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Telecom Italia: all 2009 annual reports in html format

Telecom Italia

The telecommunications sector is undoubtedly one of the leading industrial sectors in terms of online institutional communication. Corporate websites of European listed companies stand out for completeness of information, transparency and interactivity with users. This is despite the ranking of top European and other websites (see www.webranking.nu and http://bowencraggs.com/ftindex/indices) which often sees them outside the top 30, except for Telecom Italia which won the third place in the Europe 500 ranking by Hallvarsson & Halvarsson.

The technological effort which Telecom Italia makes to optimise the presentation of its financial information is indeed greater than that of its competitors. For example, let us look at the annual reporting of financial results and corporate social responsibility. While France Telecom, British Telecom, Swisscom and Telefonica merely produce more interactive and better performing PDF documents, in 2010 Telecom Italia has pinned all its hopes on the html format to offer website visitors a series of alternative surfing routes and means of using the income and financial data, which simply cannot be reproduced in a PDF document.

In 2010 Telecom Italia created the websites for the annual financial report, the Sustainability Report, the Corporate Governance Report, and the interim report at 1 March 2010. The particular feature lies in the fact that a single container has been created for all 3 of the aforementioned reports, excluding the interim report which has an individual website mirroring the structure of the annual reports.

Aims
Customers have asked for a targeted and specific product: the creation of completely interactive financial statements, which are as dynamic as possible and can be understood by users. On the basis of these requests Message created a work plan to make a "talkative" print copy of the annual report: it was agreed to make the numeric data "speak and act", to make the tables, charts and images "talkative", so as to give users the impression of being able to dialogue with the website and to interact with the information contained therein.

Features
Home page: an unusual feature on Telecom Italia’s annual report websites are the homepages. They act as a kind of window for the display of the main data and information contained in the annual report.

  • the function of the central banner is to highlight the "Key facts" of 2010 (2009 Annual report)
  • the interactive charts offer an overview of the company’s economic performance and provide an immediate glimpse of the economic, financial and operational data.
  • Thanks to the box of useful links, users can immediately view the financial statements and the notes.
  • a slide show highlights the most important issues of Corporate Governance, or underlines the company’s projects and initiatives in the Sustainability Report.
  • the Chief Executive’s video presentation and the download of the annual report complete the homepage which by itself explains the reasons behind the choice of a report in html compared to a simple PDF format. (2009 Annual report)

Section homepages: the websites of the 2009 Annual report and of the Sustainability Report have their own homepages; each one has boxes which help search by issue and rapid search for information by users.

  • In particular on the homepage of the Report on Operations there are further interactive "Key figures" and all the tables can be downloaded in Excel format.

Internal pages: the "subpages" of the reports are not only containers of information, but contain web tools aimed to facilitate the finding of contents: tag clouds, search engines, correspondence between the webpage and the PDF page for print “die hards” who can thus view the same information in a PDF format. 

  • The Annual Financial Report under Consolidated financial statements shows interactive tables of the statement of financial position and income statement. Users therefore have the chance to click on the items of interest and compare them by simultaneously viewing the charts.

The Glossary provides a clear explanation of the terms contained in the annual report, while the tag clouds act as an index: in this way users can easily find all the annual report pages in which a particular word is used.

Interactive tools, such as, for example, bookmarks, the possibility of commenting on a page or making notes, make the website a kind of dynamic notebook with which to interact.

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