness.

The table summarizes the result of our site's stock quote against our four criteria. At a total of just three points, stock quotes fall way down on the list of priorities for individual owners when put through our process. This is quite consistent with other research carried out on individual investors' use of IR websites. A survey conducted in August 2000 showed that quotes on IR websites ranked quite low in importance for individual investors.

While our conclusions might seem suprising given what you know about your website's traffic paterns, be sure that you carefully disect who is actually using your stock quote page. In our experience, more than half of traffic to IR website quotes comes from inside the company itself. This can rise to around 90% when their is an employee share purchase plan in place and stock quote is linked to the company's Intranet site.

For companies based in less highly developed capital markets, stock quotes may well deserve a higher score than afforded them in our example. This is because quotes for some exchanges are less widely available so investors must rely on individual companies' websites. In such cases, stock quotes will score higher on "uniqueness" and "frequency."

Value of stock quotes for institutional non-owners
The results for how important stock quotes are to institutional non-owners are very similar to those for individual shareholders, and for much the same reasons.

Entry knowledge: Professionals are very likely to know something about our share performance before visiting our site. Score: 0.

Frequency: Professionals are highly unlikely to use our site to check our stock quote since they have far better ways of getting quotes in real time. Score: 0

Importance: While professionals are unlikely to use the quote, it is nonetheless important for appearance sakes that we provide one. Score: 2.

Uniqueness: Same as for individual shareholders. Score: 0

By adding our score for both audiences together, we arrive at a grand total for stock quotes of 5 points, see table below.