I’ve been asked to put together a one slide powerpoint on what our intranet would look like if I could unleash the full social media meal deal. So here’s what I’m thinking:
- Only one slide!?!
- The next time we overhaul our intranet, we create a front page that looks more like CNet than a typical intranet
- Include some space at the top of the page for top stories that get there through Digg-like functionality (employees get to vote on what they think is most interesting/helpful)
- Have a news feed on the side that is only populated when there is actionable, critical information for employees to know…example: You have one day to enroll in health benefits, do it now! sort of thing (this of course would be RSS-enabled, as would all content on the site)
- There would be an internal social networking site (like Facebook)….don’t think of it as a social thing, it’s like an ultra-comprehensive company phonebook that also lists areas of expertise each employee has to make it easier for employees to find one another to collaborate on projects, get questions answered, etc.
- There would be a section for vidcasts/podcasts and photos (we’d have an internal YouTube/Flickr area where anyone could upload videos/photos that would be tagged…training videos, employee ideas about new advertising campaigns, execs talking to employees, employees talking back to execs, etc.)
- There’d be a section that would pull from our internal wiki (called Intelpedia), product definitions, historical information, benchmarking data, etc. (this could be a kind of, tidbit of the day)
- Blogs would be featured (organized by topic maybe)–the best rise to the top
- There’d be a link to forums
- An interactive calendar that would know where you were located and only showed relevant events (anyone could add an event to the calendar, easily fill an online form that got to the: who, what, where, when, why)
- We’d have an enterprise-wide web-based aggregator (is this technically possible to keep secure…someone with IT experience, let me know if I’m just dreaming here!)
- And of course we’d have social bookmarking a la del.icio.us
- We’d have a section where people could sign up for any of our feeds. For instance, our library does an incredible job of rounding up daily news that relates to our business, I’d find a way to include this somewhere on the front page, as well as in a list of great feeds that could be delivered to your aggregator or inbox.
HELP!!! I’m definitely beyond one slide. Is someone really good at visual mock-ups, could whip something up for me by say….tomorrow!
I’d love to know what you are all doing with social media? Do you find these are tools that are relevant to your jobs? I’ve read several Melcrum reports on this and so far, it still seems very new to most of us. Well–that’s what makes it exciting!
6 responses so far ↓
Nova Newcomer // September 27, 2007 at 10:36 pm |
Hey Sandra,
Funny you should post about this. I can’t whip up something visual for you, but this is exactly the topic I am covering in my workshop in Dallas in a couple of weeks.
http://www.novanewcomer.com
Anyway, if you do pull something together, I would love to see what you are thinking and chat with you about some of my ideas, too. It would be even cooler if I could mention that you are looking into this further in my presentation.
Sounds like a cool project!
Sandra // September 27, 2007 at 10:45 pm |
Heya,
It’s so good to hear from you…I was thinking of you guys just this week actually, and wondering how things were going?
An overhaul is still a dream…but we do have blogs, a wiki, forums, and some people use podcasts and we use a fair bit of video (webcasts).
You are more than welcome to talk about anything I post here. I don’t, however, speak for Intel…only myself….but as myself, I have a lot to share and learn! And I’m more than happy to be part of that.
Have fun in Dallas! Let me know how it goes…would love to get together for a chat. Talk soon, sdf.
Sandy // October 3, 2007 at 8:14 am |
Hey Sandra!
The question was what ‘the intranet’ would look like and you’ve only really described a homepage, quite a different thing, admittedly a homepage is easier to answer, but maybe intranets homepage will probably become less important in a social intranet.
There are a few good examples of things that suggest how homepages can support social media – the opening page of facebook (the mini feed especially) or google/ig or netvibes. A next gen intranet home page will look a bit like some of them.
I wouldn’t worry about what this looks like, you slip into design mode (I know, its a habit we all do!) with comments like ’space at the top’ or ‘a feed at the side’. That needs to be the last decision you make, or maybe allow it not to be made at all and leave it under user control – either way it’ll take several iterations to get right. I’d start with just describing the stuff on there.
You are organising the sections based on how they are written (a bit for blogs, a bit for videos, a bit for wikis) but these are all just types of content same as the plain old static web pages. The end users don’t know or care about the publishing model – the interactive – social – activities should be built into to the rest of the intranet.
I’d suggest sections need to be grouped based on what they are about and what they do, so each section can be composed of feeds and update notices from wikis, links, blogs and other media. The facebook minifeed model is a great example of this.
I know its important to know the type of publishing model for how you build the technology to group those links together and how you use RSS to update them, but that’s not important to the end users.
In my experience of intranets, and the internet, users don’t even really care about the difference between a content site and an application, its all just ‘the intranet’. Do people think Amazon is not a ‘content’ site?
I think there is a third category that they won’t differentiate either, social media. The artificial division in our heads (because we know how it’s built and why it’s different) is not going to be how typical users ‘mind map’ the intranet space. As we get better at the collaboration and social aspects of our ‘digital workspace’ will be something we do when we are doing the other stuff too.
I didn’t see the ‘old’ web stuff there at all, (self service applications and reference documents). Do you not think this will still be a large component?
I think the new intranet will look a lot like the old one – with a few more ‘configure / edit / vote / comment / whatever’ buttons, and a lot of auto-gathering, rather that predefined/ profiled content. It’ll work very differently, sure, but it will look much the same.
Sandra // October 4, 2007 at 1:58 am |
Sandy,
You make a ton of excellent points.
I should have said really that I was looking at overhauling the content and its delivery that typically comes from the corporate/internal/employee comms group in a company. You’re absolutely right that I prematurely slipped into where things should go and of course there’s a huge role for user experience designers (HFEs or whatever they choose to call themselves…my hubbie is one
in the earliest stages of researching and ultimately implementing such an overhaul.
I’m curious in what kind of content you’d be interested in being able to access on your company’s intranet…I might actually do a separate post about that. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately.
sdf
Sandy // October 4, 2007 at 9:58 am |
Overhauling the content of employee comms and its delivery can be seperated.
Employee comms can be published in a way that it’s tagged and available to whatever way you choose to deliver it – all(!) you need to do is make this publishing platform smart, open and extendable.
It’s probably easier if this channel is one big (but categorised / tagged) platform rather than having multiple departmental platforms. You can work on making this platform a great way to publish comms and build in great common features. I don’t know of any off the shelf systems that do this though, I’m basically describing a specific type of CMS.
Seperating the publishing from the delivery means an end user can consume this content in several ways, I can go look at the news site, and filter it how I want, I can subscribe to (or be auto-subscribed) to an new story/update alert feed. Or I can aggregate this feed with other incoming alerts (new video, blog post, wiki article, etc).
Of course once these delivery methods are established, it will be very prudent to get the content creators to optimise their content and really understand how this delivery model changes consuption of their content (good luck with that one!).
Hmm.. what kind of content would I be interested in?
To really answer that I’d have to be gnomic and say I’m interested in all the things I’m interested in and I want easy access to the things I have to regularly access.
OK, OK! that answer doesn’t help! I’ll expand it, and quit it with the recursive answers.
On a company wide level this is the various admin functions, the directory, the employee self service stuff and the content (reference, policies and contacts, etc) I need to use. This may be the same for everyone in the company, or at least most people in my higher level company grouping. This includes employee / corporate comms (but don’t over do it and make sure that channel has a high signal to noise ratio).
This is what most companies top level home page looks like (though the balance between news and useful links is tricky to get right).
On a job function level I want the same, but much more specialised systems and content. It may be possible to define that based on my profile and it may not.
This is what most departmental homepages (should!) look like.
On a social level, I want to have updates on what things other people have been up to. I’ve not seen any compainies intranet doing this well yet, but facebooks ‘mini-feed’ is the nearest in concept to this.
canada_guy // November 17, 2009 at 3:58 am |
Hello,
I see I am quite a bit late on this post but I think it is interesting that a couple of years has probably made a world of difference in the concept of social intranets.
We recently spent a year pondering the same questions and ended up with an Intranet that embodies the likes of todays most powerful social platforms… specifically, FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.