Steve cites the emergence and proliferation of “Buzz word Bingo” in board rooms and meeting places all over the U.S (see Buzzword bingo). Every time a suit spews a buzz word such as “paradigm shift” or “value add” an employee marks a bingo card with a bushel of buzz words; get five in a row and shout “bingo!”

The new way: “Creative” social media writing:

• More voices, more people

• More conversational language

• More storytelling

• Dramatically less jargon

• Being driven by social media

“Corporate communicators fight the same battles: deadlines, and creating safe copy (something that will safely go through the approval process),” says Steve, founder of Crescenzo Communications. “Content is king, and content comes down to writing for social media, which is about people: conversation and story-telling,” says Steve.

Case study: Children's Hospital of Atlanta

• Sitation: recruit people to work at their organization.

• Program: lots of competition.

• Solution: Set up a social media rectuiting site “Are you strong enough?” (http://blog.areustrongenough.com). Includes a blog from current employees about what it is like to work at the hospital.

Example: “I am a nurse in the PICU at Egleston where team work is seen every day”

Case study: Electric and gas utility in Arizona

• Situation: to educate people about safety.

• Problem: really boring topic.

• Solution: story-telling: find actual people to tell their stories.

Example: “It happens in a split second and nothing is ever the same again” accompanied by a video of the person affected.

Tips for social media writing

1- Follow the 3-30-3-30 rule. Let pepole choose how much time they want to spend: 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes, or 30 minutes.

• 3 seconds - consider the headline or Tweet

• 30 seconds - read a headline and a blurb / summary of a story

• 3 minutes - read a story,watch the video clip or listen to the auido clip

• 30 minutes - read, watch, listen, rate the content, follow links to friends, discussion forums, etc.

2- Don't be afraid to take chances.

3- Come down from 30,000 feet!

4- Always tie it to the business.

5- Report from the field whenever possible.

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Important ingredients for a successful intranet:

• Leadership

• Teamwork

• Empowering employees

• Optimizing activities & processes

• Focusing on the needs of the customer (external)

Direction of intranets:

• Portal concepts – aggregating content and tools into a single screen

• Integration of applicatons – HR, business applications, collaboration spaces

• Social media – user-generated content

• Management awareness – senior management is slowly becoming aware of intranets

Changes in business:

• Virtual teams (geographically dispersed)

• New expectations

• Tele-working (working remotely)

• Smart phones (mobile access of the intranet)

The intranet is on the verge of breaking:

• Today's typical intranet is not sustainable

• Too top-down

• Not business-oriented

• Not people-oriented

• Out-of-date

• Arthritic – too hard to publish

• Closed – limited to employees (closed to partners & contractors)

• Sendetary – limtied to office, PCs

One out of five intranets is in stage 3 (the intranet is “the way of working” now); 43% are stage 2 (it will be “the way of working” within in 1-2 years); 1/3 hope to evolve to stage 3 within 4-5 years).

Views of Stage 1 intranet:

“Our focus this year and last year is around communication, navigation and self-service, as these are areas we have the most control over.”

View of Stage 2 intranet

“Our biggest challenge fo rnext year is to change the culture of the company to not use email for example as a communication/ collaboration medium.”

View of Stage 3 intranet

“Portal usage is include in personal KPI for our perfrmance management system. This included measurements on quality / quantity of project updates, information published, etc. This has encourage people to integrate the portal in to their respective business processes.”

Is the intranet is the main entry point to applications... (the user has to go to the intranet to get to key applications)?

• Business applications & process support – 77% of stage 3 intranets; 45% of stage 2 intranets; 27% of stage 1 intranets

• Management reporting, dashboards – 55% of stage 3 intranets; 30% of stage 2 intranets; 9% of stage 1 intranets

• Employee life and career (HR) -- 77% of stage 3 intranets; 45% of stage 2 intranets; 27% of stage 1 intranets

• Management reporting, dashboards – 90% of stage 3 intranets; 74% of stage 2 intranets; 58% of stage 1 intranets

OTHER NOTABLE FINDINGS:

• Stage 3 intranets have more top leadership & operational participation in intranet steering committees.

• C-level executives now participate on the intranet steering committees of half of the respondent companies that have a steering committee (about 1/3 of the respondent companies have a steering committee; roughly 1/6th of the total respondents therefore have a senior executive actively involved)

• Only 45% have networks or communities of practice for content contributors

• Only 36% of the organizations have “clearly designated business owners for content”

• only 1% stage 1 intranets have wikis in general use (optimized); 35% are testing intranets (in some parts)

• 10% of stage 3 intranets have wikis in general use (optimized); 74% are testing intranets (in some parts)

• 2% of stage 3 intranets have wikis in general use (optimized); 30% are testing intranets (in some parts)

ADDITONAL READING:

Learning from the best intranets

Selling an intranet redesign

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Robertson's (President of Step Two Designs (Sydney, Australia) key ingredient for success: there needs to be a real reason for people to talk together.

Tip: make sure you have top-level senior support. “It (collaboration and social media tools) will rattle a few cages... so make sure you have the support,” says James. “Also, make sure you're consistent. The system will 'mushroom' and take-off. So the way you act in the first few weeks is very important.”

Employee collaboration challenges:

• Fear (from upper management)

• Compliance

• Email anarcbhy

• Fear of being wrong

• Lack of understanding (What? Why?)

• Exploding content

• Confidentiality issues

• Search

• Viral spread

Case study: Crew Community Forums (British Airways)

BA implemented online discussion forums for 17,500 flight staff (with a focus on customer service). The challenge for these employees to communicate is that they're located all around the world, and not normally working all totegher, but they come together for a single flight (on occasion). “Its a challenge to communicate for a large workforce,” says Allen Huish, head of the intranet for British Airways.

One example of change that resulted from the use of the discussion forums related to the quality of plastic cups used for drinks on flights. The issue: plastic cups are cracking when being handed-out. Having seen the discussion by flight staff, but previously unaware of the problem, the GM responsible for catering took up the cause to improve the quality of the cups.

Allen says the forums have been quite successful due to the partipation of staff, and thanks to the great support from the senior leadership team. And the executives participate themselves, doing their own typing and writing (without a ghost writer), and also participate in live chat sessions.

The forums have delivered many benefits not the least of which are improvement ideas: “well over 100 continuous improvement ideas have been submitted, discussed and progressed via the forums between crew and the teams that support them from across the airline.”

See the video of Allen Huish discussing this award-winning solution for Britsh Airways (2008 Intranet Innovation Awards).

Wikis

James suggests there are two overarching purposes for rolling out wikis on the corporate intranet:

1- Wiki as an intranet platform – as a publishing tool

2- Wiki as a collaboration tool

“Wikis suck as a piece of tehnology,” says James (although he admits not all wikis suck, and despite the technology, can be a good business tool. But don't get him started on wik mark-up... James does point to the Janssen-Cilag wiki case study, and the Scottrade competitive wikis as great wiki examples.

Adds James: “(But) if we roll out collaboration tools and tell people to go use them (withouth the necessary best practices and policy)... only 10% will be successful.”

Collaboration benefits

“Two important benefits: horizontal communications amongst employees (which is nice, but more importantly...), and the ability to solve problems that were otherwise impossible to solve,” says James.

Problem: Collaboration tools replicate the same problems we overcame in Lotus Notes; great for local deployment, not appropriate for enteprise deployment.

Collaboration recommendations:

• Have an owner for collaboration, beyond just the technology (e.g. policies, training, communications)

• Build up best practices, and provide mentoring support for teams using collaboration

• Establish good governance and management

• Identify key opportunities to deliver value to the organization

• Not an enterprise search problem, consider not searching collaboration spaces

Team Sites Case study: Transfield Services

A leading global provider of operations, maintenance, and asset and project management services, Transfield Services has more than 29,000 employees (8,000+ are knowledge workers). Requireing SharePoint’s team collaboration tools across a global services business, Transfield Services developed a ‘Team Site in a Box’ solution.

TeamSite in a Box outlines the how-to and rules for setting-up a team site including:

• “When to use a Team Site”

• Team Site checklist

• Training materials

• frequently asked questions

• video training and more

A clear governance model established ensures that Transfield avoids the “all-to-common ‘sprawl” that Team Sites can propogate. Instead of thousands of sprawled Team Sites, there are only 200+ meaningful sites. Transfield state the benefits ensure “staff across the enterprise now have opportunities to become easily connected, better informed and better supported in their work.”

Learn more about the Intranet Innovation Award winners lilke Transfield, Janssen-Cilag, Scottrade and many more case studies and screenshots at: www.steptwo.com.au/products/iia2008

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Intranet strategy

• What does the intranet do to help the organziation achieve its objectives? To do what? Does your intranet have an intranet strategy document that you can take away and share?

• If you cannot answer these questions, you don't have an intranet strategy.

• Intranet strategy supports the decisions employees make – enabling them to make better decisions that will make your organzation flourish.

Case study example: U.K. Government

Last year, the British government lost the details and files of 25 million people (1/3 of the population). There was in fact a policy on how to handle citizen's personal information on the government intranet called the “DPA Policy.” But no one could find it, so no one knew what to do. The lack of a defined strategy failed the government because while the content existed, it couldn't be found or used.

“Every manager wants to reduce the risk of their business,” says Martin White. Develop a list of the risks at your organization and find ways the “intranet can help reduce organizational risks” (and create opportunities).

Case study: Hospital

A European hospital intranet had 8,000 different guiideline documents (e.g. relating to medical procedures, etc.) – with no search engine. Traditionally, users (doctors and other professionals) had to navigate a folder structure. A discussion with the hospital's risk manager revealed that the hospital spent $5 million in insurance. But, if they could put in a search engine to help doctors find medical guidelines within 30 seconds, they could reduce their insurance substantially. The hospital spent $100,000 on the search engine, and received full pay-back within 3 months, and saved $1 million in insurance as a result.

User centric design

There are two classes of users:

• End users

• Contributors (aka editors, publishers, admins.)

Target user dsired outcomes – the end-state content or tool.

• Phase 1 – Research (interviews, notes)

• Phase 2 – Analysis (factoids, spreadsheet, sort data, identifiy patters, cluster analysis)

• Phase 3 – Represent/Communicate (dept. findings, specific personas, etc.0

• Phase 4 – Take Action

“If it can't be found, it's not helpful,” says Howard McQueen.

Howard advocates the transformation of information into “assets” by keeping it “trustworthy and up-to-date.” Howard's information 'asset' model states that information...

• requires a steward;

• must be owned;

• must be compliant;

• be the best available – balanced by the need;

• must be trustworthy; and

• must be readily discoverable.

On the Johnson Controls intranet (10,000 employees) if content is not reviewed it is expired from the search engine catalogue (variable time limit depending on the content type).

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(COPENHAGEN, DENMARK) Full slides from the “Integrating Social Media Into Intranets” with added insight on marketing and promoting the intranet below:

Marketing Intranet 2.0 is not unlike marketing the original intarnet – emploeyes have to...

1- know that the tools exist, and how they work

2- understand why the tools are of value to them and the organization

As I stated in Marketing the intranet, “If you build it they will not come. Of course, there will always be the curious and keeners and those that inherently understand it, but an intranet firing at maximum value requires marketing.”

A number of recommended insights come from Sodexo USA (thanks to Angelo Iofredda and Eileen Daly) who were very active in marketing their intranet, and shared their intranet marketing plan that focuses on six major components:

• Promote ongoing SodexhoNet name recognition and key wins.

• Highlight the variety of useful content through on- and off-line.

• Increase essential content and applications available only online.

• Increase content – including fun content – that drives repeat visits.

• Encourage continued endorsements from senior leadership.

• Support content owners – increase skill level and enthusiasm, identify and leverage best practices.

As far as tactics go, tried-and-true practices are still relevant for intranet 2.0 including:

• E-mail broadcasts

• Home page and newsletter stories

• Cross link from blogs, wikis, discussion forums, etc.
  

• Executive promotion

• Hosted chats with the CEO

• Posters and mousepads

• Premiums (handouts)

• Screensavers

• Twitter/Yammer, etc.

Not to be underestimated, and probably the most valuable tactic would be to create stories or features that quote your own executives that relate to subject matters discussed on a blog, wiki, or in a discussion forum, that links into the related social media tool while encouraging employees to “join in the conversation” or to “agree, disagree or comment” on the subject at hand.

Continue reading:

Marketing Intranet 2.0