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CORPORATE SITES OFTEN FAIL AT JUST BASICS, STUDY SAYS

Posted on March 26, 2001

      A new study indicates that corporate Web sites often fail at what might seem most important: getting out the corporate message.

      The study analyzed 10 Web sites intended to represent a broad range of organizations: four huge American companies, two multinationals with headquarters in Europe, two high-technology start-ups and one government agency. It found that in many cases, reporters could not use the sites to get information as basic as a company's phone number.

      And a public relations contact? That information, deemed among the most important by journalists, was either unavailable or hard to find on half the sites.

      The study, Designing Web Sites To Maximize Press Relations, was released last week by the Nielsen Norman Group. One of the co-authors, Jakob Nielsen, is a well known consultant in Web ``usability.''

      Finding public relations contacts and phone numbers, Nielsen said, is just one reason journalists visit company Web sites. They also do so to check company facts, like the chief executive's age and the history of the company, and to find the latest financial information.

      Nielsen said the study's findings were general and could apply to many Web sites. Of the 10 he studied, he said he found BMW's corporate site to be the least useful for journalists, not only because the public relations contact and other information was hard to find, but because the over-all presentation emphasized style over substance.

      Benetton, the clothing company, required journalists to register before they could retrieve some company information - another bad move, according to Nielsen.

      Of the 10 sites, Wal-Mart's was the most media-friendly, he said.

      On average, the 20 journalists who participated in the study said they succeeded in finding a public relations phone number only 55 per cent of the time, company financial data 60 per cent of the time, and information about management 66 per cent of the time. ``The study found that nearly every company we looked at had made a lot of mistakes in their rush toward more glamorous things on the Internet,'' Nielsen said.

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