Did you know that in the ‘guess the jellybeans’ game the average guess of all the guesses is almost always closer than the closest individual guess? It’s a wonderful example illustrating the power and wisdom of the ‘crowd’ – and why Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 are proving to be so powerful.

Like Web 2.0, Intranet 2.0 represents the evolving collection of social media tools that are revolutionizing the intranet, and the way organizations and employees connect and collaborate. Specifically, Intranet 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and social networking sites promote collaboration, people connection, and ongoing dialogues that augment, but not replace the traditional top-down communications model.

Whether you’re ready or not, your organization can no longer ignore Intranet 2.0. Employees are reading blogs on the web, contributing to wikis, listening to podcasts, and networking via Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or others. Moreover, they’re probably talking about your organization, and you’re not part of the conversation.

Before they implemented their own employee social networking site, MyBT, BT (British Telecom) discovered that 4,000 employees had voluntarily joined a BT Facebook community in their own time. Employees were connecting online, in their own time, talking about BT, and BT wasn’t part of the conversation.

“Many believe that trying to stop social media tools seeping onto intranets is a futile activity anyway, so it is better to introduce them on your terms in a managed way,” says BT’s social media chief Richard Dennison, who’s quite candidly shares this though and BT’s work on his blog Inside out.  

While BT’s management was reluctant to introduce these tools to employees, they really had little choice: employees were already using them and BT was in danger of being left out, and left behind. Adds Dennison: “If you don’t think about what value you can deliver in an enterprise 2.0 environment, you are going to become irrelevant!!”

Intranet 2.0 has indeed exploded at BT. In addition to social networking, BT employees blog, podcast, collaborate in discussion forums, and they wiki too. In fact, the wikis are so popular and successful that there are more than 500,000 employee wikis – and the vast, vast majority of them are dedicated to business topics that help BT compete in the global workplace (I will share a more comprehensive case study on BT’s Intranet 2.0 tools and successes next week).

A study of Prescient Digital Media’s clients who participated in yesterday’s Intranet 2.0 webinar found:

These numbers are very average indeed (though much, much lower in medium size, and small organizations) and echoed by many recent studies: most organizations have not introduced Intranet 2.0 tools, but want to. An additional 50% of the webinar participants (representing a couple dozen organizations) are testing, trialing, evaluating or planning to introduce such social media tools on their intranet in the next year or so.

Many, many others of course have blazed that trail and so while some organizations struggle with the ‘how’, IT and communications managers need only look to the trailblazers like BT, IBM, and many others that have shared their successes (I will link many of these case studies below).

Sabre, the company that runs most of the world’s airline flight reservation systems among many other systems, is an impressive example of the power of Intranet 2.0. With about 9,000 employees, they are a medium-sized company that have embraced Intranet 2.0 with spectacular results. Building from scratch, Sabre launched their own intranet social networking site for employees (built on Ruby on Rails) called SabreTown.

SabreTown has all the features of most social networking sites:

• Employee profiles with lots of details
• Shared photos
• Blogs
• User commenting
• Network connections & feeds
• Enterprise question & answer functionality

On Sabre Town, users can post a question to the entire organization, and the site’s inference or relevance engine will automatically send the question to the 15 most relevant employees (based on what they’ve entered in their profile, blog postings and other Q&As that have been previously posted). The results have been spectacular: 60% of questions are answered within one hour (one hour!); each question receives an average of 9 responses (9 responses!). The system has already led to more than $150,000 in immediate, direct savings for the company, with much greater benefits not yet measured.

SabreTown’s success is summarized in one spectacular metric: 65% of all Sabre employees became active SabreTown members in the first 3 months! More than 90% of employees are active today.

(I’ll provide a more in-depth case study on SabreTown next week. Watch for it as it is worth the wait, and the read).

Intranet 2.0 is no longer the future, it’s now. Many organizations have embraced the new social media technologies for the benefit of both the organization and its employees. If you ignore the potential that Intranet 2.0 offers, you’re doing so at your own risk, and the perhaps to the benefit of your competitors that may have already embraced these tools, or soon will.

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If you have additional questions about today’s Intranet 2.0, or a comment feel free to post them below. You can see a summarized version of the presentation on Slideshare: Intranet 2.0 webinar. 

You can also join the discussion on the Intranet Global Forum (Facebook community requiring free, 30-second registration).

If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.

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MORE INTRANET 2.0 CASE STUDIES & READING:

Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM

Beehive builds buzz at IBM

Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking

Serena’s Facebook intranet

Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something...

Intranet 2.0: A must-have

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Intranet 2.0

Embracing Enterprise 2.0

Intranet 2.0 on the rise, but barely

Intranet 2.0: social media adoption

Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0

Taxonomy driven folksonomy

Social bookmarking the intranet