Each of the case studies focuses on a different design or content best practice—but for my money, the “cult of personality” discussion is a compelling moment of brilliance. It looks like the IBM Smarter Planet team has actually cracked the code on how to marry social media behaviors with the company’s core business propositions. Here’s a thirty second summary of Kenna’s POV.

For the bulk of its 100 years, IBM has been the icon of the monolithic, faceless organization. The Machine. The Man. The System. This reputation was so entrenched that is employees were endowed with a unique nickname: “the blue suits”. Thus, it’s surprising – no shocking – that IBM should be the first company to successfully transform itself from a corporation into a clan. And its Website is playing no small role in its metamorphosis.

The strategy is brilliant because

• It leverages IBM’s core sales model (building relationships), gives it the golden opportunity to demonstrate expertise and passion, and translates a faceless corporation into actual people who are experts in their fields.
• It works by using photos, dynamic profiles, and links to start conversations.
• It wraps these attributes in a savvy design that takes advantage of new less is more white space trends and short, snappy & relevant content that is second to none.

And then there are the graphics. Relevant charts with factoids. Eye catching video panels. Moments of visual whimsy and delight (my favorite is the carrot that illustrates how long it takes to get from the farm to a store in California). This from that old stuffy IBM?

Library subscribers can read more about how and why this site works, view a video, and download these case studies at http://bit.ly/eOMKjU. Have your log in credentials handy—or contact us if you’ve forgotten them.

Did you hear that the blue jean giant The Gap announced a new logo? Yeah, it didn’t create a blip on my radar either. I work in the tech biz, and I don’t shop at The Gap.

But what did get my attention is how it’s re-branding effort bombed (and was subsequently pulled) solely based on the public outcry on social media outlets.

There are many blog posts and news outlets weighing in on The Gap’s misguided design decision, and the stunning influence social media can have on corporate decisions. Some blogs even present the intriguing (if not a bit far-fetched) hypothesis that The Gap’s social media strategy was actually an ingeniously crafted publicity stunt formulated to increase holiday sales and bolster waning stock performance.

So was the The Gap’s decision to announce its new logo using Facebook and Twitter a public gaffe or social coup? President of Gap Brand North America, Marka Hansen believes they “did not go about this the right way.” Sorry Ms. Hansen, I disagree. To my mind, it is proof positive that when a company employs social media properly—intentionally or accidentally—it strikes gold.

What did The Gap get right?

1. They published the announcement on two different social media outlets instead of one. This lets them “manage the message” by combining Facebook’s robust and flexible platform, with Twitter’s “cut to the chase” schema and vast reach. In social media, two forums are always better than one.
2. They have the opportunity to glean far more information than focus groups and studies can ever deliver. Their study sample is The Gap’s most loyal customers and company watchers. Its demographic is worldwide. The responses are genuine and unvarnished. Best of all—it’s virtually free. If The Gap’s number crunchers are smart, they’ll catalog responses that go beyond opinions about the logo. There is gold in them there hills.
3. They quickly responded to public feedback by pulling the new logo and publishing a press release focusing on how their customers influenced in their decision. The company has even offered customers to submit their own designs going forward. Nothing fosters customer loyalty more than showing they are valued.

What did they do wrong? From the tenor of Ms. Hansen’s latest press release, it would seem that The Gap and its branding agency weren’t emotionally ready for such overwhelmingly negative feedback. That’s about all.

Maybe the whole logo idea wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Perhaps the overwhelmingly negative feedback was more than the folks at The Gap expected. But, their social media strategy was a resounding success. It was done with the right intentions—if not a bit fearlessly. It gave them the feedback they needed. They responded with all the right messages. And most importantly—in the face of negative feedback they didn’t pack their bags and head home. Instead, they are gearing up for round two by exploring new ways to harness the power of social media. Now that’s the way to run a social media strategy.

I’ve had space on my mind. Not the kind that Stephen Hawking talks about. The kind that’s finally getting the attention of enterprise-class Web design teams.

It is the power of white space—negative space—empty space–the void.

The importance of using white space in Website design isn’t a brand new concept. One can find plenty of blogs and examples on the subject. A couple of IT sites have also tinkered with it over the past few years. Apple.com has mastered it. Intel.com isn’t far behind.

But now the results are in regarding how negative space designs directly enhance usability. This has turned designing with white space from an avant garde concept into a usability requirement.

So what’s so great about negative space? If you aren’t into design or have been too busy with your day job to pay attention, here are the main benefits:

• Pages are easier to scan
• Navigation options are easier to identify
• Visitor response times are quicker
• Content is easier to read

The (hopeful) end result? Better traffic metrics on non-sales content, better time-to-purchase ratios, and happier visitors and customers.

It’s easy for relatively small sites to jump on this design trend, and quickly reap the usability rewards. For large enterprise-class sites where marketing, cajoling, and negotiating are the paths to progress, this transition is going to require some fundamental behavioral shifts – and is likely to be a bumpy (did I say really bumpy?) ride.

Why? Let me count the ways.

Negative space design will severely limit the space available for the mountain of features, marketing manifestos, and grab bag links found on every enterprise-class Website. This, in turn, will require content managers and stakeholders to slash marketing content, keep it on point, and fit into designs that allow visitors to cut to the chase.

Negative space design means that the same number of stakeholders will compete for less space on important pages, and will have to adhere to stricter design guidelines. Global Web organizations will have yet another standard to enforce [yippee!] – plus a cavalcade of aggrieved stakeholders who want to share 500 reasons why they shouldn’t comply.

Barriers aside, negative space is a design trend that cannot be ignored. Its usability benefits are too profound. Its impact on Website design too far reaching. It’s a trend that will revolutionize and define best-practice-class sites over the next 24 months.

Want to learn more about designing with white space? Here are some great sites to peruse about the subject and gain inspiration:

• Whitespace | Great article from A List Apart that defines “white space” in design and provides useful examples.
• Using White Space Effectively in Web Design | A great tutorial from Web Design Tuts on the elements of white space design and how to use them.
• Give me my Web space | Considerations, applications, and words to the wise from Website maven Molly E. Holzschlag
• Finding Information on the Web: Does the Amount of Whitespace Really Matter? | An informative brief about the effects of white space design on Website usability, including user testing results, from the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University.

The other day, I was thinking about the latest social media snafu HP.com’s Networking zone recently ran into. Its experience is an important lesson about how dangerous displaying the musings, and sometimes wrath, of the masses can be. This led me to ponder: what questions do Website teams need to ask themselves before deciding to pipe social media content onto their Website pages? Off the top of my head, four major questions come to mind:

What is the objective? Why are you planning to use social media in the first place? This isn’t to say that your Web team shouldn’t consider social media; only that you need to ask yourself some tough questions before you start. Is it to encourage conversation with customers? Generate leads? Master the wisdom of crowds? Prove your company is “with it”? If the latter is the answer, you are going down a dangerous path. On the other hand, if you are really looking for people to tell you what they think, be careful what you wish for. Expect the worst and plan accordingly.

How complex is the topic? This is where choosing the right social media tool is critical. Complex topics require two important things—character space and smart moderators.

Esoteric and incendiary topics, such as strategies, direction statements, or defense of “good ideas gone bad,” require space for participants to fully present their opinions, and for smart moderators to manage the conversation. For these discussions, blogs, forums, and FaceBook provide the best formats.

On the other hand, highly-focused topics that mention a company’s home-runs, such as what customers like best about a certain product or overwhelmingly popular Website features – or link readers to an important article or press release — will require less space and moderation since the posts will naturally be largely positive. In these cases, Twitter is a relatively safe bet.

Who will man the ramparts? Choosing and training the right moderators is the deciding factor in the success or failure of any social media engagement. Although this seems like a no brainer, the Web is littered with endless examples of interns and part-timers being sent in to do a professional’s job.

Remember this. In any social media discussion, the company’s moderators are the voice of the company—in essence, the new PR team. They are on the front lines facing the unvarnished opinions of customers, journalists, investors, general crazies – and competitors who want to spoil the soup.

This complexity means that being a moderator is a tough, and often thankless, job. It is also why it’s critical that people with the right temperament, education, and training are managing any type of social media discussion. Unprepared moderators—or none at all—allow the masses to define the company’s reputation and value proposition. Good moderators protect the company’s brand.

What is the probable (not best case) outcome? Did a product have serious glitches? Did financial projections fall woefully short? Most companies will shy away from social media to manage these events. In reality, social media is actually the perfect opportunity to set the story straight. This is where the executives rally the troops, craft their best “This is our finest hour” speeches, and moderators steel themselves to manage the damage. Planning for the best possible outcome leaves moderators flatfooted. Planning for the most realistic (or even worst) outcome gives the company the opportunity to send the right message and turn the tide of public opinion.

The cost of being cool

Although these four questions are likely to spur a multitude of other issues, one thing is clear. Social media is dangerous, wild, and highly unpredictable. That’s what makes it “cool”.

But, chasing “cool” without preparing for the real world is a costly mistake. Like all things Web, social media requires the types of complicated planning and cross-organizational coordination that can suck the excitement out of a project.

On the other hand, not doing your homework is sure to lead to a social media presence that is a nightmare for your company to manage, and a public venue for the aggravated and aggrieved. When this happens, social media ends up as a “cool” strategy that is very “un-cool” indeed.

When social networking sites hit the Internet, companies spent many, many months watching it with a wary eye. But once leading IT companies (such as Sun, Dell, and Cisco) took the leap, the race to integrate social media into a company’s marketing mix was on. This has led almost every company to declare social media as a major influence—if not the cornerstone—of its future marketing strategies.

Bold pronouncements aside, the reality is this: most companies are scared silly because they don’t have the faintest idea about how and when to use social media to their advantage.

They should be scared.

As a case in point, let’s consider how HP.com’s new “Change the rules of networking” campaign and associated Web page goes off the rails. This page launches the new face of HP Networking using the perfect combination of “hip & happenin’” content. Lightbox videos. Web 2.0 behaviors. Twitter. You name it.  With all these cool new ingredients, where could HP.com possibly go wrong?

Let us count the ways.

True to its new “voice of the market” strategy, HP.com is using Twitter feeds to create rich marketing content. Unfortunately, the “market” doesn’t seem very impressed. With so little space available for people to adequately state their case, the tweets amount to little more than insults and “happy talk” retweets by HP employees. Hardly the rich discourse and market endorsements HP had in mind.

Twitter formats make damage control difficult, if not impossible. It’s easy to hurl insults in 140 characters – and almost impossible to counter them in the same space. Twitter’s disconnected rolling dialogs also make it virtually impossible for any company to start a conversation and effectively connect the dots. The net result? A rolling critique of HP’s Network strategy on a campaign page intended to pitch HP as a change agent in the networking industry.

So much for using “the voice of the market” as the “hip & happenin’” way to create rich marketing content.

Real estate counts. Most companies practice their own forms of damage control by limiting their tweet rolls to a revolving line in the body of a main page (great for speed readers) or stuffing them in the right panel (perfect when you want to look “cool” but don’t really want visitors to read the tweets).

HP.com, in contrast, dedicates half of its page to these ongoing “conversations”. This is a perfect formula when the tweets are happy talk and kudos. Not so much when “market voices” are opining that Cisco is the better choice.

The Bottom Line | HP.com provides a cautionary tale for any company planning to use Twitter as “rich marketing content”.  Twitter is a horrible marketing platform that can slip out from under you at the drop of a hat.  Its 140 character format doesn’t allow people to fully state and justify their opinions, or allow company moderators to respond effectively. As important, these Twitter feeds demand full-time moderators. If they aren’t on your plan, consider it another reason to avoid Twitter like the plague.

And what about HP.com’s Change the Rules of Networking campaign and associated page? Think of this as a prime example of a social media hole—and why HP.com should stop digging.

Real people, real voices, real time

While the SMB & mid-size market are using social media to just get their name out to the masses, large companies are learning how to use social media & communities in tandem for a whole new purpose. And it is literally changing the face of IT.

Large IT companies don’t need to get their name out there. I mean, who doesn’t know IBM, HP, Apple, or Dell? I would bet that even your grandmother knows the name of one of these companies, even if she doesn’t know how to use a mouse. So, aside from using social media as a slick press release system, how do large companies use these outlets to their advantage?

The death of the faceless organization: For eons IBM has had the reputation of the faceless organization. In fact, it became so faceless that the phrase “blue suits” was coined to describe it. Well, those days are over—welcome the people that are IBM. Over the past 12 months, IBM.com has started publishing the names & faces of the managers & executives who steer IBM—the company, the vision, and the products.  This initiative is supported by its online communities, Facebook pages, and Twitter personas. Now IBM customers & fans can engage with IBMers real time, and hear the perspectives of IBM employees on an ongoing basis. Now IBM has many, many faces & voices—and many of them wear golf shirts.

What goes around comes around: Large companies are made of people, and people want to hear what others are saying about them. This is where the social networking part of the equation comes into play. Forums like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter offer companies a view into the opinions, wants, and needs of its potential buyers and customers like never before. Just type IBM, HP, Dell, or Apple into the Facebook search engine and see how many pages show up. Or cruise these Websites for links back to their Facebook pages or Twitter profiles. These companies are learning that these forums are more than places to meet & greet. They are the largest-scale, lowest-cost testing forums and CSAT studies they could ever want.

To err is human to deliver spin control divine: Strategies that didn’t pan out. Products that don’t cut the mustard. Far reaching visions that never came to fruition. All the major companies have them, only now social media gives them the platforms to take wrong turns into new directions. Executives use blogs, Webcasts, and Podcasts to subtly shift their company’s visions to accommodate an ever changing business landscape. Meanwhile, product managers use blogs & forums to announce “new & improved features” (or in other words, “fixes for glitches”) in an upcoming product update—or in the worst of cases, fall on their swords. But no matter the topic, issue, or intent, all these social mediums give companies the flexibility to shift, craft, and hone their visions and image to align to current realities.

What do all of these strategies have in common? The power that social media gives people to change a company’s image, direction, and products—whether it is the company’s executives, product managers, customers, or prospects. The benefits of these strategies & forums are not limited to only the mighty few. Any company that is willing to use social media to open a dialog and listen to what people say can become the flexible and responsive organization that potential buyers and customers crave.

Companies eying new markets should avoid “Marie Antoinette” and “Frankenstein” support strategies. Here’s why.

You can tell a lot about a company’s prime customers by its Website—and even more by how customers fresh from acquisitions and market gambits get lost in the shuffle.

Examine companies like Dell, that has moved from its consumer roots into enterprise markets. Or, IBM’s, CA’s and Cisco’s endeavors to translate historical successes in the enterprise realm into SMB markets. And then there is Oracle’s attempt to execute simultaneous vertical and horizontal market strategies by lashing together its software applications with Sun’s hardware and storage products. There are plenty of examples.

If you think the “tell” of these (and other) companies’ successes or failures are found in their online marketing content, you would be looking in the wrong direction. In reality, the “tell” is found in their support and training zones.

Before support and training Web teams even entertain the hope for a successful market move, they must take these two approaches off the table: 

• Let ‘em eat cake. Some companies assume that all customers are created equal – and simply dump new customers into existing support and training zones. Think of it as the “Marie Antoinette (let ‘em eat cake)” strategy. In this scenario, enterprise customers don’t get the complex answers and training they need – and consumers get lost in messy support & training sites optimized for large accounts. In either case, it’s a bad behavior.

• Watch the birdie. Other companies decide to bolt market-specific support and training sites onto their existing venues. Think of this as the “Frankenstein” strategy. In this scenario, the company’s favored markets get center seat, while new markets and acquisitions get the “oh by the way” links in the right column, or at the bottom of support and training home pages. There’s nothing like an invisible link to tell “acquired”customers that they are second class citizens.

Both of these approaches tell new customers two important things. That (1) the vendor is more than willing to sell them products, but (2) won’t do the hard work necessary to deliver “after-sales” support and training optimized for their needs.

From our POV, two memos should be sent when a company decides to move up or down market.

The first should go to the marketing teams, giving them a heads up that they need to open and populate new product zones.

The second (and arguably most important) should be sent to the teams managing the company’s support and training zones warning them that “Marie Antoinette” and “Frankenstein” gambits don’t work. These teams need to put on their thinking caps, and recalibrate how they view and deliver their training and support sites.

Ok, I need to come clean. Until recently, I haven’t really gotten my head around the whole “social media for business” thing.

It’s not that I don’t understand what Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube and the rest of the social media gang do. I get it.  It’s just that social media has always seemed to be more of a time consuming distraction than a tool that gives businesses any kind of inside edge.

The light dawned when I was writing our new report about how companies can build Websites optimized around the B2B buying process. In case you don’t know, that’s the 17 step process your biggest customers go through to make a buying decision.

As it turns out, social media plays a huge role in this process – but not where you might think. If you think about the process in three major chunks – make the “long list” – make the “short list” – and make it through the vetting process – social media plays its most important role in part one — making the “long list”.  If you don’t make the cut here, participating in the “short list” and the vetting processes won’t be a problem.

So what roles do social media play in this part of the process? Let me count the ways.

• Social media will give you visibility with buyers who are blissfully unaware of your company and its products.
• Lets them tune in to what current customers and the market are saying so they can add you to (or strike you from) the list — and
• Perhaps as important, social media is the way buyers can monitor your company throughout the decision process. If things go wrong on the social Web, you’re likely to end up on the “short list” cutting room floor.

In other words, social media is all about creating visibility and managing market perceptions when it really counts.

Here’s a short podcast about the complex B2B buying process – and the roles social media – and your Website – play in this process. Think of it as a Cliff’s Notes battle plan to woo and win those big deals.

[powerpress]

It’s always interesting to see how companies use the Web to promote and manage a strategic acquisition. HP’s acquisition of 3Com is a great example of what not to do.

First, let’s look at this from the 3Com.com perspective. Unless you look really closely, it might escape your attention that HP has acquired 3Com at all – much less that this acquisition is part of a forthcoming – and very strategic — battle between HP and Cisco (see the Business Week article). Instead of the fanfare one might expect, this marriage is one of three revolving features on the 3Com.com home page.  There’s no mention anywhere else on the page. In the news widget. Main page features. Nada.

Of course, HP.com doesn’t get out of this alive either. Click on the 3Com & HP main feature link and you’ll be whisked away to HP.com without warning and land on a perfectly dreadful “events’ page that provides access to a 5-five-month-old podcast of the announcement. Just for fun, there are .PDF versions of the slide presentation and a transcript of the call.

And what about information about the strategic importance of the 3Com and HP marriage?  How the acquisition is progressing?  Why this is a good deal for HP and a great deal for 3Com customers? Both sites are functional mutes. With the exception of a press release buried in the Newscenter, 3Com.com essentially ignores its new parent. This information doesn’t even make the top 20 in HP.com’s investor relations or the newsroom zones – or a slot on the “Company Information” page.

So why the rant? Because this is a perfect “what’s in it for me?” moment.  If I’m an existing or potential 3Com customer, I am naturally going to be cautious about the impact of this acquisition on my purchase decisions. What’s the strategy? What’s the product roadmap? What’s in this for me?

I had the same experience this weekend when I decided to spend some quality time in our best practice case studies library.  Look and feel was good, top level behaviors were fine – but when I started to really drive it I had a Steve Mills’ moment.  If I were a customer, I’d be less than impressed. Let’s just say that there was plenty of saluting this weekend and there’s a new best practices case study library available to our clients Monday morning.

Which brings me to what my dad always told me. “The higher up the flag pole you go, the more your ass hangs out.”  If you are at the top of the flagpole, you represent the reputation of your organization – and change always happens from the top down.  Wherever you are on the flagpole, you need to be your most critical and important customer. If you aren’t, they will be . . . and that will ultimately affect your bottom line.