Best practices for corporate blogs

The PricewaterhouseCoopers guidance on "Best practices for corporate blogs" offers insight into the ways leading companies are capitalizing on the appeal of blogs as a form of direct communication with customers as well as employees. It also looks at how companies are leveraging blogs internally as a knowledge management tool to facilitate more effective information sharing and project management.

Reporting corporate performance online

Corporate reporting should be more informative and accessible. But, can it provide the information investors want without swamping them in unnecessary detail? And how can companies best use the Internet to do this? The Report Leadership group has published "ONLINE REPORTING: Practical Proposals for reporting corporate performance online."

Corporate reporting - a focus on accountability and communications

Companies use their annual reports to fulfill their legal and regulatory requirements and to communicate with stakeholders. Annual reports summarize all the crucial issues that affect the success of the business, explain how they have influenced the past year’s results, forecast how they might pan out in the future, and explain what is being done to ensure the company’s future success in that environment. Annual reports cannot and should not focus on every single issue that is relevant to every single stakeholder. They should focus on the issues that are material to the business as a whole, bring them together in a single, coherent story and reveal the “value proposition” of the total business. For more on this perspective of corporate reporting, refer to The Future of Corporate Reporting: State of Play – February 2007.

Excellence in Corporate Governance Disclosure

The CICA Corporate Reporting Awards 2007 (CRA) address “Excellence in Corporate Governance Disclosure for TSX-listed Companies.” The CRA evaluation criteria include reviewing the proxy circular and how the company uses technology to report this information. The corporate website is an ideal location for information about how a company is managed on behalf of its stakeholders. Some companies still confine this area primarily to a list of directors and senior management but the best sites include comprehensive details of the governance structure of the company, including committees, policies, terms of reference and recent activities — generally a comprehensive treatment of the governance approach in place.