2. The evolving
communications landscape
What is driving the evolution?
• Technological advancements
• Ease of accessibility to information
• Shifts in stakeholder expectations
What does this mean for the humble corporate website?

3. The corporate website
- keeping up!
“Website effectiveness” – the holy grail!
• Many are leading the pack
• Many striving to keep up
• Many are confused!

4. The early days
In the early days, the corporate website
was mostly about…
BP’s 1996 website

5. Refining our
understanding
As the corporate website grew, so did
understanding of the different stakeholders
needs.
BP’s 2003 website

6. Focus on
content
And content became the focus in a world of
social networking

7. The digital
‘landscape’
Today's corporate website wears
many hats
• Reputation management
• Crisis management
• Recruitment vehicle
BP’s current website
• Reporting tools

8. So what is next?

10. From corporate to customer
The evolution of the Thames Water website
Presentation by:
Andy Freeman
Digital Communications Manager, Thames Water

11. A little bit about us…
We are the UK's largest water and sewerage
company, serving London and the Thames
Valley.
Some key facts:
• 13.8 million wastewater customers and 8.7 million clean water customers
• We supply 2,600 million litres of drinking water every day
• We treat 2,800 million litres of sewage every day
• Regulated business – equivalent to a FTSE100
• Spending £5bn between 2010-2015 on upgrading our network
• Take over 250,000 calls a month
• Working in over 500 streets at any one time
• Nearly 5,000 employees

12. 2007…

14. Key challenges
1. Manage expectation and build relationships across
the business with senior managers and directors
2. Define the purpose of the website
3. Secure funding
4. Communicate the online vision to employees

15. Our vision
Vision
If customers had a choice, they
would choose Thames Water.
Our desired customer experience, informed
by our customers is:
• They can trust us
• We’re easy to deal with, and
• We really care

16. Where we are today…

17. Current website
Our website is independently ranked top in the Uk
utilities industry for usability – hitting the highest ever
score
Highlights:
• Traffic up 20%
• Self-service up 30%
• Return visitors up 60%
• Crisis management tool
• Three awards
• Digital now established
as a key channel

18. The past 12 months:
Planning for the future
• Networking – internal and external
• Focus groups
• Developing our online vision and
strategy
• Securing significant investment
• Aligning the digital strategy to the
business strategy

19. So, to the future…

26. The evolution
of the corporate
website
Mark Smith, Creative Director
15th October 2010

27. The changing
digital landscape
• Twitter grew by 752% during 2008 with 4.43 million
unique visitors in the US alone last year
• YouTube has 200 million unique users every month
• Blogs received 77.7 million unique visitors in 2008
• FaceBook has 150 million active users

28. Think
bigger picture
• Align your digital communications with your other marketing assets
and the wider business goals
• Understand your audiences, where they spend their time online
and what they are saying about you
• Identify a series of prioritised deliverables, a ‘roadmap’ for
digital success
• Formulate a digital strategy

29. Building a successful
digital strategy
• Digital outreach
• Brand advocacy
• Channel convergence
• Customisation
• Thought leadership

30. Digital
outreach
• Conversations about your brand are no longer confined to your website
• Understand where your audience is, where its going and
what its saying
• Proactively manage and protect your reputation through social media
channels
• Accept some loss of control and become part of the experience and
conversation

31. The
IT crowd
Dell Computers taps into its own customers as a source of talent and
innovation. Customers can submit ideas for new products or
improvements to existing services and vote on ideas they would most
like to see developed.

32. Brand
advocacy
• Identify the human face of your organisation
• Influence the influencers
• Enable and encourage brand ambassadors to represent your brand
outside the confines of the corporate website
• Establish trust and build equity by leveraging your
stakeholders social networks

33. Come fly
with me
Virgin America have partnered with Klout,
an analytics service that tracks users’ influence on
Twitter (based on variables such as the quality and
number of followers and retweets),
to offer flights to influencers in Toronto.

34. Channel
convergence
• Communication, not technology led
• Appropriate channel, appropriate message
• Don’t just deliver the same unimaginative message
through a different channel
• Integrate social content and discussion back
into your website.

35. Channel
hopping
Ernst & Young followed the ‘joiner’ demographic and
constructed a graduate recruitment campaign entirely
through social media channels, using FaceBook as the
hub to
‘share the EY experience’.

36. Content
customisation
• Deliver the right content to the right audience
• Customise, not personalise
• Develop targeted content
• ‘Dashboard’ relevant content and functionality
• Keep it simple!

37. Getting
personal
A new wave of personalisation technologies
combines aggregation with customised content,
without compromising an individuals privacy.
DailyPerfect analyses publicly available browsing
data and information to build profiles of individuals
and push content to them accordingly.

38. Thought
leadership
• Build a thought leadership culture
• Sharing knowledge will build credibility
• Repackage what you already have
• Meaningful thought leadership, not empty PR speak
• Invite your stakeholders to participate

39. Bright
ideas
GE’s ‘innovation experiment’ where businesses,
entrepreneurs, innovators and students are invited to
share their ideas on how to build the next-generation
power grid - and the best ones win venture capital
funding.

40. Summary
• True interaction now takes place way beyond the corporate website
• Your website still has an important role to play, but think about
the bigger picture
• Extend your online presence outside of your corporate website,
where appropriate
• Use other channels, but don’t forget to innovate on your
corporate website
• Understand, follow and, ultimately participate in social media,
but not at the expense of your corporate website

41. The evolution
of the corporate
website
Jason Ross, CEO
15th October 2010

42. Corporate
Digital trends
3D TV
Interactive TV
Video search

43. Website
effectiveness
• Website effectiveness – is the term passé?
• Not so much about the holy grail
• Think digital strategy - roadmap