Intranet imperatives

In evaluating our intranet….and constantly looking for ways to make incremental improvements, I figured our team needed some mantras. A direction. Clear priorities that would act as our touchstones for deciding whether or not to pursue a change.

So here they are:

Share it now. Find it fast. Make it mine.

That’s it.

Employees collaborate – share ideas, documents, photos, videos and other assets…in short, information. They should be able to do so easily. Now. What can we put in place to make this a reality? An internal YouTube, a simple wiki for reference information (based on open source MediaWiki), etc.

People want to find information, assets, whatnot, quickly. We need to facilitate that with a kick-ass search functionality and intuitive/simple navigation.

And of course it’s important to tailor the information to the individual. Primarily push-comms is SO 1990’s. It’s all about making information readily available for people to subscribe. RSS is key. A flexible software framework, paramount.

Now…it’s about delivering against this vision. We’re on our way. Slowly chipping away at the easier wins, and the key areas.

Communications trends: smaller, active, mobile

1. Smaller niche communities of people who are passionate and active versus big crowds of casual connectors
2. A shift in marketing and PR from messaging to people to joining conversations and going to the communities, rather than creating all sorts of new communities (I’ve got social networking fatigue….pls stop creating more networks!!!!!)
3. Mobile, mobile, mobile….phones! Laptops are mobile-ish, but we want smaller machines we can talk into, text on, watch videos, search maps….and on and on.

Where’s that leave internal or external communicators for that matter?

• Including RSS so people can decide for themselves what content they want to tune into
• Employees who are part of various communities and interested in putting themselves “out there” and open to discussion, rather than just pushing messages out passively
• Optimizing content for handhelds. Yeah, we’ve got to do that.