Out of curiosity I checked out Bear Stearns’ website to see what had happened to it after ‘merging’ with JP Morgan Chase.
As far as I can work out JP Morgan Chase has dumped most of Bear’s content (good move, no doubt) and shoved its website into the old Bear Stearns template.
Above: Bear Stearns today (http://www.bearstearns.com/)
Below: JP Morgan Chase today (http://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/jpmorgan):
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Corporate identity, Corporate online | 
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Posted by MAT
In his Prospect review of Against the Matchine by Lee Siegel, We-Think by Charles Leadbeater, and Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen says:
“If this debate between Shirky, Leadbeater and Siegel about the relationship between community and technology sounds familiar that’s because it is. It’s at least version 5.0 of a conversation about industrial society begun by Rousseau and Marx and then, as the Web 2.0 crowd likes to put it, “remixed” by everyone…”*
He ends the article by drawing the focus out a little wider: Read the rest of this entry »
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Copy, Corporate communications, Corporate identity, Corporate online, Effectiveness, Online strategy, Public relations, Web 2.0 | 
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Posted by MAT
Todd Defren, Shift Communications, has posted the company’s updated social media press release.
Helping companies structure their online content is always a good thing. It’s quite generous of Shift to offer the template for free.
One of the template’s strengths is it’s using the medium’s innovative structuring potential and moving beyond the metaphor of the *page* (avoiding using the web as a kind of backlit book).
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Content, Copy, Corporate communications, Corporate identity, Corporate online, Online strategy, PR, PR 2.0, Public relations, Usability, User experience/usability, Web 2.0 | 
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Posted by MAT
For sectors where communication between company and public is regulated, like health care, financial products, some consumer goods, the job of corporate website globalization is tricky. Add product availability variations from market to market and the job gets even trickier. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by MAT
The FT’s annual website effectiveness index was published on April 2.
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Posted by MAT
While *Le Web 3* organizers happily parlay about their version of Web 3.0, and while developers continue work to realise Tim Berners Lee’s conception of Web 3.0 (Symantic Web/giant datatbase), Web 2.0 has just received the royal stamp of approval.
The UK’s first Family has dived into YouTube, adding its home videos to hundreds of thousands of other people’s. They’ve called it the The Royal Channel. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by MAT
Just thinking about corporate website internationalization gives me a headache.
Why?
I’ll explain with an example.
Take, for instance, ExxonMobil’s entities’ homepages. I’ve looked (briefly, admittedly) at the integration of country sites and companies into the global brands’ visual identities (for the homepages only). Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by MAT
“Let me save you 100,000 dollars,” says Guy Kawasaki, ex-Apple guy, and leads his audience to the Dilbert mission statement generator where you can find exactly the kind of buzzword bingo that we’ve all come to love to hate. At that point in his (55minute) presentation on the “Art of Innovation”, he’s talking about how companies generate their mission statements. His argument is that companies need three words to describe what they do (tagline), not 60. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by MAT
The online world makes companies easy to compare: you just open several browser tabs and find the product or company websites you want to compare and flick from one to another.
That’s hard to do with magazine articles, or TV and billboard advertising.
I’ve done a very basic and sweeping comparison of 21 websites belonging to pharmaceuticals and medical device companies to show how easy it is to do this kind of comparison. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by MAT
Benchmarking results for global corporates were published yesterday in the Financial Times with an article called Corporate websites: How well are we being served? by David Bowen of Bowen Craggs & Co.
The “Index of corporate website effectiveness” (rankings list) is available as a download (pdf or html) from the FT.
Looking through the rankings and the websites, it’s clear that it takes both investment and hard work to produce effective websites. The standards set by Siemens, BP, IBM and the others raise the bar for everyone else. It won’t do to be a global corporate and have a sub-standard website.
Last year the FT benchmarking report was done by Hallvarsson & Halvarsson. Some of their webrankings are available online.
>Summary on e-consultancy
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Posted by MAT
