“About Us” Evaluation: Scalamandre Gets a D

Scalamandre, Inc., founded in 1929 by Franco Scalamandre (1898-1988) and headquartered in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., produces high-end textiles, trims, wall coverings, and carpeting. Its niche market is reproduction of such items for the restoration of historic homes and antique furniture. Scalamandre fabrics have been used at the White House, the United States Capitol, and The Breakers and the Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island. The company’s about us page is here.

OVERALL GRADE: D

Personality: E

The Who We Are page, which is featured at the top of the list of options on the home page, sends us to a box set against a huge white expanse, then takes a disproportionately long time to load scrolling text in an ugly font in a tiny box. We can’t easily skim the text or read it as a block. There are no illustrations with the text, although several historic renovations are mentioned.

Even worse than that is the fact that the only image on this page is a few inches of fabric at the edge of a bolt. For 80 years, Scalamandre has produced textiles stunning for their colors, patterns, and textures. What a wasted opportunity that blank white space is!

Products/Services: D

Examples of Scalamandre’s products are buried under the unrevealing menu heading House Tour, which turns out to include extensive descriptions of historic homes such as The Breakers. The Collection page offers more images, but reaching them requires multiple clicks, and the pictures (apparently from interior-design magazines) include many products that are not by Scalamandre.

Accessibility: C

The Contact Us page offers a mailing address, telephone, fax, and email, but the page is only available from Who We Are.

The tagline on the Contact page says, “America’s manufacturer and importer of the world’s most beautiful fabrics, trimmings, wall coverings and carpets.” This needs tweaking (why mention importing if the company’s main focus is manufacturing?), but some form of it should appear on the Who We Are page and elsewhere.

TAKEAWAY

Scalamandre, a company that produces works that are a delight to the eye, needs to incorporate far more visuals in its website.

Does your Web site’s “About Us” section accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). Contact us if you’d like to have your site evaluated—there’s no charge and no obligation.

Today’s example was chosen at random; CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.

Happy 275th, Bellevue Hospital

If only NYC's Bellevue Hospital had done oral histories with patients since its founding in 1736! We'd have transcripts and tapes from Stephen Foster, O. Henry, Eugene O'Neill, and countless people whose voices are not often heard at all. Not to mention the doctors who set up and staffed the first maternity ward, emergency room, and ambulance service in the US.

Fortunately the country's oldest public hospital is catching up: "As part of the recognition events surrounding the 275th anniversary, Bellevue has been recording oral histories in conjunction with StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit organization that records, shares and preserves stories of American life. The interviews conducted at Bellevue will be archived at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and selections will be played at listening stations at Bellevue beginning next year. Selections will also play on the Bellevue/HHC website, as well as the StoryCorps website," says a news release (link here).

http://www.nyc.gov/html/hhc/html/pressroom/press-release-20111215-bellevue-275th-anniversary.shtml

No book, sadly. Bellevue is a city hospital with a perennially strapped budget, and doubtless that accounts for why they had to fit 275 years of storied history into a 24-page commemorative brochure. New York University's Langone Medical Center does publish an excellent literary journal, the Bellevue Literary Review (their Web site fudges about the connection to the hospital itself): http://blr.med.nyu.edu/ The hospital itself is raising money for an in-house museum; if you'd like to contribute, details are in the press release.

Last but not least, click on the title of this very blog post for The New York Times's coverage of the dodranstricentennial (OK, I learned that word from the article!).

“About Us” Evaluation: Groupon Gets a B+

Groupon, established in November 2008, harnesses the power of social media to offer customers substantial discounts on food, entertainment, shopping, and services in 45 countries. The company employs over 10,000 people in its Chicago headquarters and has offices in an increasing number of locations around the world. Groupon’s About Us page is here.

OVERALL GRADE: B+

Products/Services: A

The About Us page is buried at the foot of the home page, under the Company menu. That’s a pity, because it’s well written and intelligibly organized, moving from the service Groupon provides to its operating principles and then its origin.

Accessibility: A

If you’re asking customers to shell out money for a service to be provided by a third party, at an indefinite future time, you’d better be sure they trust your customer service. We like the fact that when Groupon mentions their dedication to customer satisfaction on the About Us page, their email address and a telephone number are right there in the text.

The Get Help section of the footer offers a Customer Support page with an online form, online support, an email address, and a telephone number with the hours that staff are available. One would expect a mailing address for corporate headquarters--but then, no one without a computer is ever going to use Groupon.

Personality: C

The final section of the About Us page, headed “Our People,” states, “Groupon’s people are our most valuable asset. Everything about Groupon is a reflection of the interests and ethics of its wonderful staff.”

And that’s all it says. Why make a statement so sweeping, and then not elaborate?

The photo under this heading--the only one on the About Us page--shows dozens of people in choir robes on a stage. The caption states that this is the Groupon staff singing at the Chicago Lyric Opera. We suspected this might be a joke, like the “Groupon Says” feature at the lower left of the home page. But there they are on YouTube, belting out Bach. (Don’t leave your day jobs, guys.)

At minimum, we’d like to see a link here to the team that founded and still runs the company. The link to them is buried under Company / Investor Relations / Corporate Governance / Management. These bios could use some tweaking, to make them more closely related to the current positions of the executives: see AirBNB’s site, for example.

TAKEAWAY

Groupon gets almost everything right, but more personality--a sense of who runs the company and what the employees’ attitude is--would improve the About Us page.

Does your Web site’s “About Us” section accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). Contact us if you’d like to have your site evaluated—there’s no charge and no obligation.

Today’s example was chosen at random; CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.

Kurt Vonnegut, Corporate Historian?!

Kurt Vonnegut hated greed but liked business. Learning that factoid was one of the many pleasures of reading And So It Goes—Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, the excellent new biography by Charles J. Shields. The author of Slaughterhouse-Five was nothing if not a contradictory man.

Son of an architect, Vonnegut grew up in a family of prosperous Indianapolis merchants. It’s common knowledge that he was a public relations man for General Electric’s Schenectady Works for years. What’s less well known is that he was ready to quit until GE put him in charge of being the liaison to Columbia University’s then-new oral history program. As part of it, Columbia wanted to preserve the memories of GE engineers and scientists who had helped launch radio.

Like any good corporate history author, Vonnegut started by compiling interviewee biographies and timelines. Shields reports that Vonnegut “was awed … he genuinely liked these men … Their success was deserved. They didn’t grouse about the company; they were grateful.” Vonnegut went so far as to describe them as “extremely interesting, admirable Americans.” He still quit the PR job—he’d always felt like the company’s “captive screwball”—but he happily drew on his GE experiences for his science fiction writing.

Years later, he used his business savvy to dig up the lowdown on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In an article for Esquire magazine, later collected in his book Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, he noted that the Maharishi spoke to the American people “like a General Electric engineer.” Vonnegut nailed him as a benign salesman who, as Shields paraphrases, “was just pumping the handle of free enterprise as vigorously as the system allowed.”

The biography also reveals that antiwar Vonnegut consciously owned stock in a company that made napalm for bombs, and that he was hardly liberated where women were concerned…but I’ll leave you to discover the whole story for yourself. Just a quick P.S., though: If you worked in publishing during Vonnegut's heyday--I was lucky enough to work for his then-publisher, Dell/Delacorte, and to write promo copy for his books--you'll enjoy the biography even more.