Swiss energy and energy service company Alpiq has just launched a community-based website at www.immergenugstrom.ch (immer genug Strom means “always enough electrical current”), and at first glance this is a really nice initiative. There is a forum, a TV channel, surveys and lots of content. Quite a big move for a company of this kind in Switzerland, or at least at first glance. But, being Swiss, it is also a bit conservative, and actually not as social as it looks. So the good news is that it is a first, here; the bad news that it’s not all there and others will do it better, or maybe not at all if it doesn’t work!

What is nice about the site? For one thing, the design is nice and the separation into different content and activities is good. For another, there is lots of content, e.g. lots of videos to see on the “TV” link. So what doesn’t work? Well, the problem is that it is not a full-on social site. The “forum” section is not fully-featured, much more like the comments list on a blog site. There are four “threads” — basically just a paragraph with comments, and no user-generated threads. On what looks like a community video page, the videos are from their four in-house “Strom Scouts”. The TV page is a page full of short videos and clips, with no live content. They videos are all good for a job, but there is no shared comment feature — the “comment” button leads to a normal “contact us” page with no mention of moderation or what would be done with the comment. The Q&A section is a very nice FAQ page, but again with nothing user-generated.

Now, I suspect the half measures are partly because it’s a trial run, and partly because this is a very technical area so Alpiq are probably wondering about the role of user-generated content. But its attractive content and one or two real social features are more than offset by the lack of full social media tools that will get users generating content — and energy is a topic that positively invites this content. If it does not come from users, you end up doing it all yourself and not getting their active engagement, so where is the real point? I think this site will end up in disappointment for Alpiq, which would be a pity as it is in some sense in the right direction. However, what bothers me most is that other utilities and service providers may look at this venture as an example for social media in this part of the world and draw completely the wrong conclusions. There is little doubt now that social media works, but it has to be done in a wholeheartedly social way.

So why did it turn out like this? Overall it looks like it was done and driven by IT departments with some oversight from Marcom and the - financial - blessing from management, plus one staged video clip done by the CEO. The results show the shortcomings of this compartmentalized approach. Real success depends on a business-centred planning approach. To do social media well you need to have sales, marketing, operational, and often HR and other departments involved, doing excellent planning that cuts across the departments. Not something where IT companies or even PR companies excel, as they both miss important parts — and may well not even have noticed the site’s deficiencies.

Here are some important pointers - and my comments on them - to using the website as a marketing and PR tool. They are from Nielsen’s Alertbox - a blog I strongly recommend. Much of the advice seems, in retrospect, blindingly obvious, but the fact that Nielsen has thought of it first is why he is held in such high regard.

First, quite an old one on where B2B sites often go wrong

Most B2B sites emphasize internally focused design, fail to answer customers’ main questions or concerns, and block prospects’ paths as they search for companies to place on their shortlists.

Most online interactions are demand-driven: you either give people what they want or watch as they abandon your site for the competition’s. The result of poor design on B2B sites? In our user testing, B2B sites earned a mere 58% success rate (measured as the percentage of time users accomplished their tasks on a site).

Nielsen does make the point, to be fair, that B2B sites have a complex selling task and need to address a group of people. B2C is usually for an individual who is able to make an instant decision. However, that only means that B2B sites must work extra hard to support, inform and involve users. Particular usability glitches cited are absence of pricing information of any kind, having to register for information without knowing how useful it will be, and poor segmentation, so that users are marshalled along a route that does not contain all the most relevant information for them.

What interests me about these findings is that these are clear signs that buyer personae have not been examined properly, and that companies are not putting themselves in the shoes of their prospective customers. Both of these we see as fundamental elements of marketing and PR planning.

The report, with 144 usability guidelines and 158 screenshots can be downloaded for $198 - so just a small fraction of the cost of a website redesign.

A more recent one on bounce rates

I found this really interesting because it shows how user behavior has evolved along with website design. As users are directed to landing pages deep within a site, many of them refuse to commit to the second click. Partly I think this reflects the speed of browsing nowadays, as it is now easy to have a quick look and leave. The lack of appeal seems to be often due to low-relevance link sharing or over-general SEO.

This phenomenon points to one of our key principles in online PR: tuning your SEO to people that are genuinely interested, by increasing the specificity of key phrases. The Nielsen report views the bounce rate of search-directed traffic as particularly critical - and this is the one to test the real effectiveness of the landing page on.

Do About Us pages do their job?

First, a positive: contact info has improved. Now the negative: fewer companies are making clear what they do in a single paragraph - the information that makes most people go to the page in the first place is now unclear in nearly 20% of sites. You can probably guess what the bounce rate is like! The worst thing, though, is that user satisfaction has actually decreased over the past 5 years.

The reason I don’t find that a surprise is that I reviewed about 100 About Us pages of European tech businesses a while ago. Many were pretty much interchangeable even in widely different industry sectors, and almost all said they were leading the world in something. Which means that the prospect, instead of getting a clear impression of what makes a company different, reads about what makes them the same! I’m not going to give any of my own tips here, because there’s not much I would add to Nielsen’s advice in this blog.

We recommend providing About Us information at 4 levels of detail:

1. Tagline on the homepage: A few words or a brief sentence summarizing what the organization does.
2. Summary: 1-2 paragraphs at the top of the main About Us page that offer a bit more detail about the organization’s goal and main accomplishments.
3. Fact sheet: A section following the summary that elaborates on its key points and other essential facts about the organization.
4. Detailed information: Subsidiary pages with more depth for people who want to learn more about the organization.

This layered content presentation forms an inverted pyramid that uses hypertext to shield users from overwhelming details, while making specific information available to those who need it.

The full guidelines for this run to 253 pages, again not too expensive at $124, but a lot of work for a single page?

When Jakob Nielsen speaks…

Jakob Nielsen is the website usability guru, and when he talks about usability, he is credited with complete authority. May seem strange when you visit his site — it looks like sites of 10 or more years ago. But everyone knew how to use them. His point is not that all sites should be like his, but that they should be as functional: to know when to behave like a user manual (easy to use, easy to navigate, and has all you will need in it) and when like a magazine (visually impressive, surprising, involving).

What Nielsen thinks of online ads

Nielsen’s ideas aren’t based on personal impressions, but on a great deal of observational research of web users behaviour. Now, speaking at the inaugural Web Experience Forum in Boston, Mass. he has some important news for advertisers as reported by Alistair Croll at GigaOm: Forget banner ads, which are purely interruptive, so users ignore them. Go for search ads, which users click more often than generally thought. Nielsen in this case does not give figures for his survey, but according to Croll:

Jakob showed the audience at WEF08 several videos, including heat charts of eye movement, to demonstrate this process. Some testers skimmed picture ads that contained text — but only briefly…Pictures that are content get attention; pictures that are “fluff,” visitors treat as an obstacle course to bypass, particularly when it’s bland photographs of “smiling lady with a headset” or “guy who looks happy with a service.”
…He even produced an example of a gigantic rat on ask.com (celebrating the year of the rat) that testers didn’t recall seeing. And this thing was half the screen!

Is Nielsen right about banner ads?

Mostly, I think. Banner ads can and do work, but only if they draw the eye and are relevant to the user’s reason to be there. Portals are an example, review sites another, and you could find others. But outside of these, when they are interruptive, they are mimicking the display ad world rather than the newspaper classified ads. Even in print media, it’s the classified ads that pay for themselves, and that’s why search-related ads do so well. Even then, billboards and newspapers often attract your attention when you aren’t particularly doing something else — e.g. waiting at the traffic lights or skimming through the pages — whereas web users tend to be more purposive, so the bar is pretty high. So although it’s too much to say they don’t work, they’ve got to be attractive and relevant at the same time.

Where banners win over search ads, though, is in catching people who didn’t already see themselves as potential customers. If a small number of clicks are converted into high value sales as a result, banner ads can pay for themselves many times over. The other important case where banners work is sponsorship, i.e. promotion rather than advertising. Their purpose is brand enhancement, rather than selling, so they don’t have to interrupt, just get the name noticed.

A good PR tip from Nielsen’s site

While it’s worth looking at the resources on Nielsen’s main site, it’s also worth looking at his biography page - which, despite a bit less navigation than I would like, does a very good job of publicizing him- I particularly like a couple of the spoofs he links to: Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter ‘C’ Unusable and Davezilla’s Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Fighting Styles (as shown above). Not only are they fun to read, but Nielsen’s listing them makes his otherwise rather austere presence much friendlier.