Annual report. These two words are top of mind for many communications managers right now – so what’s hot in the world of annual reports?

More companies have realised that their annual report is an essential company profile, read by customers, competitors, employees and shareholders – and they are increasingly creating annual reports that are like company brochures, highlighting the best that the company has to offer. And over the last couple of years, the format of annual reports has changed, too.

PDFs online
Most companies still produce a printed version of their annual report – and make the PDF available on line for people to download. But last year Hempel took a more radical approach. The company decided to produce a compact annual report that’s only available online. It can be emailed to the relevant people and anyone can download it from the website. For Hempel, it saves money in printing and distribution costs – and shows that the company puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to cost cutting.

Online annual report sub-sites
Novozymes went one step further, and created a complete sub-site for its annual report. Each section of the report had its own webpage. You navigate like a normal website – and it can be updated throughout the year with the latest news.

Online interactive annual reports
But this year, perhaps the big move will be interactive online annual reports. TDC took the plunge last year, with an online CSR report that included embedded video and expandable tables and maps. (If the link doesn’t work, you can find the report here.)

Many companies seem to be interested in doing something similar this year. Why? Online interactive annual reports are new, and make your company seem cutting-edge. And they are exciting – so they grab attention. The skill, though, is making sure they hold attention once the bang of the moving images has died down.

Spotted any other trends? If you think something will be big in annual reports this year, let us know.

Do you send a million text messages a day? Or do find yourself spending all your free time in the Twitterverse? If so, you might be putting your ability to spell in serious danger – at least according to some critics. OMG, you say!

Short Message Service Language, aka textese or chatspeak, might actually be the fastest growing dialect in the world, but is it leading us to pathological sloppiness? Some are even calling it the death of the English language. Really? 

Well, turns out shortening English into cryptic phonetic bits doesn’t impact our ability to spell ‘real’ English. Recent research shows that if you’re a good speller of the Queen’s English, you’re also a good textese speller. In fact, those who used more elaborate codes while texting where actually better spellers of normal English. Srsly. And, as good logic would have it, if you are a poor speller in ‘real’ English, you’re more likely to make errors in textese. So bware!