Social Intranet Strategy Datasheet

CREDITS: THE SOCIAL WORKPLACE AND THOUGHT FARMER www.buzzvalve.com

Case #1First, what is an intranet?An internal website that helps employees get stuff done. That’s it. Simple, clear, everyday language. That’s what an intranet is and that’s all you’ll ever need to say to explain an intranet to most employees. The internet connects many people to many websites and many networks. An intranet connects people within a network. So your intranet is simply a website within your company’s network that (mostly) only employees can access.

Case #2Next, what is ‘social’?‘Social’ may be the most overused word in technology today. We think you’d find, though, that the average businessperson would struggle to define ‘social software’ and ‘social media’, resorting to feeble references to Twitter and Facebook.Social is really just about people interacting with each other. ‘Social software’ is software that enables users to interact with each other. ‘Social media’ is content (“media”) published

by a bunch of people who can interact with each other and the content.

Case #3Definition of a ‘social intranet’It takes two things to make an intranet social:Authorship: The ability for everyone to create content.Connections: The ability to see the people behind the content and to connect with them in some meaningful way.Traditional intranets have very narrow authorship, restricted to a small handful with official “editor” permission. Traditional intranets also lack connections. Content is basically anonymous and shows no social context, no connection between pages and specific people.A social intranet allows all employees to author rich content, connects every piece of content to a specific, living and breathing person, and helps people connect with each other. On a social intranet the “people layer” permeates the entire site and makes every page more personal and more human.

THE MARKETER’S GUIDESOCIAL INTRANET STRATEGY

A social intranet is only one part technology, and two parts people and process. In fact, technology is only an enabler, and may only be worth 20% of the total value of an intranet.

Truth be told, a successful social intranet is remarkably similar to an intranet. It resembles the corporate, family intranet at first glance but only when it’s not performing to expectations. A flourishing social intranet needs many of the requisites of a regular, run-of-the-mill intranet: well-defined governance and process(es), highly engaged people, and highly functional technology. But the devil is in the non-technical details: the process.

People and process drive the social intranet – governance and content make it sing.

AN OPEN WORK INITIATIVE CURATED BY: BUZZVALVE

http://www.buzzvalve.com



PeopleThe first ingredient to a social intranet is of course people: executives, managers and front-line employees who depend on social media to communicate and collaborate with each other on a daily or weekly basis. Unfortunately, executives aren’t quite pulling their weight when it comes to contributing regularly to Intranet, stifling many organizations’ attempts at turning their intranet into a social intranet:

58% of employees contribute to the Intranet on a weekly basis or more frequently.

Only 28% of executives contribute to the Intranet on a weekly basis or more frequently.

Many executives still do not embrace the intranet, even from a sponsorship or stewardship role. However, the most successful intranets have one common ingredient: active executive support and sponsorship. Without active executive support, a social intranet will fall short of its potential.

To be a true social intranet, access to these plugins needs to be open to all or most employees. Only two-thirds of organizations with social media plugins on their intranet allow all employees to access them. This means a large portion of the employee population doesn’t have access to social media plugins and is missing out on an opportunity to help create a social intranet.


10 WAYS TO ENGAGE USERSA social intranet becomes an online community space and employees need to feel a sense of involvement and ownership starting early in the project so they feel it really is their community.

1: Send out evaluation survey for old intranet.

2: Hold focus groups about intranet problems.

3: Interview key stakeholders early on.

4: Observe employees in their daily workplace.

5: Ask employees to post ideas for the new intranet.

6: Create a group for content owners.

7: Involve key employees in product evaluation.

8: Crowdsource the name of the new intranet.

9: Create pilot groups on new intranet.

10: Identify community managers for early adopter groups.




ProcessGiving employees free reign of the Social Intranet doesn’t come without risk. To mitigate that risk, you need to plan accordingly and support the plugins with the proper governance, standards and policies before rolling out these plugins and giving employees full access.

Key to the process component is establishing and defining a thorough governance model. Simply put, governance defines an intranet’s ownership and management model and structure including:

• Management team• Roles & responsibilities of contributors• Decision making process• Policies & standards

Like the content of your website or intranet, planning and governance is technology agnostic; whether it’s Thought Farmer, Confluence or another content management system, the necessity for and the approach to governance is the same.

Politics and the issues of control, ownership and standards go hand-in-hand with intranet management and perhaps these issues, more than any other, have driven the requirement for planning and defined governance models. Sadly, very few organizations actually have a well-defined governance model, and many of those have spent hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars on their website or intranet – amounting to extraordinary investments left to chance and execution on a whim.


8 TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL PILOTPrior to a company-wide deployment of a new intranet, many companies conduct a pilot with an initial group of users. Here are a few suggestions on making that pilot a success.

Tip #1: Pilot around a specific event or project

Tip #2: Choose the right group

Tip #3: Include an influential senior person

Tip #4: Set up a basic navigation structure

Tip #5: Populate some initial content

Tip #6: Set up email notifications

Tip #7: Assign specific tasks to pilot group

Tip #8: Promote, launch and follow up

BONUS: Create hypothetical scenarios & use cases




TechnologyThe best social intranet platforms comprise a consortium of plugins: blogs, wikis, user commenting, tagging and team calendars to name a few.

The top three social intranet plugins being used in organizations today are:

• Intranet blogs (present in 75% of organizations with at least one plugin)

• Intranet discussion forums (65%)• Intranet instant messaging (63%)

Given the low cost of social intranet plugins (38% of organizations spent less than US$10,000 licensing and installing their plugins) it’s no surprise organizations are opting for more and more plugins as they become available.

But each plugin has different strengths, weaknesses, and adds varying degrees of value to your organization, so identifying which plugin is right for you can be difficult. Often this means gathering business requirements for the plugins to be integrated into your intranet from key stakeholders in your organization.


THE BITTER TRUTH ABOUT CONTENT MIGRATIONIt lies there just over the horizon and just below the surface of any new intranet implementation. It is the factor that is most often forgotten or ignored as the intranet barrels toward launch. It is often left out of the project plan altogether but can take longer than the build itself. It is content migration.

#1 / Content migration is underestimated and misunderstood.

#2 / Resourcing for migration should be addressed early in the project.

#3 / Reduce the scope of migration through ruthless pruning of the content inventory.

#4 / Negotiate and communicate the nature of the content freeze before migration begins.

#5 / Set tough goals and chart progress

#6 / Have little rewards and thank you prizes on hand




You’ve probably figured out by now that the technology behind a wiki, or a blog pales compared to most web content management systems and can’t carry the dirty laundry of a killer portal or enterprise content management solution.

The technology is terribly simple; what makes it ‘sing’ is people and process.

The secret sauce to sites such as Wikipedia is the collective wisdom of the contributing crowd; the end contributors, and the process that encourages the all-too-simple, effortless contribution and peer reviewing of content. The collective wisdom of the crowd is transformative; so significant that it sparked a landslide evolutionary leap in user technology, and the Internet as we know it.

How does this translate to the intranet? It’s the same IP technology, the same browser, and the same users, but with a different focus, perspective and set of requirements. However, the intranet is not the Internet.

A quantity of fundamental intelligence must first be applied before said technology can trigger a transformation of the corporate world behind the firewall. But when done successfully, the social intranet is the intranet on Starbucks: caffeinated, ubiquitous, and engaging.

A successful social intranet, though, is not easily achieved. If you build it they will not come, necessarily. However, if you understand the requisite process(es), you will attract the people, and the enabling technology that will help catalyze an antiquated business system into a dynamic ecosystem of collaboration and innovation.

Ten steps to a Social Intranet:

• Business requirements• User requirements• Best practices• Strategic planning• Governance• Information architecture• Wireframes• Design• Launch• Change management

8 COMMON MISDIRECTED FEARS CXO’S HAVELet’s face it, the biggest hurdle to overcome with a social intranet is often pure fear. The C-level can be hopelessly gun-shy about employees displaying the slightest about of intranet-sanctioned social humanity. Where did this fear come from?

Misconception #1: Lack of social filters for new hires

Misconception #2: Perception of productivity loss among employees

Misconception #3: Security and confidentiality of information

Misconception #4: Diffusion of official communication and accountability

Misconception #5: Trails of audits and discoverability

Misconception #6: Collaboration improves terms of employment, resulting in stronger employee unions

Misconception #7: Mob mentality wrt. critique and feedback

Misconception #8: Asymmetrical usage in communication




Social Intranet Strategy Datasheet

Technology

Transcript of Social Intranet Strategy Datasheet