Interesting Elsewhere: #intranet launch tactics, US presidential candidates & mobile design

The four Intranetizens like to read widely on all aspects of intranet management – design, UX, technology, content, strategy, LOLcats – it’s all relevant.

But mostly it’s just a tactic to avoid making eye contact with strangers on public transport while commuting to our day jobs.

Here’s what’s been on our iPads this week:

• Make your intranet pinteresting: Depending on your point of view Pinterest is either a goldmine for socially driven marketing, or a place for women with too much time on their hands to pin pictures of ersatz tat they won’t get around to buying from Etsy.com. But either way, Pinterest’s strategy – encouraging engagement based on shared interests – is one intranet managers can learn from.
• Tracking offline comms channels in Google Analytics: Measuring success means looking at outcomes, not outputs. More often than not, that means looking at more than just page views. Here Luke Oatham gives a practical guide to using Google Analytics campaign tracking in order to capture activity on the intranet as a result of clicks in emails and documents that are sent out to staff.
• A collection of intranet launch videos:  Ellen Van Aken has compiled a collection of videos that support intranet launches. Do these really work? We’d be interested to hear your experiences.
• Woolworths goes mobile with 890 iPads for store managers – Alex Manchester comments on an interesting intranet launch from down under. Woolworths managers were given iPads to access their new, task-focussed intranet. In our vendor review round-up this week we talked about the trend toward the intranet breaking away from the desktop, and this is a good example of this in action.
• Presidential Smackdown – web edition: The US presidential race is beginning to hot up, and this year online campaigning counts more than ever before. This detailed piece from Smashing Magazine looks at the responsive and mobile sites of both Presidential candidates and shows just how bloody hard it is to get this stuff right. Both have clearly put thought into the different needs of desktop and mobile users, and worked to deliver that. Whatever your thoughts on the candidates themselves, there’s a lot anyone designing intranets can learn from both campaigns.

And what’s made us laugh this week:

• Fifty Shades Generator: are you bored of Lorem Ipsum? Add a bit of spice to your wireframing with this tool, which will create as many paragraphs of bad erotica as you (and your stakeholders) could possibly need.

And finally, a reminder that we’ve updated our events calendar for the coming months. If you have an intranet event – conference, training course, webinar, meet-up – let us know using the contact us page or in the comments below.

The full series of Interesting elsewhere posts can be accessed. Don’t miss out!