What do you do when you’re asked to build a thought leadership platform, a million-member community, and regain some respect from the marketplace in the process? Roll up your sleeves.
When most people think of HP, they think of laptops or printers, not enterprise software—despite the fact that HP Software, on its own, is a $6 billion business. That’s a problem, because HP not only employs a lot of smart people who make interesting products, they also have interesting opinions about the future of business and the enterprise.
But lots of companies want to share their opinions. What HP Software wanted to do was write a book about the future and then ask other smart people outside of HP (customers, partners, even competitors) to read it, share it, debate it, and ultimately help them rewrite it. It would be the world’s first collaboratively written ebook. So we started with a single question: What will the enterprise look like in the year 2020?
Enterprise 20/20—the book and the community—launched in June of 2012. Every month we added a new chapter, hosted online discussions with industry luminaries, and revised existing chapters with the help of the growing community. We also made the infographics and videos from the book available as shareable assets and for use in marketing campaigns. Within five months, Enterprise 20/20 was the most discussed topic at the HP Discover trade event.
The book
Novio helped HP Software design, write, and edit the first five chapters of Enterprise 20/20. No easy task given that HP was undergoing a worldwide brand refresh at the time. Or that the internal and external team we managed spanned twelve countries on four continents.
Cover artwork (volume 1, chapters 1-5)
Editorial design
The community
Building a community from scratch is not for the faint of heart. Plus, we wanted to do something no one had ever done before—link directly to forum threads from specific sections of the ebook. Partnering with the platform developer, we were able to figure out how to monitor conversations and easily guide the discussion.
Community site design
The assets
Having a book as your central marketing asset is great, but a bit ungainly. So we created the book knowing that we’d want to break off individual pieces of content (infographics, video and audio files, interviews) and make them shareable via social media channels and useable by HP’s various marketing departments.
Infographic library
