1. Define the rules, don’t define the purpose
Any social intranet needs to have some rules to help it function correctly but importantly, these should be a style framework more than a definition of purpose. It’s important to provide employees with guidance:

1. Topics — Is it only work topics or does anything go?
2. Language — What can be said, what can’t be said?
3. Tone
4. -isms — Your guidance should include statements about racism, sexism, agism and more.
5. Harassment — sad to say, you probably need to make it clear that this is not acceptable

Avoid making statements about the specific purpose of a social intranet as it can often close down the creativity and spontaneity. Think of it like this: your office has meeting rooms, they’re likely for business meetings, but the precise purpose is left to the users of the room.

2. Legitimise Social: Ask your leaders to lead
Social intranets are work, not work avoidance. Take steps to educate line managers of this at every opportunity and have them, and senior leadership demonstrate this by being active in your social intranet from the first day. Nothing says that social intranets are a legitimate and exciting way to work than your CEO being present and active in this space.

This is vital to the long term health of your social intranet. If people don’t see it as a legitimate channel, they’ll quickly stop using it and revert to less appropriate tools such as email.

3. Find and Nuture Evangelists
People make social. Find people in your organisation who instinctively get social and use them to help integrate it in to the workflow weave. It is particularly useful if you can find people in key parts of your business such as finance as they will quickly bring other people, in other functions, into the social way of working. Use evangelists to seed ideas and develop social communities.

4. Integrate social into existing workflows
Line manager technology leadership is central to adoption and success: if they don’t use an enterprise social network themselves, then there really is little point in you doing so to collaborate with them.

Social needs to be become part of business workflows. Work with leadership and line managers directly and provide business consultancy. Understand from them what their business problems are and demonstrate how social technologies can help.

5. Smart small and build
Take baby steps: Crawl, then walk then run. It will take a long time to create the right environment for a social enterprise to flourish so it’s important to set modest milestones for your intranet.

1. Registered users — if they’re not registered, they can’t participate so you’ve got to start here
2. Numbers of posts — how much ‘noise’ is there in the social space?
3. Number of posts per user — is it a small number of users posting, or is everyone participating?
4. Groups — if your social space allows for private/public groups, are teams adopting these?
5. Time in social — minutes per user per month
6. Anecdotal — ask for success stories within the social space

6. Publicise Successes
Once you’ve been made aware of the successes borne of your social intranet, make sure you publish these using your traditional IC routes. There’s not much point in re-publishing these within your social intranet as you’re preaching to the converted, somewhat! Make sure your whole business is aware of the value of social intranets through these stories.

7. Create, then Curate
This is critically important. Creating the social intranet is the easiest step, curating it is the hardest and most important. You’ll need people on the ground dedicated not only to delivering the steps presented above, but also in seeding ideas and creativity within your enterprise social network. Community manager roles will become increasingly commonplace and important for the vitality of your social intranet.

Summary
Installing the functionality is easy. Be it a native tool, or one of a few excellent enterprise social network tools such as Yammer or Newsgator, getting the technology up and running is the start but to make it a success, you’ll have to work hard to curate. We hope these strategies will help you.

What have we missed? What successes have you had?

Do a quick  search and you will find positive articles on how you can engage, motivate and support your content owners to contribute to the intranet. There are some great tips out there, but do they work? Are your content owners a friend or foe to your intranet?

Friend

• This person actually delivers what they promise and meets all the deadlines. They aren’t just a content owner, they are your super user, your ambassador, the one person you go to when you are in a jam.
• Like a coming home to puppy, your content owner jumps onto your lap and licks the face of intranet authority.  Working on the intranet might be a bit of a side project for them, but their enthusiasm is limitless. They love every task and will always make the time to help if they can.
• A content owner that can inform and advocate influential stakeholders on the intranet is as critical as a ‘doer’.  The HR director may not be able to take thirty minutes out to attend your Intranet governance meeting, but the HR content owner will talk about it with them at every opportunity.

Foe

• They nod, they agree, they say all the right things in public but once the witnesses are gone it’s another story. They ignore your calls and your emails and do whatever they want. Give up, this content owner is a lost cause.
• Enthusiasm or time is not the problem but their ability and tech savvy skills are lacking. Sometimes it’s more effort than it’s worth and you find yourself saying, ‘Let me do that for you.’
• Until it is in their PDR or job specification, you will not get the commitment you require. Be prepared for disappointment and days of chasing them as their promises will never come through.

Did we just describe your content owners? Do you have more foes than friends?

How do you really motivate your content owners?

Empower them: if they are involved and believe they have a say then they are interested.  Just listening isn’t enough. If they have responsibility and accountability they will take the lead and will encourage fellow colleagues to follow. Take the steps to empower one of your content owners by letting them lead a project. As the intranet manager you are never far away and can step in, but you may be pleasantly surprised to find you don’t need to.

Ask them: “what does motivate you?” It might be that they love being creative and are only able to do it on the intranet.  If so, maybe its worth ‘taking a hit’ on the brand consistency and visual standards. If being more creative gets them engaged then why would you want to stop them? Establish a friendly rapport with your content owners and find out what they love to do both at work and at home and see how it can be incorporated into the intranet. Giving your content owner the ability to do what they love will ensure they always complete the task.

Recognise them: Find out what kind of recognition works for them.  It might be cake or beer, it might be a simple thanks, or it might be a public display of appreciation.  Whatever it is remember the type of recognition can range with each content owner. Think about rewarding people when they agree to something, rather than after they deliver it.  If you reward first they’ll feel a bit of an obligation and are more likely to over-deliver.

Make them the expert by establish a mentoring programme. There will be a group of content owners who will want to take the lead and help others. Let them. If you are managing a global intranet it is important to set up regional contacts. These regional experts can support their colleagues better than you could by simply being in the right time zone and location.

Appeal to their practical side: This may be your most difficult content owner as this person won’t respond to any of our suggestions above. Sit them down and have an open and honest discussion about their frustrations. They could be annoyed that they have to answer the same questions day in and day out. By clearly stating that if they took the time upfront to put content on the intranet they wouldn’t be disturbed with silly questions and could get on with their ‘real’ work. Even the most negative content owner can’t argue with  logic.

Motivating your content owners takes patience, perseverance and bribes. There is no quick fix but by implementing some of our suggestions we are confident you will be able to have more friends then foes.

One sure-fire way to get your execs to sit up and take notice is to win an award. Here the Intranetizen team offer five reasons to enter (and win) award schemes.

1. Gives you a way to compare your intranet against others

If you think intranet managers have a tough time getting a peek at other intranets, spare a thought for the users. Even new starters will only have seen a couple of intranets at most; for your longer-serving staff, yours might be the only intranet they’ve ever seen. This means they only have their experiences of the web to compare it to. How many times have intranet managers heard their colleagues ask why it can’t be more like Facebook, Google or any other web site?

By scooping an award, you create an opportunity to show how well your intranet compares against others and are able to give your users some context.

2. Celebrate a job well done

You’ve worked hard on your intranet project, and – if you do say so yourself – you’ve done a sterling job. Getting a pat on the back from the industry gives you and your team an opportunity to celebrate your success.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to be proud of your work.

3. Career development

There are only a handful of award schemes for intranets, but these create a big noise within the industry. Winning an award for your intranet management skills raises your personal stock, attracting attention from headhunters and competitors. If you’re keen to stay where you are, an award gives you a firm basis on which to negotiate, and strong evidence of success, when bonuses are being discussed.

4. Put your intranet in the spotlight internally

Winning praise from external judges gives you a prime opportunity to publicise your intranet (and yourself) within your own organisation. Your execs will sit up and take notice.

It also gives you a chance to tell the story of your intranet’s development, helping to engage your users with its success.

5. Make a noise about your intranet externally

Win an intranet award and you’ll find your intranet in the spotlight for many months, attracting the attention of the industry press (and blogs like this one).

Conference organisers are keen to showcase award-winning intranets (and intranet managers). Taking home an award more often than not results in a raft of invitations to speak at conferences all over the world - and, in turn, allows you to network with the vibrant community of intranet professionals creating further opportunity to learn from others.

Which Awards should you Enter? 6 awards to consider

1. StepTwo Intranet Innovation Awards

Entries are now open for this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards. These awards, run by Step Two, celebrate cutting-edge intranet developments.

Here at Intranetizen, we’re big fans of the Innovation Awards (and not just because we’ve scooped some prizes ourselves!). What sets these apart is that they don’t look for the ‘best intranet’, because that’s impossible – the best intranet for your business would be completely different to the best intranet for mine. Instead, it showcases great ideas, well executed.

If you’ve developed something really special for your intranet this past year, the innovation awards are a wonderful opportunity to give it the attention it deserves.

Entries close on 31 May.

2. 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”. Depending on the nature of your intranet and the nature of your delivery team, you could also consider the “Excellence in Employee Engagement”  and “Internal Partnership” categories.

Entries close on May 25.

3. 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.

Entries close on July 12.

4. 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. There are no specific awards for intranets here, but rather celebrate IC success in the round.

Entries now closed (last date February 17).

5. Neilsen Norman’s Design Annual

The NNG Awards are yearly snapshot of the best in intranet design. While we’ve been somewhat critical of this before, it’s still the gold standard of intranet prizes.

Call for Entries July 2012.

6. 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. In 2011 the Ragan awards received over 350 entries and will continue to grow in popularity.

Entries will open for 2012 in December.

Are there any others? Let us know in the comments below.

Venue
This is the third time that I’ve attended an intranet conference in Berlin but the first to be hosted by we.Conect and the first at the nHow Hotel Berlin. Conference facilities were great: bedrooms functional (if pink), conference room bright and airy, food great. It’s a thought provoking location too given it sits on the line of the Berlin Wall.

My only gripe is the lack of free wi-fi. With free internet access, delegates can not only catch up on what’s going on in the office, but also tweet their way through the conference. The value of that additional exposure to the organisers is way in excess of the cost of providing free wifi. If you’re organising a conference, make sure this is top of your list. Second up must be the provision of power — delegates will need to charge laptops, phones and iPads. I’m delighted that the organisers have made note of both points and promised to change for 2013.

Icebreaker
Smart thinking from conference organisers who recognised that given the start time on Day 1, most delegates would be in town the night before. They organised some great icebreaker sessions over beers and bratwurst. Great opportunity to meet fellow delegates and get a feel for the conference. For those of us who were returning to Berlin, it was great to see old faces: Darius Miranda (@dariusmiranda), Kelli Carlson-Jagersma (@NorthStar) and Mairi Willis (@calamairi) to name a few.

I’d like to see an Ignite-style presentation session as part of the Icebreaker in the future. The venue, the topic and the beer suits it.

Day 1: Pfizer, Tieto, Dell, Zyncro, Coca-Cola Enterprises, eBay, Wells Fargo, e-Spirit
Enterprise social network technologies formed the heart of most if not all of the decks presented on day 1. Yammer, Chatter, SharePoint and other suppliers were all well represented. It’s tough to make firm conclusions from this save for noting that big companies are recognising the power of enterprise social networks but that in every instance, it’s significantly harder than running a tech project. Company culture is vital; ensuring that there are change management programs in place to help drive the change and curate social spaces are central to long term successes.

Getting social into the workflow is critical. It must be integral, not peripheral, if it is to succeed. As Kevin Jones noted, you’ve got to “weave it into the way you work”

I was delighted to have the opportunity to demonstrate the great work that my company (and team) have delivered at Coca-Cola Enterprises. Thank you for your feedback if you were there.

Another valuable insight was presented by Dell about the types of social media. I’d not seen this interesting distinction before and it helped position the kind of work that I do (and do not do) day-to-day. Dell identified three types of social media:

• Internal Walled Garden: Tools like Yammer, Chatter and others. Entirely aimed at employees and their customer teams
• Hosted Properties: Forums and more, created and managed by a company but publicly open to customers.
• Public Social: Facebook, Twitter and more

Whilst the skills and experiences needed to manage social in these three spaces are very similar, I expect many companies are not (yet) rolling these up into the same team.

It was also interesting to see how social and digital capabilities were being deployed for somewhat more traditional internal communication purpose to great effect. The projects ran by eBay, Wells Fargo and Pfizer, were an inspiration that I hope to steal.

I can summarise a tremendous conference day as follows: “People are King, Content is the message”

Evening
Great company, great meal, good catching up. I learnt how to tell which is your bread plate and your drink ( ‘b’ for bread, ‘d’ for drink ) and that intranet and social collaboration managers have admirable drinking and dancing stamina

Day 2: NASA, Round Tables, Siemens, Deloitte
A great start to day 2 with Kevin Jones explaining the importance of failure in driving success and explicitly pointing out through a series of videos and slides, why social intranets can fail. In learning to avoid these pitfalls, we can develop more successful social intranets. As Kevin notes, “Try, fail, try again: iteration through failures the key to success”. Remember that!

World Cafe Experience
The world cafe saw conference delegates and presenters take on the role of facilitators to focus on some specific intranet challenges. Whilst I found this a valuable use of time, my regret is that there was no way of attending both ‘streams’ of the event (I attended 4 of the 8 tables) and that I was also in the same company at each table. It’s good to shake up the people a little and network deeper

Summaries

The Value of Twitter and the Intranet Community
When a conference goes well, the networking and shared learning continues long after the event itself. This is tremendously valuable: it keeps the conference fresh in the minds of delegates, but also ensures practical assistance and insight beyond the 2 days.

Twitter was central to that. Despite having too long a hashtag (#intra_reloaded takes up too much space of my tweets), there was a small but growing community of tweeters at the conference. The visibletweets.com feed was great at sharing the community insight. I know that several delegates took to Twitter for the first time during the day. Be kind to them — the intranet community needs new life blood.

New content, same old people
It’s great to turn up to a conference and know you’ll hear from some great people and rekindle some valuable professional connections but equally, it’s a little frustrating to see a similar set of presenters. New insight from new conference presenters please — take a risk, invite some new faces! Test them out using the Ignite style in the evenings.

Should you attend in 2013?
Go. It’s a good one! Any conference that lives beyond the 2 days like this one does must be doing something right. Any conference hotel that offers guitars on room service has got to be worth a visit. Any conference organisers who dance and get stuck in like these folks do are well worth investing in.

Having attended three Berlin intranet conferences now, I can say that it’s on my list for 2013.

I was looking forward to attending James’ masterclass because he promised an interactive day full of:

• design principles and concepts
• practical techniques, including card sorting, tree testing and usability testing
• pros and cons of the homepage design

Did he deliver on that promise? I think so. Ok, I am not saying James didn’t deliver what he had promised, nor am I saying I was disappointed in the masterclass. Actually it is the exact opposite, but I was disappointed in the debate. I wanted more from my fellow attendees!

What worked well

James. His presentation style works. He has been doing this masterclass for awhile and it shows. If you haven’t seen him speak I highly recommend it.

The content. Some of the theory can be simple to the naked eye, but there is a lot more to it. James breaks down the theory in manageable steps from working out what to deliver to sorting out the homepage, structure and design. He suggests books to buy and articles to read and always backs up his argument with screenshots.

Activities. I don’t think we went 45 minutes without breaking into groups to complete an activity. Groups completed a card sorting exercise, looked at intranet reaction cards, and tried to create a draft structure in 30 minutes. It was a great way to put the theory to test and really expand the minds of the attendees.

What needed some help

The participants. If I am being perfectly honest (and James already knows this) it was an odd mix of people. There were a significant number of people from the agency world. Not intranet practitioners, but people who want to add intranets to their repertoire of what they can offer their current and potential clients. It has to say something that agencies are attending James’ masterclass, it’s a clear indicator that James is well respected in the global intranet community. But I felt I missed out on some great debates.

Interactive Session. Not enough people took advantage of the interactive session. We were all invited to bring screenshots of our intranet to be reviewed by James and the group. Three people, including myself, followed through on that assignment. It might be scary to find out what you are doing is wrong, especially from James, but how else will we learn, or in my case challenge? My advice for future participants, swallow your pride and bring your screenshots. I think screenshots should be mandatory.

What should happen

No matter where you are in the world, if you are going to attend James’ masterclass, or any workshop for that matter, participate! Paying the fee and showing up is not enough. You need to commit yourself to be an active participant. That means you have to join in the conversation, play devil’s advocate, and challenge the speaker.

Take everything with a grain of salt. You are listening to an expert with great ideas for the perfect scenario. Listen to what the experts have to say to but balance it out with what you know. Sometimes you have to make the most of what you can.

Remember, what works for one organisation may not work for another. That is the key to a user-centric design; it’s about the people who use the intranet.  We listen to the theory, we hear about the perfect scenarios, but some intranets ignore the basics yet they are a success. Why? They delivered something that their colleagues want. Sounds so simple yet it is hard to achieve.

James and I may have disagreed with each other with my approach, but it is always good to have someone review your intranet and challenge the techniques you used. It’s the opportunity to debate with James that is a key contributor to attending this workshop. I am looking forward to proving James wrong, and I know he is as well!

Oh, and one last thing … did we mention James has written a book?

In a series of  Intranetizen posts, we’ll explore the makeup of intranet teams. Today we’ll take a look at the format of a developmental intranet team, set up to redevelop an existing corporate intranet. You’ve hired the agency, now it’s time to get to work.

Getting the right team of people, with the right mix of skills, is a critical part of the process. Here are the key constituencies you’ll need.

IT

We believe it’s short-sighted to consider building a new, or re-developing an old, intranet without having your IT colleagues by your side as you’ll need them for a few key skills. Consider these key topic areas:

• Software and software compatibility (licensing and more)
• Hardware (servers)
• Networking (bandwidth provision)

Change Management

It’s very likely indeed that your new intranet will be a significant change for your employees and so we believe that securing the skills of change management will be a boon.

• Identify what’s changing (to inform communication plans)
• Identify who’s affected (to ensure communications hit the right people)
• Identify training needs (where simple communications will not suffice)
• Identify people who’s role might be significantly affected by the change

Project Management

Project Management is a skill in itself. If you’ve got a big new intranet project on your hands, employ a specialist. Whilst the agency you hire (if you hire one) will bring their own project manager with them, it’s advisable to have someone inside your company to cajole your colleagues into action.

HR

You’ll need HR on your development team for one of two potential reasons. Firstly, many people consider that intranets are evolving into a digital workplace, providing access to communication, collaboration and transactional tools and information for your employees. If your intranet is becoming the gateway to HR tools, you’ll have HR on your team.

But there’s more. Call on HR to help if any of these headlines apply to your work.

• Union issues, maybe as a result of home access
• Any significant job changes as as result of new intranet-based processes

IT Support

Make sure representatives of IT Support are included in your project from the start as the extra head on the project board will pay dividends in the long run.

• Provide insight during product development which will reduce service needs once launched
• Have a ‘ground-up’ understanding of the system which will improve their ability to assist employees in need

Learning and Development

When my bank changes my online banking service, they do not invite me to a full-day course on how to use the system and nor do they send me a manual on their new product. It’s understood, by both parties, that there will be no training and that the tool they provide must be utterly intuitive.

The same holds true for your intranet. If you’re proposing sending employees on a course to help them understand how to use your newly launched intranet, then you probably need to invite some usability experts to your project board. However, L&D can be fantastically useful to your team.

• Provide insight into employee learning styles and existing knowledge to assist with product development
• Create on-screen prompts, run social enterprise ‘help sessions’, develop FAQs

Communications team

At some point, you’ll want to populate your new intranet with some beautiful, rich, compelling content and it’ll likely be your communications team that will take the lead here. Beyond content provision, there’s much that your communications team can do for the project before the go-live.

• As the key users of the content management back end, they must assist with CMS development and usability
• Clarity of navigation, section headlines and other intranet furniture – really important to remove ambiguity and improve understanding
• Supporting or driving stakeholder communications as an output of change management

Usability, Accessibility and Design Experts – the Web Team

It’s a browser-based solution, so you had better include the web experts from the start.

• Understand the business goals and goals of the end user.  There is little point in  meeting only one set!
• This should lead to a vision and strategy – and hopefully some scenarios of how you want and expect your intranet to be used
• Structure – create a place for everything and give everything its place. This would include the page layout, information architecture, navigation, etc etc
• Do the colouring in. Make things look nice, make the right stuff stand out, stop things from appearing to be cluttered or broken, create some constancy and design rules for the future – a style guide, etc

Legal

Like it or not, there are lots of laws which apply to intranets and getting your head around them early by involving legal will help you smooth these issues over. For full details, do see our post on the law and intranets, but here are the important headlines with which they can assist.

• Copyright, trademarks
• Defamation
• Privacy and Data protection
• Equality and Accessibility
• Monitoring and analytics

Summary

Getting the right people around you is the first step to intranet success. The focal areas we present above — IT, Change Management, HR, IT Support, L&D, Communications, Web and Legal — should ensure that you’re surrounded by the right people, providing the right expertise to deliver an excellent product for your company.

How many people you have in your team, be it one from each category or a variation, is entirely up to your budget, company needs, geography and company culture. Maybe they’re all one and the same person?

Tell us what you think — who have we missed?

A poor search function doesn’t just mean users can’t find the content they want; it reduces user confidence in the whole intranet. Pages of irrelevant, badly-titled results frustrate users, leading many to ask “why can’t this just be like Google?”

Google has spent the last twelve years – not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars – tweaking its search algorithm.  No one has these kinds of resources for enterprise search, but there are certainly a few things intranet managers can learn from Google.

Here Intranetizen gives our top ten tips for sorting out search.

 1. Make it simpler

Google’s search page has but 15 words on it. People like this. User research consistently shows the simpler the search page, the higher the degree of user satisfaction. Remove complexity and ambiguity and make your search interface as straightforward as possible.

Users should be able to type their search term, hit a button and get some results. Allow users to refine that search afterwards, and leave any additional options to an Advanced Search option.

2. Don’t rely on a default install

Any search engine needs to be tweaked and trained in order to produce the most relevant result. Google succeeds because it does this constantly.  Search engines are not like Macs; they don’t “just work” straight out of the box.

Every intranet will have different content, and every set of users will have different requirements for that search. So whatever your search solution, you’ll need a certain amount of fine tuning, looking particularly at:

• Indexing
• Weighting
• Metadata
• Spellchecking and stemming

Changes should be implemented iteratively, testing all the time on real content and users to ensure search returns the most relevant results.

3. Consolidate search features and sources

Localised search linked to specific functionality can be useful, but it’s also prone to user error; if a user has to navigate to a particular area of the site to use, say, an expertise finder, it creates a confusing user journey.

All searches should start with a single search box available on every page (usually in the top right). Users often don’t know whether a piece of information can be found on ‘the intranet’, a database, the extranet, the company website, or within some of your social content, so you should aim to include as many data sources as possible in your search index, then enable the user to choose result they want through refinement options.

4. Implement autosuggest

The average Google web search string now contains four words, but research shows users tend to use fewer words in enterprise searches. Less focussed searching means less relevant results.

Encourage users to use longer search strings by implementing autosuggest. This will produce more detailed search queries, and in turn more relevant results.

5. Make your results page more like Google’s

The design of the results page probably has the greatest impact on user satisfaction with search. It should enable the user to quickly identify which of the results is the one they’re looking for.

This means stripping out unnecessary detail (such as last updated date), highlighting instead those things which give the user strong ‘information scent’, like title or site section. This will allow users to more quickly scan the page and pick out the right result.

Google has become synonymous with quality searching.  There’s some evidence to suggest satisfaction with search goes up if the search results are simply made to look more like Google’s, even if the actual results are the same.

Some work on the look and feel of your results could improve user satisfaction. Use AB testing to see how changes in layout and presentation impact on user satisfaction.

6. Personalise results

One of the reasons Google’s search is so good is that it’s personalised. While a search is seen as neutral, in reality it’s anything but; as Evgeny Morozov notes in The Filter Bubble, results are presented based on your searching history, location, gender, and all sorts of other data Google holds on you.

Profiling search by individual may be a step too far for most intranets (not to mention difficult to implement), but you can improve search satisfaction by providing different search results for different groups of users.

So for instance, users at an electrical retailer might search for “Acme Refrigerator”; discrete groups of those users will have different expectations about what that search should return.

• Sales staff are looking for sales figures
• Customer service staff want details of the product and perhaps any reported problems
• Product Development are looking for design specifications

Users will be looking for different content based on their role, department, language or location. With a single search experience, some users will find what they want at the top of the list, while others have to wade through several pages to get the result they need.

By personalising the result, linking results with user data, each group of users (in theory) gets the content they are looking for at the top of their results page, increasing user satisfaction.

7. Add metadata – and allow your users to do it too

Google results page presents a range of pages from a variety of different sources. Intranet search struggles to define the relevance of one page over another, as the site is made up of a relatively small selection of content, from the same sources, using the same words to describe the same things. It’s unsurprising an algorithm can’t work out what makes once page more relevant than another.

The most effective means of tackling this is, annoyingly, sheer manual effort. Adding good quality metadata to the pages people are most likely to be looking for, and ensuring this is prioritised by your search engine, will vastly improve the results and ensure your key content can be found.

Embrace the power of the enterprise hivemind and allow users to tag content. If someone searches for ‘Sales figures’, stuff tagged as ‘sales figures’ by real users is likely to be as good or better than any traditional content crawl results.

8. Optimise your content… and get contributors to do the same

Good quality content on good pages performs better in search. Unfortunately, quite a lot of intranet content doesn’t meet these criteria.

If key content can’t be found, take a look at it and see what the problem might be. Does it have a unique title? Does the intro clearly summarise the content? And does it contain the right keywords?

It’s vital that those contributing content to an intranet understand the basics of SEO and what they need to do to make their pages findable. Before you let people loose on your CMS, give them some basic training on what they need to do to make their pages findable, such as:

• Keywords
• Intros
• Unique (and clear) titles
• Metadata

9. Analyse

Review search logs regularly; you’ll learn a lot.

What are your most popular searches? These are often seasonal. Watch for peaks in searching and promote relevant content to more visible spots when it’s being looked for regularly.

What are the most common failed searches? One common reason for this is that the content just doesn’t exist. If people are regularly looking for something through search, that suggests there’s a user appetite for it – so create it.

There’s often a disconnect between the terminology used by searchers and that used by specialists who create the content. Look out for this in search and improve SEO, metadata and synonyms lists to ensure content can be found using the search terms people are actually using. Which leads on nicely to…

10. Add synonyms and acronyms

Every organisation has its own jargon, often impenetrable to new starters and outsiders – and a real problem for search.

Most enterprise search solutions allow admins to manage synonyms and acronyms, and can be set up so that a search for CSR will, for example, also return searches for Corporate Social Responsibility.

Again, a bit of effort is needed. Contact all business areas and ask them to send you a list of the most popular jargon in their departments (tip: PAs are the absolute experts at this), and ensure this is reflected in your search engine setup. But thereafter, keep this little register up – projects come and go, and have their own acronyms.

Which brings us on to an eleventh tip (we never claimed to be good at maths!). Like everything on an intranet, search isn’t something to be set up then left; invest a little time in it to ensure it’s still giving users what they want and searching current content well – and your users will love you for it.

Why Internal Comms is the most important function of an intranet – Rachel Miller

The amount of noise in organisations is rife, with everyone wanting to have their say and pitch their messages on the real estate homepage of the intranet. If ‘control’ of the homepage is given to more than one function, there is often a scattergun approach of firing messages at employees in the hope they will stick and land effectively. I think it goes without saying that this doesn’t work!

I was asked to write a post about why I think internal comms is the most important function of an intranet. Intranets traditionally are ‘owned’ by Comms teams, who are often the main stakeholders and use most of the homepage. However without a well-designed site and strong partnership with IT, who can help translate Comms requirements into reality, you’re fighting a losing battle.

One of the predictions on this blog for 2012 was that ‘news will no longer be the star of the intranet family and that intranets are fast becoming about much more than Comms as they will help people with the actual process of doing their job’. With that in mind, the prediction is that Comms will no longer be the main stakeholder for the intranet and their messaging may not have the majority of homepage real estate.

I believe Comms to be the champions and guardians of messaging, particularly when it comes to ‘policing’ the various messages mentioned previously, to ensure consistency of approach and to weed out the irrelevant noise. I think if an organisation loses that overview, be that from Comms or IT, it is in danger of simply firing conflicting messages at its employees.

I agree that intranets are becoming much more than Comms and I welcome that. It’s vital that organisations adapt, evolve and flex their approaches to deliver an effective intranet that employees want to visit as it has information that isn’t solely corporate key messages.

Equipping employees in ‘the actual process of doing their job’ is exactly what good internal communication is all about. Therefore it’s a crucial part of an intranet’s function. News often appears as the star of intranets, certainly if you’re measuring perceived value by the space used. I think if an intranet becomes purely a useful dashboard to enable employees to do their job, without including a news element, it will lose the jewel in its crown. I think that good, reliable, credible news sources that help employees feel connected to and part of an organisation will always have a role.

Rachel Miller started her career as a journalist and has worked agency side and in-house as part of the Corporate Communications teams for companies including BSkyB, L’Oréal, Visa, Tube Lines and London Overground. Named in PR Week’s Top 29 under 29 list, she’s a Kingston Internal Communications Management post-graduate, mentors comms professionals, blogs at www.rachmiller.com and Tweets @AllthingsIC.

News has had its day on the intranet – Jonathan Phillips (DigitalJonathan)

The story of intranets is one of aggregation: like technology magpies, intranets have added functionality steadily over the course of the last 15 years. First they were simple communication spaces, then many added transactional elements and more recently, social functionality has become the norm. Intranets constantly evolve to mirror the changing organisation that they serve and yet, they’ve broadly evolved along these similar lines.

News — or other internal communication messaging — was likely central to the business case for creating your organisations initial intranet,  but its time as the lead feature has long since gone. News, is old.

We are reminded by the staggering growth in internet social media and by intranet trend reports, that employees are increasingly turning to social channels in their personal and professional lives. News is in decline; social media is in rude health and intranet news is slowly going the way of newspapers. The trouble is that news on an intranet has been through countless rewrites, undoubted legal review, executive sign-off and possibly translation which means it doesn’t hit the intranet with the anything like the immediacy, or potency of social sources. Social gives employees the real truth, quicker. News is not as trusted.

Intranets are no longer the sole preserve of internal communications. They’re distinctly richer for the aggregation of collaboration tools, knowledge stores and likely, HR transactions. Intranet news is rarely a destination for employees, but a welcome and valuable distraction from the real business of an intranet which, simply, is to help people do their jobs. However good your internal communications team, employees don’t care about news in the same way they care about viewing a payslip or connecting with colleagues. News doesn’t give the same tangible return as other intranet features for the employee or management. Ever heard an employee say “Hold on — I must read the internal news”? This author hasn’t.

With news not as immediate or as valued as the social serendipitous sources for employees, there is serious risk that news will not remain on intranet homepages for much longer. The death knell might be technology itself. Whilst screen resolutions and average monitor sizes in companies have increased, intranet real estate remains limited. Mathematically, if your intranet is to continue to add new features, something’s going to have to give way and with ROI difficult to prove, news would be the likely candidate. Move it down the homepage, maybe move it off the homepage — it’s place of prominence is likely over.

Let us know, vote and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Day one

Labelled as pre-conference, promised workshops on emerging intranet trends. Jane McConnell had to drop out due to illness, but the indefatigable Martin White delivered two workshops in her stead (one on virtual teams, and another on enterprise mobile). This meant it was something of the Martin White show, although in our honest opinions that’s not a bad thing – Martin talks a lot of sense.

I also attended a workshop with Mark Morell on the digital workplace. This was the first of many sessions on the theme and I came away with two observations: 1) that the digital workplace is gaining traction beyond intranet experts; but 2) no one really knows what the digital workplace actually means.

Our only criticism of day one is that the workshops weren’t very workshoppy; they were slightly shorter talks. A more interactive format might have differentiated these sessions from those on the later days.

Day Two

I was eventually joined at conference by Luke, who had somehow convinced UK officials to give him a valid passport. The first day of the conference proper was in many ways the less interesting of the two; numerous schedule changes, together with the fact half the sessions were in Danish meant there wasn’t much choice about what to attend (at least, not if you don’t speak Danish).

One highlight from Day 2 was Jim Ylisela‘s ‘Making the Business Case for Lively Intranet Communications’, which took the murky world of Chicago politics as an analogy for our own organisations. His key messages – to identify and work with key stakeholders, and to keep plugging away in order to keep the intranet fresh in people’s minds – aren’t breaking any new ground, but the manner of delivery was such that it was well worth attending.

In the afternoon participants split into roundtable discussions. Luke and I did one on social intranets, which – while interesting – would have been more so if there were more participants. Perhaps fewer sessions with more people would have produced a more lively discussion, but others in different groups might have had different experiences.

Next up, Jeff Willinger from Righpoint promised to “make Sharepoint sexy”. We’re not sure he managed that, but he did get the room dancing to Katy Perry. The day wrapped up with the IntraTeam prize for best Danish intranet (with a local government intranet narrowly beating TV station TV2 to take home the prize), and a quick tour through the Danish Foreign Ministry‘s Sharepoint implementation.

Day Three

The last day was a different kettle of fish altogether; trying to choose any one session was difficult as the other sounded really tempting too – so much so that I wish I could have cloned myself and attend both.

With two exceptions: my talk on mobile intranets, in the first session of the day, was clearly THE place to be, as was Luke’s later in the day.

Following on from my session was Oscar Berg, with a controversial talk on why intranets fail today’s knowledge workers. His argument is the opposite of the lean intranet; as the cost of serving content falls, it becomes ever easier to serve minority interests. I’m not sure I agree – more often than not, bloated intranets make it harder for users to find the content they’re actually looking for – but it was worth hearing the arguments.

Luke had the dubious honour of taking the sleepy slot after lunch. Lucky for those of us watching, his history in screenshots approach had the audience hooked. Luke covered a range of themes from developing a single intranet for companies which develop through mergers, to branding, to developing social functionality. This session, like several others during the conference, talked about the growing importance of community management in improving organisational communciations. As users increasingly value what their peers say, the need for effective community management is gaining management attention.

As Luke headed to the airport, I stuck around for the final session of the day, on Lundbeck‘s LinkedIn-powered expertise directory. An interesting approach, but one I’m not sure will have much application elsewhere. But that’s the great thing about intranets – what works for one isn’t going to work for another, but it all provides some good food for thought to take back to our own organisations.

A terrific event

All in, despite the logistical challenges, Kurt and the IntraTeam crew put on a smashing event. The sessions were perfectly pitched at the audience of mid- and senior-level specialists and covered a wide range of subjects relevant to those managing large, complex intranets. The venue was excellent; even with occasional wobbles, the wifi availability was better than most other events I’ve attended. This helped the lively Twitter backchannel to thrive, adding to the quality of discussions in the room.

This conference is definitely recommended.

Were you at the IntraTeam event? What did you think of it? Let us know via the comments below.

For: Naming is part of the branding, @digitaljonathan intranetizen team

There will come a time when designing and building your new intranet when conversations shift from the technical to the aesthetic. We know that your intranet design — its curb appeal — will be critical to early adoption; it’s technical abilities will be what keeps employees coming back. We’re visual creatures after all.

An intranet name is part of that visual design, part of the curb appeal.  Here are a  few good reasons for giving it a name:

• Take some time to sit with employees whilst they’re using your intranet. What do they call it? If you don’t have an intranet name as part of the branding, they’ll likely call it many different things – ‘intranet’, ‘portal’, ‘employee portal’ or maybe even ‘SharePoint’. This is the problem in a nutshell. Without a branded name, employees will call it anything they like. Employees need a common vocabulary.
• It gives the new site intranet a distinct identity and provides a break from the current landscape. Never be tempted to give an old intranet a new name and expect employees to be wowwed. A new name for a new intranet gives internal standout and recognition.
• It is easier to reference in other communications (‘for more information, visit [name]’). The brand name facilitates stronger communication. Make it easier for yourself – name your intranet

Be imaginative. If you’re thinking about calling it i[Company Name], [Company Name]Net, a pun, or contrived backronym, you probably need to see the resources below.

Against: Naming your intranet is just stupid, Paul Graville, Concentra UK

This question comes up on every single intranet project I’ve been involved with: what should we call our intranet? CompanyWeb, Connect, Core, Gateway, Dave, etc. etc. etc.

I think this stems from the fact that intranets are typically underused and therefore don’t provide much value. So the idea is that giving the intranet a personality will encourage people to use it. This is HOGWASH. Take it from me, people are not so stupid that a change in the name will get them using something.

I’ve also heard the argument that naming something makes it easier to talk about e.g. “The document you’re looking for is up on In.Sight”. While this argument holds some weight, I don’t think it’s necessary for a computer system to have a name. Just say “The document you’re looking for is on the intranet”. Or, if you’re intranet is built on the Microsoft SharePoint platform; ”It’s on SharePoint”.

Does your email system have some cutesy name or do you just call it email, Outlook or Exchange server? Same goes for your file share; is F: drive sort for Fred? If you decided to use an online file sharing tool like Dropbox would you be happy to say “I’ve put the file on Dropbox” or would you be on the phone to Dropbox’s support like asking if they do a whitelabel service that you could rename to Barry?

I think naming your intranet can actually contribute to a lack of user adoption, the fact its identity is highlighted makes people see it as a separate system rather than something they just ‘use’ without thinking about it.

Intranet Naming Thoughts and Resources

If you are naming your intranet and you’re short of inspiration, here’s some other great resources.

• Intranet Name Ideas: http://intranet-matters.de/intranet-names/
• ThoughtFarmer intranet names: http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/blog/2010/02/25/what-to-name-your-new-intranet/
• Crowdsourcing an intranet name: http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/blog/2011/08/08/case-study-crowdsourcing-name-for-new-social-intranet/
• Amanda at StepTwo’s useful perspective: http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_namingintranet/index.html

Does giving an intranet a name drive adoption, or increase the sense of ownership? Or is it a twee rebranding exercise? If you have opted to break ground and not give your Intranet a name, how was your experience? Would you do it again? Did your colleagues even noticed?

What are some of the best and worst intranet names you’ve come across? Tell us in the comments below.