Everybody I know
remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the
news that Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank of Nigeria governor, had
summarily dismissed the chief executives of five banks for various
infractions. That date is now known by a string of colourful monikers:
Black Friday, Operation Sting, Codename Demystify and Sanusi’s Tsunami.
There may well be other more dramatic titles. Since then, it has become
normal for commentators to speak of a pre- and post- August 14, 2009.
Watersheds precipitate these kinds of mental cut off point.
I vividly recall my
precise coordinates. I was stuck in traffic that afternoon at the
Rumens Road- Kingsway junction, listening in disbelief to the news over
Wazobia FM. In front of me, a hawk-eyed LASTMA official leapt out of
nowhere to order the motorist in front of me to park for using her
phone while driving. Who knows, perhaps, she was calling to confirm the
news. I even remember what I was wearing. A light blue shirt and
burgundy tie.
A million thoughts
raced through my head. Though unsure of the market implications of the
regulator’s drastic actions, I quickly saw that public perception of
the CBN move would depend to a large extent on the competence of the
communications teams serving the governor and newly appointed chief
executives.
Habits and emergencies
What I did next
underlines the truth that habit will trump numbed senses during an
emergency. Daring the vigilance of the traffic officers, I picked up my
phone and called up my assistant. I instructed her to go to the
websites of all the affected banks and take full screenshots of every
page. In that hectic transition period, I wanted to monitor how the
institutions would use the web to communicate with the public, and
importantly, investors. After one week, my verdict was straight Fs.
Regrettably, today,
seven months later, their grades have not improved. These banks have
completely ignored their websites as effective channels for pushing out
key messages. With barely any mention of the CBN’s strategic intent for
the institutions or management’s provisional plans, their websites
might as well have been frozen on August 13, 2009. Excluding summary
biographies of the new management and generic letters to stakeholders
that were uploaded to their sites, one finds no content on a credible
roadmap at each institution, that takes into consideration its unique
challenges and opportunities.
But this is not for
lack of their discussing it elsewhere. For example, I recently watched
a CNBC Africa interview with an executive director at Oceanic Bank,
Oyinkan Adewale, and another frank video chat with the managing
director, John Aboh, on YouTube, the video sharing site. Both videos,
which were shot in December, ought to have been embedded on the bank’s
website. They have not. Sadly, the Press page at the Oceanic Bank
website is blank. The news pages on the other bailed out banks’ sites
fare no better. It is impossible for the stakeholders addressed in
those letters to buy into what they have not been sold on, and
increasingly, a lot of them use the web to search for information.
An integral part
Compare the
situation there with two UK mortgage institutions, Bradford &
Bingley and Northern Rock, which were taken over by the government. Not
long after their takeovers, both companies’ launched new sites with
dedicated sections on their new ownership. Importantly, the sites had
extensive frequently asked questions (FAQs) pages. How hard can it be
to replicate these?
Newspapers will
always be a great medium. A few even form part of the breakfast diet
for many people. But companies do not control it. Editors do. They
determine when and where stories run, the length and tone. Besides
paper, by definition, is disposable. How many people still have copies
of last month’s paper? This is where the corporate site excels. It is
always accessible, malleable to textual and video formats, archives
perfectly and is under the company’s control. What better broadcast
platform can a company wish for? None I can think of.
Gone are the days
when the corporate website was a sandbox for the IT department. Today,
it is an integral part of every institution’s corporate communications
toolbox.
Anyone who uses
tools like Google Analytics and Visistat on their sites for tracking
visitor statistics and search engine queries knows too well the gold
mine of information their dashboards reveal. Do any of these banks
monitor these? If they do, what are they doing about it? How is their
web content evolving to match search parameters?
Thinking about the
full power of a corporate website unleashed reminds me of the lyrical
US Marine recruits’ creed in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 classic, Full Metal
Jacket: ‘This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend.’ No exaggeration here. At critical times,
the fully loaded website can be the choice assault weapon in the
company’s arsenal.
The writer is the managing director of a full service investor relations firm based in Lagos, Nigeria.
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