Actionaria - what do retail shareholders want from communications?

I’ll be heading to Actionaria tomorrow, the annual show for retail investors in France. It’s mainly out of nosiness – having produced a brochure for one of my clients, I’m quite keen to see what the competition has come up with.

Retail investors are a small but important group – typically they are “sticky” shareholders. In it for the long term, goes the conventional wisdom, they are loyal to existing management and can help counteract price volatility resulting from trading by high turnover institutional investors, or market stress.

But what retail investors want – and therefore how companies should communicate with them – tends to be a relatively neglected area of research. Three facts stand out:

The first is that retail investors invest overwhelmingly in household names. In recent research by Investec Wealth & Investment, over half the 2,000 interviewees declared they were more likely to buy shares in well-known companies. Moreover, the same proportion would continue to hold such shares even if they performed poorly.

The second is that they want a simple story. They want to know what the company does, how it makes money and its vision for the future.

The third is that retail investors overwhelmingly use the internet to make decisons: research by the SEC shows that 4 out of 10 private investors will visit a company’s website to gain information.

What does this mean for communications?

First of all, if you’re not a household name, time to demonstrate how you fit into people’s lives. IMI proudly announces on its homepage, for example, that it “converts industry knowledge and market insight into design-engineered solutions”. This doesn’t mean much to most people. Dig deeper in the website and you discover they play a crucial role in areas of concern to the general public, such as clean energy, energy efficiency and healthcare. There’s material for a compelling retail shareholder story here – but it isn’t being told.

Second, make the most of the "third party" channels these investors rely on: press, and retail brokers (particularly in the UK and US). Not only do they reach a wider audience, but their independent view makes them valued by small shareholders. Tell your story simply to journalists and brokers. Then keep telling it.

Finally, invest in your website. Navigation is key – your audience is internet-friendly but not necessarily internet savvy. Ensure your IR site and annual report are no more than one click away from the homepage. Both the homepage and the IR landing page should provide an overview of what the company does, with information logically arranged so investors can quickly and easily locate what they need. Shareholders should have the option to subscribe to regular email alerts, or dedicated shareholder newsletters to keep them up-to-date with the company and generate further loyalty.

The limits of fluent

I was once checking in at a remote airport in the middle of China when I saw a sign behind the airline representative that made me erupt in a fit of giggles. “We take your bags and we send them all over the world!” it proclaimed proudly.

Trying to convey to the well-meaning Air China representative why this was so funny proved to be a non-starter. “It is not correct?” she enquired, sadly. “Yes and no. It’s hard to explain. But it doesn’t matter”.

It didn’t matter, of course. My bags arrived in Beijing, and subsequently at Heathrow. But this mistake – the result of someone who thought they could speak perfect English being allowed to print a sign - is repeated ad infinitum around the world in contexts where it does matter. Where the worst that can happen isn’t that a foreign tourist might have a good laugh on the last day of their holiday – it’s that you will look unprofessional to potential customers.

There’s a very odd phenomenon – let’s call it monolingual hubris – where people who are really, really careful about their own language, and would be horrified to send out anything with a misplaced comma or wrong adjectival ending, think it’s absolutely fine to publish something they’ve written in another language without getting it thoroughly checked first.

I know, because I’ve suffered from monolingual hubris myself: I once tried writing a website in French. It took me days. Weeks, even. I felt terribly clever when I’d finished. Gramatically it was virtually flawless. There was one small problem. It just didn’t read like French. It was the website equivalent of taking your bags and sending them all over the world.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, Samuel Beckett being the obvious one. But most of us are not Beckett. I’m fine with that, and now announce cheerfully to clients that I don’t write in French, but can introduce them to a great French copywriter if they need one. 

Happy Halloween - or why content strategies needn't be scary

I woke up this morning to a deluge on Twitter of things vaguely related to Halloween. Once I’d got over the photo of a pumpkin carved to look like Yoda, (and retweeted it, obviously) I noticed a couple of scary-themed tweets from some more serious-minded companies like Mintel, Penguin and Salter Baxter. The latter, a corporate reporting agency, announced it planned to tweet scary sustainability facts throughout the day.

Really? you might say. And yes, this kind of thing only works if it’s done properly. But it did remind me of a conversation the previous week: a big B2B brand, the kind that tends to make money rather than headlines, who announced to me, “we know we need to say more but we just don’t have very much news”.

On the one level, their comment was right – few people want to read about deals signed between companies in a specialist field. On another level they were totally wrong – they have a lot to say, because what this company does has a direct impact on most people’s lives. They just need to find the right format to say it – and the right hook to get people reading.

This company is not alone. Lots of companies have things to say on themes that people find interesting, without necessarily having ready-made news hooks like an acquisition, a brand new product or an event.

There are ways to get round this, and PR professionals have been working some of the formulae for years. But in the era of social media and webzines, even B2B brands, have an opportunity to engage with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders directly, on specific subjects that interest them. Take data security, which has become extremely newsworthy as a result of the NSA debacle, and Adobe’s embarrassing admission that as many as 38 million of its customer accounts may have been hacked. Traditionally unglamorous IT companies can use the spike in interest to promote their own views in an engaging way, direct existing customers towards white papers, feature the issue in a webzine…

This is not to say you can create news where there is none. Tweets, blogposts and articles must remain relevant to their audience. But thinking in terms of themes rather than one-off events provides a solid foundation for a content strategy- and has the additional advantage of encouraging brands to focus on the core story rather than disparate events.

Of course if you got this far, you will have spotted the trick. I used the Halloween hook to get you to read about content strategies. However, as you’ve got this far, here’s a reward. That pumpkin carved to look like Yoda.

Translate the desired effect, not the words

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the limits of translation. I don’t mean those moments where you realise there isn’t the right word for something in the other language. Rather, I mean those times when you come across a whole phrase that is so imbued with one country’s culture that its translation into the other will result in something that is frankly bizarre.

Take educational attainment. In France, most people will begin their CV or corporate bio with which business school or grande école they attended. Little matter that they subsequently became the chief exec of a CAC 40 company / prize-winning novelist / President of the Republic. No, the important thing is that they graduated from ENA or HEC.

This speaks reams about the French system and how it works. But if you try to translate it into English, those cultural references don’t carry across. Over the age of 25, beginning your English corporate bio with where you went to university is at best slightly odd, and at worst, tacitly implies you’ve achieved very little since.

This is why, every time I have been confronted with the issue, I have advised French executives to move any reference to what they did when they were doing when they were 20 to the end in the English version, but keep it at the beginning in the French. For me this results in an accurate translation, one that is based on a ranking by value of what the person has achieved in the eyes of each country’s readers.

This is a very simple example, but you can take the idea much further. Take speechwriting, for example. A British or American executive, for example, needs to speak in short, clear sentences to be authoritative. Ideally, there should be humour, to show his “human side” and to convey the impression that he is sufficiently at ease to joke in front of the audience. In France, excessively short sentences make you sound cold, and jokes are definitely an optional extra.

I’m a big fan of translation that raises its hat to cultural assumptions. In fact I practice it myself. My English CV begins with the fact I have 15 years’ experience in corporate communications. The French? “Diplomée de l’Université d’Oxford…”

The art of Anglification Part 2: dare to avoid the borderline

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post on "strategic reflections on transversal actions" – the art of turning dreadfully mangled Franglish into something resembling real English without offending the French colleague who's asked you to read their carefully crafted prose. Having spent the last couple of days reviewing a particularly dire translation as a favour to a friend, I thought I’d add a new “borderline” category to the danger list.

“Borderline” is all the stuff you can just about get away with. Used once, it’s ok. Used several times and the underlying French becomes immediately noticeable, the verbal equivalent of discovering a pile of steak-frites hidden behind the Chesterfield.

So here goes: the ultimate guide to borderline Franglais, and how to avoid it:

• Au service de. As in, une expertise pointue au service d’une approche opérationnelle. The sort of phrase that used to inspire panic in me when I first started writing French. How lofty. How elegant. But really, how utterly, totally meaningless – and, as it turns out upon closer inspection, lazy. In English, stringing together random ideas is considered perfectly normal. Because French finds this horrifyingly non-Cartesian, links are created where there are none. So be daring. Replace au service de with a simple and. Should anyone take umbrage, embark on a smug and lengthy explanation of the relationship between Descartes’ thinking and the structure of the French language.

• Atout. As in un atout culturel, un atout précieux. Frequently preceded by constitue as in X constitue un atout important. Most translators plump for asset, but really, how often do you talk about assets in English, other than when making out your will? Time to be daring again! Replace the whole lot with a single adjective. E.g. La famille et les amis peuvent souvent constituer un atout important - Family and friends are often vital 

• (…) In French, you can write long lists of examples in brackets, followed by “…” at the end when you run out of inspiration. In English, you can’t. It really is that simple. Of course, this being a fairly innocuous difference between the two languages, you can definitely get away with it the odd time, should your life, or relationship with your French boss depend on it. However, where possible, replace with (for example x, x and x).

• Adjectival phrases. Hard to describe, easy to spot. All those sentences in French corporate literature that start out with something like Véritable spécialiste des…., nous… The ultimate borderline, because used once or twice, they’re perfectly English. The problem is overuse. Used over and over again in English, it’s a structure that sounds – well, like French.

Now I’ve started, I could go on for hours. (In fact véritable, in the point above, has just made it onto the next list – a real specialist, a real asset… as if the reader would otherwise expect a load of fakes). Uncomfortably, you will find that the worst overuse of borderline words and phrases is in bad French, but it’s generally safer to avoid tackling that one head-on. Just take pride in the fact your English “translation” ends up being better than the véritable thing. 

What language does the EU really speak? (or how French won in the end)

France has been terrified for several decades now that its cherished national language may be losing influence in the European Union.

In fact a recent publication issued by the European Court of Auditors proves they may have won a surprising coup: not by insisting on use of French, but by introducing a swathe of Frenchisms into “EU English”.

Snappily titled “A brief list of misused English terms in EU publications” (as an aside, the document is 58 pages long, which gives you an interesting illustration of what the EU thinks of as “brief”), it sets out English native speakers’ bête noires in terms of EU gobbledegook.

Most, if not all, have more than a hint of French about them. They include some of my personal bugbears – the kind of words that make me want to whip out a mug of earl grey and some soggy sandwiches and stage a one-woman protest in defence of the English language. “Actors” for “people who do things”, “axis” to describe an idea for developing something, or a priority, “important” to mean big (although I have always found something rather refreshing about the French willingness to admit something deserves attention by virtue of nothing other than it being large). It’s English, but not as we know it.

Of course the real danger is that some of these words will start to sound normal. Some of these words by themselves, read very quickly, at arms length, sound just about OK. UK civil servants now apparently talk about “externalisation”. (Actually, that’s a bad example. I can’t think of a single context in which the word externalisation would pass muster).

English has always thrived on new additions to the language. French struggles, before disdainfully adopting le weekend and le smartphone as linguistic embarrassments. But using existing words to mean something completely different causes confusion: if the EU wants to join my reactionary protest against this particular set of additions, they're welcome. Cucumber sandwich, anyone?

Internal comms - are you talking to me?

As every marketer worth their salt will tell you, you have a limited number of windows each week to email promotional material, the top one being Thursday afternoon. Even then, most recipients will immediately press the delete button.

What they don't tell you is, the same pretty much applies to internal communications.

Internal communications is generally the most misguided of corporate comms activities, for the simple reason that few chief executives are willing to admit that their employees may not actually like them, and even fewer comms executives are willing to contradict the chief executive. The result is generally a deluge of intranet newsflashes on the latest raft of senior management promotions, corporate jollies, and initiatives dreamed up by head office. Unsurprisingly, hardly anyone reads this stuff.

How to fix the problem? The main answer lies in approach.

Put simply, you need to work out who your audience is, what they're interested in, and how they want to find out about it. You wouldn't dream of producing external communications without knowing the answers to these questions, so why should it be acceptable to do this for an internal audience?

Write with your most cynical audience in mind. Most senior managers think that the majority of employees are satisfied with their jobs, and with the way the company is run. Conversations around the water cooler in offices around the world demonstrate this is simply not true. Information on a new initiative is likely to be better received if you explain in concrete terms why you are introducing it - perhaps because a competitor is increasing sales in a specific product line, or because you think it will help you attract a new type of customer. Reach for a string of clichés and abstractions and employees will switch off - or worse still, roll their eyes.

   

Recognise that your employees are your number one external communications channel- and really believe it. Acknowledging that bad communications with employees leads to lost sales tends to focus the mind. No one has "reading the intranet" as part of their job description, so when you publish news, you're competing with a whole host of other distractions, not least the employee's work! This means you need to bring the same level of imagination and rigour to the production of internal comms as you bring to external comms. It really isn't the poor relation of communications- it's the most important part.

Employees need to feel internal comms supports their ability to do their jobs. They need to be able to find the information they need, quickly, and connect with the people they need to move projects forward. This takes internal comms to a strategic crossroads of comms, HR, knowledge management and, increasingly, IT: collaborative portals that help people work better. It's a far cry from programming emails for a Thursday afternoon.