I hate ‘likes’ – Jon’s view

“Catastrophic crush kills 2 colleagues” screams the intranet headline. 2 likes. This ubiquitous interactive feature is on your intranet, most enterprise social networks and external social sites too, but what does the employee mean when they used it? Context and meaning are lost as soon as the like button is hit and this is what makes it a dangerous tool.

What do you mean, ‘like’?

At the heart of the problem is that liking something on your intranet can have countless different interpretations and where such terrible, contradictory ambiguity exists, interpreting it is very difficult. Difficult and pointless. Think about the last time you ‘liked’ a friends status on Facebook: did you like it, or did you use it to convey some other meaning in the hope that the author understood?

On your intranet, the same issue exists. The article accumulates ‘likes’, but what did they mean?

• The reader actually likes it: Really? can they really like the fact that two people died? Maybe they really hated those two people. Maybe they caused it! Is this gloating in the face of a tragedy? Call those two people into a meeting with HR immediately please!
• They like the title: Yea, pithy title. Nice alliteration.
• The reader fancies the author: The ‘like’ is a form of flattery. I like you, I like everything you do. Drink next week maybe?
• The reader appreciates the sensitive writing style: Horrible story with a really horrible picture, but what a splendidly well-written article.
• They’re sympathetic: In the absence of a ‘Ooo’ button, this is as close as I can get to digital sympathy.

Attempting to interpret is a facile as the button itself.

It’s like, shorthand?

When we use the like button in social media, it really means “I’ve seen you’ve posted” with no particular emotion conveyed. It’s the new ‘poke’, a digital wave from the other side of the road as you pass in your car. On the intranet, it’s more about the liker than the likee (gah, I hate myself for using such a word). The like says “look at me”.

‘Likes’ as a measure of quality

We’ve long advocated taking a fresh look at intranet statistics, proposing that managers move along from qualitative stats such as page views into a more qualitative dashboard more reflecting the outcomes of the intranet. Are ‘likes’ an example of such a measure? The answer is maybe and therefore no: if you can’t be 100% certain why an article or page has attracted its likes, you cannot use it as a measure of quality.

I like likes, so how do I make them work?

We need to look at making likes work or removing them from the intranet. Here are a few ways in which you might be able to rescue the situation.

1. Add other buttons: Adding a ‘dislike’ and ‘meh’ button will give employees slightly more meaningful choices
2. Add direction: Give employees some direction as to what like actually means.
3. Add context: Only allow employees to like (or dislike) something when they comment on an article. That will mean you have context to the data and may just encourage employees to comment more.

I like ‘likes’ – Luke’s view

Jon has said why he hates likes. How he can’t see any value in them and how they can only be improved by expanding options and providing more meaningful context. I hope you – dear readers – are smart enough to realise this is bobbins and short sighted poppycock.

• If the like is so worthless – why do the user of facebook click like 3.2 billion times a day? 
• If it gives the owner of the like nothing then how have some valued a single likes worth as $214?

We have to accept that ‘the like’ has come to be because it manages to offer the ‘seller’ the ‘customer’ and ‘the system’ real value. Moreover, the real power of its value is in its simplicity and the breadth of its meaning.

Who cares what like means anyway?

The crux of Jons argument is that a like doesn’t mean that someone likes something. In fact – it’s not really possible to know what someone means by the act of ‘liking’. This is a perfectly valid point and entirely true but, Jon has missed an important point – one that he has actually made himself in the past, That its not about the outputs, it’s about the outcomes. We need to forget about measuring the number of likes itself and focus on what behaviors the like drives. What is the outcome of a like?

On facebook the outcome  is the most successful social media platform in the known universe and a mechanism that’s changed the face of marketing and created massive new businesses.  But what about on the intranet?

What could like mean?

Firstly, lets take a more agnostic look at what the act of liking might really mean – Jon and I both agree there are plenty of potential meanings.

• That I like this thing
• I want to show the poster I have read it
• I want to show the poster empathy
• I want to endorse the poster or the message
• A quick way of sharing the item with other in my network
• A way of bookmarking
• I am interested in more of this kind of thing

Generally a like means…

All of these possibilities are forms of engagement and ways that ‘the system’ learns more about the person.  It’s a very easy, low barrier to entry way for someone to tell the system the kind of things they will engage with.

In the corporate world, the things you want on your social intranet (especially when you first get it going) are:

• Adoption
• Engagement
• Relevance

They are all interlinked, but can be summarised as giving people the information relevant to them, that helps them do their jobs as best they can, make them more engaged in the tool, the organisation and their colleagues, and create a system where everyone adds value through full adoption.

Likes are an essential tool to make this happen.  They are meaningless enough for someone to feel safe about ‘being seen to like’ something. Yes they indicate user interaction, offer social proof to others that the tool is being used, that their content is being read and appreciated. And they give information into the system about what kind of content people want more off.  Whether that be information to the search tool to optimise results, or information to others creating content to ‘create more stuff like the stuff that got liked’.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

While every feature we add to our intranet must have purpose, it doesn’t need to be defined to an exacting degree of measurability. Its ok to just have features that people seem to like and use – if they drive the outcomes you desire for your organisation.

While we need to remember that Intranets are not internet sites, and that we shouldn’t just lift ideas from the web – we do need to recognise that there are some concepts that they have got right – probably though expensive and tiresome research. The ‘like’ is one of these concepts – whose power is in its simplicity and its non-descript meaning but universal understanding.

So – like or dislike the like?

Is Jon right? Or is Luke right? Tell us what you think? Have you created a solution for the ‘like’ that you can share?

Venue

For the 2013, the we.Conect team moved the conference to a new venue – the Kosmos cinema in Berlin. The organisers were excited by this venue and I can see why. Situated in East Berlin, it was at the heart of the GDR film scene and showed secret screenings of films from the West to the East German leadership. And it’s a great space; huge stage and a floor to occupy a big audience without it feeling packed.

The only downside of this choice was that this is a conference centre without a hotel, so delegates were bussed in from a few nearby venues. This was very well organised by the team, but meant that we were a little more tied to the bus timetable. I stayed in the Andels Hotel, others in the NH, but both were praised by delegates.

Icebreaker

Last year in my conference write up, I made note of the smart thinking by the organisers to make use of the night before the conference proper. Once again, the icebreaker was a big hit. It’s a great opportunity to get people together early, start the networking over a glass of wine or beer and kick off the conference in the right way.

This year, the icebreakers were hosted in one of the conference hotels (it just happened to be mine). That was a little awkward for one or two, such are the difficulties of managing a multi-site conference. However, it was a great evening providing a few lightning-style presentations and great networking.

Day 1: Hamburg Süd, Andritz, Deutsche Bank, Zyncro, Stora Enso, Compagnie Financière Richemont, Infocentric, Skanska, Nestle Nespresso, Novozymes, Sensika and Pfizer. 

An early start on Day 1 started with registration and coffees at 07:30 ahead of the chairman’s welcome at 08:30. Within the bowels of the Kosmos, it was the usual round table affair – a format I much prefer over the long bench format I’ve seen at other conferences. Again, the careful attention to detail of the organising team shone through as there were sufficient seats to ensure that no-one had their back to the screen. Following my feedback last year, some of the tables were powered up – invaluable at digital conferences. Wifi was fast and strong in all locations. In a conference first (at least for me), the entire event was sketched as we went. It was a brilliant record of two days of presentations.

Max Lund from Hamburg Süd kicked us off with a fine summary of their intranet launch journey. From start to finish, theirs took 12 months. Having spoken to many in the room and via Twitter, this seems par for the course. Lund’s presentation made note of  the network of editors and editors-in-chief at Hamburg Süd. With 4,500 employees (3,500 of whom are regular intranet users), the company had a network of some 200 editors, a ratio of 1:17. It struck me then and now that this is a very high number and I’m sure we’ll investigate this ratio in future posts. Predictably, the site itself was very news heavy; my estimate was 60% of the real estate. Never-the-less, this was a pleasing project and product and was rightfully nominated in the top three of the inaugural reloaded awards. You can read more about this project here.

Philipp Rosenthal (now of Infocentric, then of Tieto), presented a fine insight into the his project work at the Infocentric/Tieto client, Andritz. I’ve seen Rosenthal speak on several occasions and I never fail to learn. A few snippets:

1. “Don’t copy, get inspired” – expressing the importance of not copying consumer digital technologies, but learning from them.
2. FOMO – “fear of missing out”
3. FOLC – “fear of losing control”
4. The Subway Map – a visual representation of the information flow underpinning the organisation. Fascinating.
5. “It’s not about winning awards, it’s about being functional” – an important reminder to remain business and employee-centric at all times in the project.

Other day one highlights include the brilliant community work at Deutsche Bank (presented by Thomas Olsen); the ideation with gamification overlay all on SharePoint 2013 (demonstrated by Frank Hatzack); the ever-affable Lluis Font from Zyncro showing how his platform connects the social world; Kimi Matsubara from Skanska showing why their intranet was nominated top 10 by Nielsen Norman; Bob Libbey from Pfizer making the case that content is the king and a demonstration of the importance of cross-functional collaboration by the team at Stora Enso.

The round table ‘Challenge your Peers’ concept is another gem: find your expert, settle down for an hour and pick their brains and those of your peers to help you advance your own work. I like this. It’s simple and practical. It works where LinkedIn groups often fail. It would be interesting to see how the conference team could expand this concept and make the conference work in the other 363 days of the year.

Evening

Once again, this is where the we.Conect team get it so right. When other conferences leave delegates to their own devices, the intranet Reloaded event gets the delegates back together for a meal and let’s be honest, the best networking is done over a glass of wine. Good food, good company, great location and a great band despite their tron-inspired jazz funk outfits. Special thanks to Jacqueline Hanlon who looked after us all until the ‘wee hours’.

Day 2: Sonae, Towers Watson, Kempinski, Philips, Robert Bosch

The less hungover delegates will have no doubt made it to the conference jog before our agenda started. Please, don’t judge me, but I decided that sleep and breakfast had greater appeal! The fact that these social networking opportunities are built into the agenda is a reflection of the overall attention to detail.

Due to flights and some other work conflicts, I was not able to attend all of the sessions, but did want to highlight the work of João Piedade at Sonae and James Lewis at Towers Watson.

Piedade is doing some sterling work at Sonae in developing their intranet, Sonae Circle. I lost count of the great framework models he presented for his work but rest assured they were all photographed and will be studied for applicability to my own business in due course.  An early gem was concerned with the importance of foundations for your project: governance. We’ve discussed governance  a few times on these pages, but Joao called it out his own way: Governance is about people, processes, policies and goals. He also took time to describe what Sonae Circle would ultimately be: People, Social, knowledge, contents, communities, mobility, search and collaboration. Finally, he added another great model for driving change: Define the problem, understand stakeholders, beta development for iteration and then use and re-use. As Piedade said “…if you don’t understand the problem, you will fail with the solution”. This was an excellent start to the second day with so many learning points. He had the floor, he had the room and we were all ears as this fellow delegate noted. Our cartoonist captured it beautifully.

James Lewis is another excellent presenter and his methodology for delivering change for the Towers Watson intranet gave plenty of food for thought. We have written about the differences between the big bang and the long wow approaches to development and Lewis ran with this long wow theme and presented the TW method for deciding upon- and delivering change. The approach was to deliver small incremental changes in the main, with any one block of working lasting 40-1600 hours of work. This ‘iterate fast and release often’ style is increasingly popular but they key learning for me was the use of multipliers and votes to decide on which pieces of work got chosen. Democratic delivery!

World Cafe

The world cafe saw conference delegates and presenters take on the role of facilitators to focus on some specific intranet challenges. I hosted a facilitated conversation on the top of mobile intranets and learnt so much from the 80 or so delegates that passed by my table. Sadly, that also meant that I didn’t get to experience the other elements of the world cafe and unlike last year, there was no verbal summary from which to learn. The organisers have promised visual summaries which we will add to this blog in due course.

Summary

It’s all about the people

A good conference is about the agenda and the presentations; a great conference is the additional networking opportunities afforded. Intranet Reloaded has this in buckets: icebreakers, conference dinner, world cafes and challenge your peers. The conference is two days long but the network strength built should last you the remaining 363 days until the next gathering.

I often see familiar returning faces at this Berlin conference which speaks volumes. This conference is not cheap, there are plenty of other potential dates in the calendar but yet folks return. I’m glad they return: it’s great to see and hear how their projects have matured. If you are a regular attendee of intranet or digital workplace conferences you will have seen some of these people (and some of their content before). I accept that this is inevitable to a degree since conference folks hate taking a risk with their agendas and presenters – delegates pay too much to allow it. I’d like to see the lightning presentations brought into the full agenda: it’d be a welcome change of pace and give some in-experienced speakers a more gentle introduction to public speaking. And once again, a distinct male bias on the speakers list that did not appear reflected in the audience. I encourage any conference organiser to work with the 300seconds crew to identify new talent.

Should you attend in 2014?

The short answer is ‘yes’. This conference attracts some excellent international speakers who have delivered some ground breaking products. I learnt a huge amount, met and re-met some outstanding thought-leaders.

We’re now launching our intranet awards page so you can keep on top of submissions for 2013′s prizes.

StepTwo Intranet Innovation Awards

The StepTwo awards recognise intranet innovation in a number of different categories. Gold Awards went to the following companies:

• Chr. Hansen (Denmark)
• NSW Department of Education and Communities (Australia)
• Enter (Russia)
• Government of the Netherlands (Netherlands)
• Weston Solutions (US)
• Urbis (Australia)
• Scott Corporation (Australia)
• The Judge Group (US)

You can buy the full report here. Closing date for next years entries have not yet been announced but likely in May.

The SCM Awards

The SCM Awards have several categories that you should consider for your intranet project including the “Excellence in Technology”  and “Small Team Award”.

Winning the awards for their intranet was SmallWorlders / Heineken International.

Digital Communication Awards

Hosted by Quadriga University of Applied Sciences, the Digital Communication Awards are the first awards in European PR and communications that exclusively honour outstanding achievements in online communication. Primarily focused on external digital excellence, they do have a dedicated intranet category. A full list of their 2012 winners can be found here.

Best intranet award went to Coca-Cola Enterprises

Institute of Internal Communications Awards

The IIC awards celebrate the kind of work being done every day by IC professionals in the UK. They cover everything from campaigns, innovation, digital media, print media, writing, events and design. The full list of winners can be found here.

Winner of best intranet was Unilever News Centre for Unilever

Neilsen Norman’s Design Annual

The NNG Awards are yearly snapshot of the best in intranet design. Whilst we and others have been critical of this award methodology, it’s still the gold standard of intranet prizes. They recognise a list of  ’top 10′ intranets for the year. For a summary of the winners, you can read their free report or pay to download the detail here.

• Acorda Therapeutics (US)
• American International Group (US)
• AT&T (US)
• Hager Group (Germany)
• Luzerner Kantonalbank (Switzerland)
• ONO (Spain)
• Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA) (Saudi Arabia)
• Swiss Mobiliar Insurance & Pensions  (Switzerland)
• WorkSafeBC (Canada)
• XL Group (Ireland)

Ragan’s Employee Communications Awards

The Ragan EC awards have five awards under their Intranet category. The categories cover design, headlines and blurbs, social, interviews and profiles and value to the employees. Unfortunately, their deadline has just closed so we don’t yet know the 2012 winners.

CIPR Inside Awards

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) celebrate internal communication successes, including intranets, through their annual CIPR Inside Awards. The winner was Coca-Cola Enterprises.

Digital Impact Awards

Covering a huge range of topics around social, external and internal digital communications, the DIA have a category specifically for intranets. Winners in 2012 include:

• Clarks (Gold Award)
• Coca-Cola Enterprises (Bronze Award)

The Judges’ View

Recently, I was asked to judge a ‘best intranet’ award for a conference which provided insights that may be useful as you prepare to enter awards in 2013. Here are a few tips that made my job much easier and will help you highlight your successes.

1. Stick to the prescribed word counts: This is vital. Trust me, I will not count your words, but lengthy, wordy, overly verbose entries will not endear you to your judge. If you’ve got 10s of entries to judge, you’re better off making it succinct. And please, punctuate and use paragraphs! It immediately fills me with foreboding if I see 1000s of words without breathing spaces.
2. If you don’t share it, I can’t judge it: I had the pleasure of seeing a summary of an intranet I know well, but the author had not really shown it in it’s best light. Your job on the entry form is to make it shine.
3. Add hyperlinks to content: Some award entries are very strict about the materials that they want you to submit – maybe a prescribed entry form and a set number of images – but where there is some latitude, exploit it. Make your intranet images, videos or support materials available on the internet and add hyperlinks. There’s no guarantee a judge will click through, but if they do, they’ll get a much stronger vision
4. Numbers make prizes: Be it ROI, costs, user stats, numbers help augment your words and make it easier to understand the scope or value of your project. Many companies (mine included) hesitate, but it helps judges enormously. If you don’t feel you can share it publicly, share it as part of the entry and make it clear that it’s not to be revealed. They’ll understand. Don’t for a second think that big companies equate to big budgets which take the prize. In my experience, intranet creativity and excellence is more likely to be founder in smaller organisations who really work hard to stretch their dollars.
5. Speak with the organisers: A friendly relationship is not going to win you a prize, rest assured, but it won’t harm your entry. It may secure you a gentle reminder on deadlines; some liberty with closing dates or even the opportunity to add clarity where needed. Ask to see their scorecard, they can only say ‘no’.

Summary

Is internal approval, or external recognition more important? It’s easy to answer: your intranet, first and foremost, is designed to serve the communication, collaboration, transactional and knowledge needs of your employees and company so your first aim should be to get the thumbs up within the company. However, these are not mutually exclusive. If an award it appropriately designed, with good measurement criteria, it will be able to identify projects that meet employee and company expectations. And in an industry that operates behind the corporate firewall, it’s fantastic to get the external recognition afforded by a win.

In this special guest post for Intranetizen, William Amurgis - former director of internal communications at American Electric Power - sets out how you can boost traffic to your intranet by focussing on access, relevance and timeliness.

Many intranet managers follow a standard morning routine: reviewing the server logs from the day before to determine overall traffic, to identify the most popular pages, to monitor search terms, and to spot spikes and dips.

You can often glean important information from traffic analysis — assuming we are also willing to follow up on the analysis and take action to make improvements.

Some intranet managers even set goals to reach particular visitation or participation thresholds.

I’ve never considered visitation or participation rates to be primary goals for an intranet. I tend to focus on productivity enhancement, message reinforcement, and other goals that tie more directly to the organization’s overall strategies and values.

However, if you wish to boost traffic to your intranet, concentrate on three things:

1. Access. Make your intranet easy to access, from a variety of work and home devices, including mobile smartphones. Simplify the login process, if any, and ensure that performance — the time it takes for a page to load — is snappy even from remote locations.
2. Timeliness. Make your intranet a must-see, daily destination by offering fresh, timely information and, wherever possible, real-time performance indicators (tied to business goals or — better yet — bonus plans) and status updates. Every aspect of our intranet’s front page changes at least once a day, driving repeat traffic.
3. Relevance. Also, ensure that the information and applications you provide are relevant to your organization, and consistent with your organization’s strategies and values. Monitor and observe your employees to better understand their needs, and then deliver related services. Pay close attention to hot topics, and address them.

Allow me to illustrate with a brief story.

I was initially surprised, years ago, when I began to see comments on our interactive intranet from field employees. These people work out of their trucks all day, and don’t necessarily require intranet access to do their jobs.

When I inquired, some field employees told me that they would access the intranet over lunch or during breaks, using the computers installed in their trucks to obtain work orders. Others explained that they would access the intranet from their homes, or from mobile smartphones.

To them, tuning into the intranet and participating in online discussions would occur not because they were forced to do so, but because they wanted to do so — just as long as we offered something relevant and valuable to them.

So, if your goal is to increase employee visitation and participation rates, focus on improving access, timeliness, and relevance.

Frankly, I respect the decision of any employee who chooses to avoid the intranet or elects not to participate in online dialogue. The burden is always on us, on the intranet team, to understand our people, to inspire them, to inform them, to involve them, and to offer them value.

Anything less is simply not worth visiting.

William Amurgis is the former director of internal communications at American Electric Power, a large electric utility based in Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. He recently accepted early retirement and is currently considering other career opportunities. You may reach him at wm@amurgis.com or follow him on Twitter at @wamurgis.

Conference Structure

Unlike many conferences, the Congres Intranet event is a day conference, with a day of focused workshops preceding it. Whilst I did not attend the workshops themselves, the calibre of the presenters and delegate feedback shared with me suggests that they were well run and well received.

The day itself consisted of thought-provoking keynote speakers (in both Dutch and English) either side of a series of breakout sessions. The full agenda can be found here in English and Dutch.

Chairing the conference on behalf of Entopic was consultant Samuel Driessen. Samuel is a well respected contributor to the global intranet community and chaired our day effortlessly. As a non-Dutch speaker, I particularly appreciated segments in English to allow the whole room to connect.

The main presenting room, Congres Utretcht

Our Conference Highlights

Without doubt, my highlights were the three keynote speakers who topped and tailed the conference agenda. Keynoters, unlike those running breakouts, often have the opportunity to speak to the trends and themes in our industry so are often a brief insight into our near future. Entertaining the main room with plenty of inspirational goodies were Euan Semple, Luis Suarez and Steven Van Belleghem.

So what did we learn?

Euan Semple at Congres 2013. Picture via Motion10. Click through to original

All three speakers provided thought-leadership on social enterprise, particularly the value of conversation and social interaction and the implications for how we will all work in the future. Whilst many practitioners are on the first step of the ladder — convincing senior leaders to invest in and embrace social technologies — Euan Semple reminisced about introducing bulletin boards in to the BBC some 12 years ago. We were social even then. With consumer technologies becoming the professional IT benchmark, the argument was that businesses need to embrace social concepts quickly or simply fall behind employee and customer expectations.

Both Euan and Steven talked about the value and importance of conversation. Euan noted that blogging was a way “writing your way into existence: your trace”. I felt that was an important challenge. Employee blogging is often seen as frivolous, but here was a well-presented argument that blogging was a way to create organisational history, complementary to traditional KM sources. We should blog to find our voice, blog to filter and our thinking and blog to create knowledge. Employees should not fear adding to the noise. As we’ve noted elsewhere, social noise helps drive networked productivity, but in time through writing, the signal to noise ratio improves.

Luis Suarez presenting in the main hall at Congres Intranet 2013. Picture from Motion10. Click through

Luis Suarez (http://www.elsua.net/, IBM), focused on the changes technology would make to the knowledge worker and the enterprise in his presentation “The Evolving Knowledge Worker“.  Luis asked his audience about the greatest challenge facing businesses and with guidance, we landed on engagement (and one assumes we can take this as both employee and customer/consumer engagement in an enterprise). Social technologies have a huge role to play in meeting such challenges through openness, transparency, honesty, authenticity, driving responsibility, ownership, caring and even empathy. This was compelling stuff, material that I hope every CIO and CEO gets to hear. Euan Semple writes “Organisations don’t tweet, people do“; Luis’ adds that social technologies make businesses more human.

Steven Van Belleghem’s presentation was in Dutch, so I owe an apology to him and to readers for any mis-interpretations of themes. Steven’s challenging title was “Internal Communication is Dead” , arguing that it’s conversation and dialogue which is now vital to health within, and without, the enterprise. It’s conversation that helps drive engagement and conversation that helps drive collaboration. Steven makes a strong case for the traditional intranet manager role to evolve more into a community manager who will help drive conversation.

I sincerely regret I don’t speak any Dutch since it was clear from the audience that Steven is a tremendously engaging, enthusiastic and knowledgeable speaker. He owned the stage and even had his audience joining in. Impressive.

I must also apologise to presenters running breakouts. The twitter backchannel showed that there were some great sessions that generated healthy conversation but as I was presenting one, and don’t speak Dutch, my participation was somewhat limited. I’ll follow up and learn through the decks.

Getting there

Getting to Congres Intranet could not be easier. There are countless cheap flights into Amsterdam Schipol airport and from there, it’s a quick 30minute, €10-15 train journey to Utrecht Centraal. The vast Media Plaza is a short 5 minute walk from the station. The price and ease of transfer will make selling this conference to your manager much easier.

Summary

Congres Intranet is one of the best established conferences in the calendar. This was its fifth year and that longevity speaks volumes about the speakers and agendas that Entopic curate. I was impressed with the organisation, the venue, the speakers and the delegates — I enjoyed myself.

There was a good balance with the vendors too. As delegates, we all know that vendor attendance helps keep the cost of attendance down, but how and where they participate in the proceedings make all the difference. At Congres Intranet, vendors did not take to the stage so there was no auditorium selling, but they were present in breakout areas. I want to mention Coconut and Liferay – impressive products, knowledgeable and non-pushy sales teams. We hope to feature both in future vendor profiles.

I do wonder if there was a missed opportunity for the conference organisers though. The main conference day is a great introduction to some excellent presenters who, it transpired, were also running workshops the day before. If organisers switched the days, I suspect many delegates may be tempted to stay another day and hear more detail.

I would also add that whilst speaking Dutch is not essential, it would certainly be an advantage. The majority of keynotes and a minority of breakouts were in English, so whilst it’s possible to attend a full English program, choices are naturally limited. This is no criticism but international visitors should just be aware.

In summary: great value, great agenda, go.

As a true IntraTeam Event veteran attending the conference for the fourth time I was looking forward to the annual intranet ‘family reunion’ in Copenhagen that Kurt and his ‘Intra Team’ usually puts together, so before leaving my home in Aarhus on my three hour train ride to get there I naturally had high expectations to this year’s event and I was – once again – not disappointed.

Day one

The first day was – true to form – dedicated to workshops and tutorials lead by intranet experts and thought leaders. I attended a six-hour workshop about intranet personas lead by Gordon Ross, whose inspiring blog and tweets I have been following for years.

He introduced a method developed by Dave Snowden and based on this we went through a narrative and sense making exercise (and a lot of post-its) to produce five personas. Very interesting and I can only recommend all intranet professionals to give personas some thought. It takes time but in the end it is time well spent.

In previous years I have been giving feedback that the workshop days were more tutorials than workshops – and last year’s Intranetizen review noted the same. So I was happy to find myself in a ‘real’ workshop rather than to sit down and listen to a tutorial. Speaking to other delegates I got the impression that they, with the odd exception, also enjoyed the day. Certainly a positive development for the event where the weak spot has been the first day and I hope this continues.

Day two

The first proper conference day was kicked off by Jane McConnell who gave a nice presentation on what you can call ‘The state of the Digital Workplace’ based on her latest Digital Workplace Trends report. If you have been following Jane and are familiar with her work there is no big surprises here but nevertheless a good way to start the conference.

Following Jane, David Cotterill from the UK Cabinet Office presented ‘Idea Street’ from UK Department for Work and Pensions with some great insights into why community management is important but also how game mechanics can be very helpful. Most interestingly David’s case study provided proof of the elusive ROI of social collaboration and how the initiative had saved £20m – quite impressive.

IKEA had been called in and Linda Tinnert had put a very interesting presentation together (pun intended) on how they are using Yammer globally. In many ways they reflect the journey my company and several others have been through. It’s about people – not about the tools! A sentence that cannot be repeated enough when you are talking about the digital workplace and its components. Following this presentation I had the privilege of hosting a round table with Linda which was an excellent follow up on the many questions that came up after her presentation.

The day concluded with award Denmark’s Best Intranet 2012 which was presented to Grontmij for their intranet with Tivoli as the runner up. Overall it was very well designed with some nice features but I talked to others who questioned whether this was the best one out there since there was little focus on search and social. I will not agree or disagree but crowning someone or something as ‘the best’ always raises questions. In my opinion, the best intranet is one that fits the organization. This is also why ‘the best’ is a little ambiguous and personally I prefer awards that highlight good features like the Intranet Innovation Awards rather than an entire intranet – maybe something to consider for IntraTeam.

Day three

This day started with two analyst presentations. First up was Matt Mullen from 451Research whose presentation title promised to teach us how to deal with the aftermath of Dropbox. Certainly an interesting presentation about consumerisation but not quite what it said on the label which was a real shame. Matt was followed by Jarrod Gingras from Real Story Group who talked about search to a packed room. In my opinion there was little news in his presentation something tells me that search is becoming a subject that we all know is important but we have no idea (nor any budget) how to do something about it.

Gordon Ross from ThoughtFarmer was next with a somewhat philosophical presentation about the concept of power in the social intranet. Drawing from the ideas of Manuel Castells he emphasized how the aim to ‘empower’ everyone puts the existing power structures under immense pressure and how we need to understand how power flows in networks – hierarchical or informal before we can shorten the distance between people. Extremely interesting but also complex and I can only recommend that you watch ThoughtFarmer’s blog or follow him on Twitter where he will be sharing his inspiring presentation.

After lunch I gave a presentation about our first 10 months on Yammer and the lessons we have learned. As I mentioned before we have a lot in common with IKEA’s journey not to mention that we still have a lot of work to do but the fact that we have been able to learn as we go through real life experimenting has been invaluable. The event concluded with Elizabeth Lupfer who was called in last minute and gave a good presentation on how Verizon worked with engaging people in a large organization.

They did it again

Once again IntraTeam Event turned out to be a great conference. Lots of familiar faces and some new additions to the growing family together along with some inspiring speakers did that I left Copenhagen brimming with ideas and thoughts.

Venue and logistics were good as always apart from day three where things were a little crammed together due to another event. This was part made up for by lunch at the 25^th floor overlooking Copenhagen and overall not something that could change the picture of an excellent conference. I’m looking forward to the 2014 edition.

Did you attend IntraTeam event this year? What did you think of it? What could be improved, and would you recommend it to others? Talk about it in the comments below.

Martin Risgaard Rasmussen, @risgaard, is a Social Media enthusiast and Online professional currently working as a consultant at Grundfos. He blogs at connaxions.wordpress.com

Search is slowly improving – more as a result of improved integration and improved solutions rather than an increase in focus and resource allocation. The information landfill still exists but nearly all companies work on changing this and as a result we now see a widening gap between those who succeed and those who don’t.

Paul Miller, CEO and Founder, Intranet Benchmarking Forum. He is the author of “The Digital Workplace: How Technology is Liberating Work”, a Charter Member of the Editorial Council of IBM’s Center for CIO Leadership and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal. @paulmillersays 

Intranet services will be as present on the mobile frontline (retail, logistics, manufacturing to name a few) bringing staff and customers closer digitally. This will still be “work in progress” for many companies but delivering applications via mobile devices to customer-facing staff will become standard.

Intelligence will become embedded into innovative intranets, providing understanding of staff location, patterns and needs – creating a growing divide between digital enhanced businesses and those playing catch up.

Andrew Wright is the chief Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) guy. Located in Melbourne, Australia, he started the WIC in April 2009. He also delivers intranet workshops and provides intranet consulting services. Skype: awright.ciba.solutions; @roojwright

Sorry to be a pessimist, but I don’t think the majority of intranets in 2015 will look much different from today’s intranets. Based on my intranet research over the last 4 or 5 years, I haven’t noticed much of a change in that time and I can’t see that trend changing in the near future.

Admittedly there have been some improvements in technology, look & feel and some award winning intranets have become a little more interactive, but the fundamental issues remain the same as they did 4 or 5 years ago:

• There is still a strong focus on internal communication as the core purpose of the intranet
• As a result, many intranets are simply internal newsletters (some now with Facebook like activity feeds) that provide nice news stories that may or may not get read (check out the 2012 Beautiful Intranet entries and notice how much home page real estate is for news, announcements & updates)
• Staff still don’t see them as business critical because they are not essential for completing business tasks and as a result they do not have the attention, respect or budget of senior management
• Many are also simply document repositories, not much different to network drives (I’m specifically talking about SharePoint here)
• Staff still cannot find what they are looking for and information is still categorised by business unit – staff need to know which department owns which piece of information before they can find it
• There is not much consolidation of information going on and silos of information are continuing to appear. The wheel continues to be reinvented.
• I don’t see much workflow, task automation or online interaction taking place

None of these issues are strictly technology related – they all relate to intranet vision and change management.

Ok, so it’s all very well for me to be critical, so how I would like to see intranets in 2015? Well that’s a different story. I think the great thing about intranets – and what motivates me to spend so much of my time researching them – is that they have a unique ability to support 3 critical business imperatives:

• Rapid implementation of continuous improvements & innovation across an organisation
• More efficient business operations
• A greater level of employee engagement

I’d like to see the intranets of 2015 support these goals more clearly and explicitly (eg. we are implementing activity feeds because we think this will create serendipitous connections that will not only encourage innovation within our organisation but will also contribute to a higher level of employee engagement – which leads to higher profits and greater productivity).
I also think one of the major contributions an intranet can make to an organisation is the ability to be the glue that combines the different organisational (and external) information elements together in a context that is meaningful to each staff member (I know, sounds a little complicated).
I envision a personalised web page for each staff member that not only lists all the activities they need to do their job, but also provides additional context such as links to any documents, templates, applications, discussion forums, people, online forms, lists, contacts, web pages, and any other content that supports the completion of that activity. Maybe we could call these intranets Contextually Integrated Business Applications. I think a time frame of 4 or 5 years is not unrealistic to achieve this utopia.

Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd., is an intranet and information management strategy consultant, founding Intranet Focus Ltd in 1999. An information scientist by profession he has been a Visiting Professor at the Information School, the University of Sheffield since 2002. Prior to setting up Intranet Focus Ltd in 1999 he held senior management positions with Reed Publishing, International Data Corporation and Logica plc. In the course of his career Martin has undertaken projects or managed business operations in over 35 countries.

By the end of 2015 I think there will be four fairly distinct types of intranet

Type A intranets will be well on their way to being digital workplaces. They will be interconnected with digital workplaces in suppliers and customers, be predominately task-based and built on search-based application platforms. The roadmap for these intranets will be set by IT departments because of the significant application integration and security management issues.

Type B will be social intranets, meeting requirements for sharing between groups and teams within and across organisations. Type B intranets will be designed knowledge sharing and in addition will support activity stream analysis to provide employees with a means of tracking social media and collaboration channels across the organisation. I expect to see IBM making an impact in the development of these intranets through its significant commitment to Connections.

Type C will be mobile intranets, though they will not be mobile versions of current intranets. The navigation experience will be via search and apps, and the focus will be on the immediate delivery of usable information at the point of requirement. Both Type B and Type C intranets will be driven by line of business units.

As we move into 2016 we will find that in larger organisations the three Types will co-exist and be synchronised, providing a seamless access to data, information and knowledge. The information architecture may well be presented dynamically by a search application. Users will create and validate the information they deliver so the role of the intranet manager will be primarily around issues of governance, compliance, defining user requirements, usability testing and performance analysis.

However I expect that the majority of intranets will be Type D, highly organised collections of documents and web pages predominantly based on SharePoint. There will be little progress here as organisations struggle with the issues of when and how to migrate from current platforms. Organisations are already conscious that during 2015 there will be news of SharePoint 2016! These intranets will have utility but little impact on the achievement of the objectives of the organisation.

Jane McConnell, author of Digital Workplace Trends 2013, has been active in the digital world since 1996. Jane has 14 years of extensive hands-on consulting experience with intranet and digital workplace strategy in large, global organizations. She has conducted over 100 intranet/digital workplace projects for 50 organizations. Most of them are headquartered in Europe, some in North America, and all of them are global.

Intranet2015 is only 23 months away! That’s a short time in enterprise years, at least it is for large organizations. Organizations that want to make a leap forward need to use that time to work on change facilitation. They need to find ways to  build and instill trust and openness (as appropriate) in their cultures. As I discussed in “Digital Workplace Trends 2013″,  in the majority of cases, resistance to social collaborative ways of working comes from top management. Early adopters on the other hand have support from top management; the resistance comes from middle management. Culture and change is where I would love to see a real difference in 2015.

Guy van Leemput, Online Communication and intranet expert, is an experienced professional in the fields of marketing, product management and e-business. He has managed international teams that defined and implemented new web strategies, built online community platforms and redesigned corporate intranets. Guy leads the JBoyeactivities in the Benelux region.

1. Supporting the ‘New World of Work’: Intranets are growing and maturing in order to support the ‘New World of Work’ as Microsoft and others have called it. The traditional intranet with its official content will still have a place, but a much smaller one than before. Social, collaboration and especially mobile capabilities will ensure that the employees of 2015 will work together efficiently anywhere, anytime, on any device. Introducing NWOW is quickly becoming a priority in many organizations, and so will be the transformation of their intranet.
2. Unlocking tacit knowledge: Many organizations are introducing social features on their intranet or are implementing a brand-new social business platform. By 2015, these will be widespread. When looking beyond the hype, the main business drivers are always about unlocking the tacit knowledge that sits in the brains of the employees. Companies want to make this knowledge accessible, across physical locations and departmental silos, in support of business objectives such as product innovation, faster time-to-market and better customer service. Managers like to say that ‘People are our most important asset’ but in the past this was often just lip service. In 2015, it will become a reality. (Well, at least in those organizations who implement successfully)

The good news in all of this – at least for us intranet professionals – is that intranets will become more business-critical than before. Intranet managers often complain that the intranet is only the poor cousin of the website, with little money and no senior management attention. Now they have a unique opportunity to lift their babies to stardom!

James is a global expert on intranet strategy and design. He is the author of the best-selling intranet books “What every intranet team should know” and “Designing intranets: creating sites that work”. He has helped many high-profile organisations develop an intranet strategy, and keynotes events around the globe. James is the Managing Director of StepTwo Designs.

For intranets in 2015 there is two pieces of good news, and one ongoing challenge.

1. The edges of intranets become further blurred. 2012 and 2013 saw the rise of “intranet plus”, for example “intranet plus collaboration”, “intranet plus document management”, etc. By 2015, what are considered add-ons to current sites will become assumed elements, further expanding the role of intranets, and blurring the lines with other enterprise systems.
2. Intranets are mobile. The rise of enterprise mobility is both compelling and unstoppable. By 2015, many of the key tools and resources that staff need will be accessible from mobile devices, whenever and wherever.
3. Productivity remains a challenge. The greatest intranet benefits come from streamlining core processes and activities. But this is a very slow process, as it’s heavily dependent on IT and enterprise systems. By 2015, we will see more solutions in this space, but still a lot of work yet to do.

Summary

Firstly, we’re very grateful to our panel of experts in giving us an insight into the future. We’d like to highlight some important trends from their ideas that resonate with us.

Mobile and Mobility: Despite sounding like a Jane Austin novel, these two focuses will be vital for intranet 2015. The intranet will be everywhere — on every glass, company or employee owned — and in particular, will be smartphone focused. We believe that this mobile first thinking will generate some important steps forward in UI and functionality.

Work and Workplaces: The intranet will be the workplace of the future. It will have evolved from a communication and collaboration vehicle and will be a place of work. If your business makes widgets, you’ll make them, in part or full, through intranet functionality.

Social: The intranet will not have social spaces, it will be intrinsically social with every social features weaved into each element of current functionality. Social HR; social marketing; social internal communications anyone?

What do you think? What will your intranet2015 look like? Add your comments below and join the debate.

When we reported the story on Monday, many of you were quick to comment with your thoughts on why Yahoo made this decision, and what it means for other organisations, and for the future of the digital workplace.

Within days, the story was picked up by mainstream news outlets, who questioned the logic of the decision for a high-tech business like Yahoo!

• Guardian: Yahoo chief bans working from home
• BBC: Teleworking – the myth of working from home
• Wall Street Journal: Yahoo ban on working from home is misguided
• Fox News Business: Mayer Mistake? Is Yahoo work-from-home ban a morale killer?
• ZDNet: Why Yahoo’s ‘no home working’ rule will lead us back into the office

Other business leaders quickly waded into the debate, most notably Richard Branson, who wrote a passionate blog post arguing employers should give people the freedom of where to work.

Yahoo!’s move also prompted several stories on how to make a success of home working, including this one in the Guardian. Our favourite, however, was this tongue-in-cheek version from the Daily Mash. More useful advice can be found in Martin White’s excellent research paper on managing virtual teams.

Other things which caught our collective eye this week:

• On the Step Two Designs blog, James Robertson sets out why every intranet needs a strategy
• On CMSWire, Jed Cawthorne says intranet governance has never been more complex – nor more important
• William Amurgis imagines the internal communications department of the future
• Ahead of their SMILE (Social Media Inside the Large Enterprise) summit, Simply Communicate are conducting a survey on the use of mobile in the enterprise
• Findwise are conducting their annual enterprise search and findability survey
• Sam Marshall and Jane McConnell launch a new Digital Workplace group on LinkedIn
• Researchers at MIT conducted an autopsy of a dead social network. These findings are useful and interesting reading for anyone who wants to make a success of an enterprise social network
• Congratulations to all the winners of the CIPR Inside awards, which took place last night – in particular Intranetizen’s own @DigitalJonathan, whose team took home the award for best intranet

And what made us laugh this week?  An early contender for Tumblr of the Year is Jim’ll Paint It. A man (Jim) with an eye for detail and far too much time on his hands, takes commissions for bizarre original artworks, which he creates using Microsoft Paint.

In a memo widely leaked by disgruntled employees, Yahoo!’s Head of HR Jackie Reses explained:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

What does this mean?

While it’s thought only a few hundred customer service reps are based entirely at home, the change in policy affects a great many more who work part of the time from home, and even asks those who take an occasional day to wait in for a repair or delivery to reconsider.

Yahoo! employees have until June this year to relocate, quit or get on board with the new policy.

The move prompted a lot of discussion online, particularly amongst intranet and digital workplace practitioners, who for years now have strived to ensure work is what you do, not where you go.

The tech world has long been ahead of the curve when it comes to flexible working, with startups pioneering flexible work arrangements and being early adopters of digital workplace tools. As we noted last year, this has now become mainstream, with acceptance of home-based working powered by the digital workplace growing in even fairly traditional sectors such as government and financial services.

Once one of the most innovative startups around, Yahoo! is said to have lost its edge in recent years. In an attempt to regain that momentum,last summer they brought in former Google exec Marissa Mayer. She quickly sought to bring Yahoo!’s perks and culture up to date with those elsewhere in Silicon Valley, giving employees free meals and iPhones, and bringing in weekly open meetings.

All of which makes the decision to pull the plug on home working even harder to understand. If an internet company – with digital native employees, great technology and connectivity – can’t make home-working a success, what hope has anyone else?

Flexible working is the future

As digital workplace practitioners ourselves – all four of us work from home all or part of the time – we were particularly surprised by the news. Cloud technology, tablet computing, high speed broadband access make working from home as efficient as office-based activity. Add into the equation that home-based workers are happier, require less costly company-provided office space and have a vastly reduced commuter carbon footprints makes the edict from Yahoo! feel a terribly retrograde move.

It certainly puts Yahoo! well out of step with prevailing industry trends. In this year’s Digital Workplace Trends report, Jane McConnell found over a third of organisations considered mobility to be their highest investment priority for the year ahead – something that looks set to continue to grow in future years.

In his book The Digital Workplace: How Technology Is Liberating Work, intranet entrepreneur Paul Miller argues “Physical place will become less and less central to work itself. What will be transformational will be the new geography of work: the Digital Workplace where we will spend more and more time, working in entirely new ways, with richer, more immersive tools.”

Growing numbers of organisations are already finding the digital workplace delivers cost savings, more engaged employees, reduced environmental impact, and scores of other benefits besides, without a loss in productivity.

Yahoo! needs to tread carefully

However, Yahoo! are not alone in failing to realise these benefits. A survey of 400 businesses and 2,000 workers published last week  by communications giant O2 found that staff were willing to embrace new ways of working, but they were not being supported by their employers.

O2 business director Ben Dowd said: “Just six months since Britain’s biggest flexible working opportunity, the Olympics, it’s shocking that less than one fifth of people feel they are encouraged to work flexibly. Businesses must sit up and take notice of this critical evolution in employee behaviour and create a business culture equipped to support it. Talking about it simply isn’t enough. To create a truly flexible working culture, actions speak louder than words.”

Yahoo!’s actions suggest their business culture is badly out of step with modern ways of working, and hardly suggests they’re at the cutting edge of web technology. With more employees considering flexible working an essential part of their overall pay and benefits package, some have suggested Yahoo! are making themselves an unattractive prospect to prospective hires and investors alike.

To help you, to help us and to help the vendors themselves, we’re running a series of posts of over this coming week showcasing 5 intranet companies. We’ve supplied them with the same standard set of questions and will publish their answers in their own words to ensure equity! All the images have been supplied by the company themselves and are reproduced with permission.

Today, we showcase Coffeepoke

In a brief paragraph, who are you?

3 founders and 2 associates,we are based in France (except one of the associate based in Mexico). Antoine (CEO), Renaud and Evrard are former viadeo employees, Edouard (CTO) is a former employee of Pixamania and Boris has a banking/selling background (at barcap and calyon in London). Boris and Evrard are in charge of the business development in Europe and Renaud is developing the business in the LATAM region.

Coffee Poke is the 1st Cross-Platform application (Web +Mobile App + TV App) dedicated to strengthen bonds between employees in a workplace. Coffeepoke is the 1st social network with a TV app. Coffeepoke does not replace the traditional coffee break. Coffeepoke allows an extension of those informal exchanges on a virtual platform; from those that usually happen between a limited group of people, to all the employees of the company.

Coffeepoke has an original functionality called “CoffeePoke” that creates real connection too, you can invite your colleagues for a real coffee and learn to know them !

Briefly describe your product’s history? Why did you start it, where does it come from?

Steve Jobs thought the most efficient meetings were the informal ones taking place in hallways, at the coffee machine or in the parking lot ! So do we!!! From this assumption, we have decided to developed Coffeepoke app that unite colleagues, promote informal exchanges, reinforce conviviality within the company.

Describe your typical customer – what kind of company, what size, what are the kinds of problems they need to solve?

Typical customers are the mid cap companies (between 100 and 500 employees and even more) whatever the industry. Problem they need to solve is how to get a more efficient communication between employees within a company.

We also have clients that already have a social network deployed but the adoption by the users is difficult, using just our TV app is a booster for adoption as we also offers access to its RestFull API allowing clients to integrate the application in their work environment.

What do you see as your product and company’s USP?

Coffeepoke, the enterprise social network

Which feature(s) of your product do your customers rave about most?

The TV app, in the common area (open space, canteen, hallway…), the TV application is simply and permanently broadcasting on a TV screen the last posts from the coffee wall (you can customise which messages can be broadcast).

Also Coffee TV is a powerful tool dedicated to internal communication or human resources. Because some messages are more important than others, Coffeepoke has a functionality that broadcasts “Top-Down” messages; for example results announcement, internal promotion, new recruits, events and more….

Which feature(s) of your product do you feel are most under-used?

As we have decided to have a very simple platform and also very easy to use, we don’t have any features that are under used, if so we would take the features off the platform.

How much customisation does your product typically need / how much to you recommend your customers make?

To keep the value and the spirit of the company, it’s very easy to customise the coffeepoke interface. The admin can easily customise their Coffeepoke interface with the company’s logo and a specific background. Very simple to do so! As well users can customise their profile with an avatar and a background picture.

CoffeePoke also offers access to its RestFull API allowing clients to integrate the application in their work environment (as Yammer, Jive, Sharepoint, Salesforce, Intranet…)

What advice would you give a company planning to invest in a new intranet platform? / what are the most important factors to consider?

You need to be able to integrate other application to an intranet platform (for example coffeepoke app with Yammer). The 3 most important factors:

• simple : users must understand straight away what they can do with the platform
• social: users need to be able to collaborate through the platform
• smart: users should be able to look for existing information using semantics for example

What’s your cost model? Free; one-off; per seat per month charging; something else?

£4 per users/month
£50 per TV/month
Set up fees: £2000 (includes TV set up, platform set up…)
We also sell the TV sets

Who are your main competitors?

Basically, our competitors are all typical Enterprise social networks as Yammer, Chatter, Jive, Yoolinkpro, Bluekiwi, Jamespot…. Even if we are not exactly doing the same.

What do you need from *your* customers to deliver intranet success?

To have an intranet success, customers need to be ready for some change management, implanting a new intranet is a long process with new practice. Coffeepoke is not an intranet but a collaborative app which is very easy to deploy in a company and can be used as the social brick for an intranet

What does the future have in store for your product?

After coffeepoke, we have a few new collaborative apps for 2013 and 2014, but I can’t really tell what they will be (yet). The only thing I can say is that you will be able to connect all our apps together and our new apps will still be based on “one need = one App”

What does intranet 2015 look like?

Intranets as we know them today will become more and more social and will simply be replaced by proper enterprise social networks.

Who should Intranetizen readers speak with to find out more about your product?

Boris Leveille-Nizerolle +33671367053 or boris@coffeepoke.com

What question should we have asked? And if we had, what would the answer have been?

None!