Globally local - locally global

News, emails, videos from Corp Comm: spam or not?

An intranet manager asked me the following a couple of days ago:

"I am looking for some comparative benchmarks for readership of news posted on corporate intranets. I get fairly regular feedback from senior management here that readership should be higher (uptake on articles ranges from very small to as high as 80% of target audience in some cases) and I would like to find something to demonstrate to them that an average readership of X% is fairly typical. Are you aware of any such benchmarks?"

I referred him to a blog post "Spam from corporate communications?" that I wrote just over a year ago, based on 2 real life anecdotes from intranet managers about corporate emails. Since then, a couple of intranet managers have asked me what percentage of viewership is average for corporate videos.

Do any of you have any figures to share?

A valuable strategic asset

I'm looking for as many Intranet Awards as I can find.

If you have one in your country or an international one, or even an intra-enterprise one, please get in touch.

I want to publicise these awards, and understand what the criteria are for winning! I want to get the best ones on to the decision-makers' radar.
What makes an intranet business critical?
How can we make the intranet part of the strategic assets of an organization that should be considered when evaluating the value of an enterprise?

Here we go, chronologically...with the awards I know:

The oldest, to my knowledge, started in 2001 and is run by the usability guru team at Nielsen Norman:
Best Intranet Design. It awards the intranets which have outstanding design and usability. (I'm pleased to say that one of my global clients won this a few years ago!)

Another one started in 2007: Step Two Design's Intranet Innovation Awards. I especially like this one because it does not attempt to evaluate the "whole intranet" (which I personally find impossible to do in the case of global organizations), but rather looks at specific innovations within the intranet.
The goal is to "celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets and find these ideas (whether large or small), and to share them with the wider community."

(Disclaimer: I am one of the judges for Intranet Innovation Awards.)

I have recently become aware of the Intranet Portal Award in Brazil, starting in 2008, organized by the Intranet Portal Institute. Its goal is to recognise portals that "facilitate access to information and knowledge which has become a necessity for those who want to be competitive in a networked economy". I love this ambition for an intranet/portal award. Very business-focused!

I know there are other awards in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, but I don't have the specific information or links. Please send them to me. I'd like to interview you about the details.

If you organize or are aware of other intranet awards, please get in touch.

We all need to work together to bring intranets up to the decision-maker radar, which is where they belong by definition!

New Twitter group - IntranetWatch

I have set up a Twitter group called Intranet Watch.

The idea of the group is to share links, questions, quick ideas among people involved in intranets. Members of the group will post intranet-related stuff to this group, but will not post personal and other stuff.

Twitter is great for getting to know people, what they are doing/thinking/etc. but I felt the need to have a parallel Twitter channel targeted to "intranet stuff".

You need to sign up to join - send an email to intranetwatch@netjmc.com and I'll put you on the list of followers.

It will probably take us a few weeks to get things smoothed out, so please be patient with the warm up period. Twitter groups are not common, and we need to make sure that everyone who joins this group can freely post intranet specific stuff here. We may need to tweak the configuration a little.

The idea is to have a place you can go to when you want to ask a question, share a link, test an idea. All intranet fanatics are welcome - as long as there are no ads and no sales pitches.

P.S. You need to have a Twitter account in order to sign up. http://twitter.com/

Once you've set up your account, go to your home page in Twitter, do a search on Intranet Watch and request to follow.
Then you can post your intranet questions and musings freely to the Intranet Watch twitter page.

Intranets: a growing, living and permanently changing tool

I launched the 2008 Global Intranet Quick Poll a few hours ago to organisations who have already signed up to participate.
I need to share with you a response that just came in: one participant describes what intranets should be, the challenge intranet managers have, and has asked us to investigate this issue in the survey. This person has hit the nail on the head:

"The image of intranets needs to be transformed from a static one-time-project (been there, done that) to a growing, living and permanently changing tool for daily work."

I immediately thought of a slide I used many times a few years ago, and  published on this blog in February 2006. Here it is again: One slide worth a thousand words:

Effective internal communication benchmarks?

My previous note on "Spam from Corporate Communications" triggered some comments and questions from around the world.

Rachel McAlpine picked up on it and I put a comment on her blog "Content that makes people happy" saying that 90% of the time people want local news. That's what they find relevant. But that the trick is getting the other 10 % right.

Of course, the percentage varies, and also depends on what you consider "common" and what you consider "local" or "specific". Those are words full of meaning to most people, and can set off long discussions!

I received an email from a senior content manager who said he was struggling with the issues I raised and says " I find it difficult to measure the effectiveness of our communications and channels. While we have internal benchmarks, I would like to measure our effectiveness against external companies. I am curious if you have, or are aware of any bench mark studies. I would be interested in click rates, effectiveness of the communication and contribution to our strategic priorities."

I was also recently asked by an intranet manager in a global company if I had any idea what "click rate" or "watch rate!" to expect when a new corporate video is published. In their case, the videos are published both on the web site and the intranet, as well as being project from screens in the lobby and around the organisation. Good strategy, but that makes it nearly impossible to know how many employees have actually seen it.

The short answer is No, I don't have any benchmark studies and would love to know if anyone out there does. Please share them with us here or send me an email.

However, I do have some suggestions as to how to keep employees informed and feeling involved:

1. Be sure to include at least one question about your intranet in your annual employee "climate" survey. This lets you build from a baseline.
2. Consider doing a short online survey to find out whether or not people know the strategic orientations of the company, and where they get that information. See if it is from internal sources (managers, newsletters, intranets, colleagues, etc.) or external (press clippings, TV, ..)
3. Do regular quick polls on your intranet to assess user opinions about different subjects including strategy.
4. Do not forget to include employee usage of your web site (in addition to the intranet itself) when you consider how employees get corporate information and messages.

If you are really brave, do "candid camera" or "live news" style interviews one day in the canteen, by walking around with a mike and a video camera asking people to tell you what the company strategy is in their opinion. Then publish it on the intranet.
I'm half joking. You might get some really interesting answers, or you might get fired!

Spam from corporate communications?

One of the speakers today at IntraTeam event in Copenhagen told us that a group of users in his company had complained to him about the spam they got on their company emails. He asked them what kind of spam it was so that he could try to adjust the filters, and they said it's from Corporate Communications.

This is the second firsthand anecdote I have heard recently where intranet users have complained about "spam from corporate communications". In the first case, a few months ago, it was an IT person who told me that the number of "deleted without being read emails" from corporate communications to employees was in the high 80-90%. A figure like this should make people stop and think about what their "all" email policies are.

It should also make us all think about how blogs with RSS feeds can ease this situation for users. People can then subscribe to what interests them. Of course, then the problem is that maybe people won't subscribe to the feeds from corporate...!

That then raises a more fundamental issue of what type of news really does interest everyone in an organisation? In most cases, at least in large global companies, there is very little news that really speaks to "all employees". Which of course brings us around to how to customise, and what is the right balance between mandatory and optional news items on a portal page.

What is common and who decides....two basic open questions for many companies.

These questions are subject to much debate - sometimes quite emotional, and touch on organisational politics, fundamental beliefs about the nature of human beings, and even philosophical views on the value of individual freedom versus what is good for the larger group.

Facebook filling a gap in company intranets

I wrote a note following the JMC Breakfast at UNESCO with Florence Devouard and Stephen Roberts (UNESCO):
Questions from intranet managers where I published 6 questions raised by the intranet managers during the breakfast.
I invited responses from readers, and heard from one - thanks Samuel for your contributions (bottom of page).

I will respond to these questions one per post and include Samuel's response to each question. I've separated them out into 6 posts because each one is a subject on its own. Please join the discussion and tell us what you think.

Previous questions: (1) Wikis versus the intranet or wikis plus the intranet? (2) Extreme personalisation - how far? (3) Intranet on cell phones.

Question 4 out of 6. Facebook

Question from the intranet manager: How should a company position Facebook vis a vis the company intranet?

Samuel's response:

Good question! Andrew McAfee has some interesting posts on this topic. I like the idea of Facebook being an Intranet. It’s really user focused. But where do you leave the corporate news and Whoiswho in Facebook? Or don’t we need them then?

My response:

I know several large, global companies that have created networks on Facebook. These networks are open only to employees of the company. Other companies have apparently let their employees create official groups on Facebook that anyone can join. The cases I know have done it using the company name and logo, but they let anyone in. Another company I know created a group on Facebook, but you must get approved by the administrator of the group before you can join.

My personal opinion is that in many of these cases (in all the ones I refer to above and know personally) Facebook is being used because the intranets of the companies are too rigid, only designated people can publish content, there is no easy way to locate people in the company if you do not already know their names. In other words, the intranet/portal landscape is weak and Facebook is filling the gap.

A number of companies are including "my site" or "my page" concepts in their intranets where individual users are free to present themselves, put their favorite links, build networks, etc. much like Facebook. This can definitely help build communities and let people find other people in groups that are geographically dispersed.

Risks to be managed

However, the questions that need to be answered for both corporate "my page" projects and closed groups on Facebook are:

1. What types of content can be put on these pages? Can people publish documents and other content they've produced, start discussions on professional or related topics? If so, how can this knowledge be made available to others if it is dispersed out on individuals' pages?
I would not count on the search engine in most cases.

2. In the case of open networks that anyone can join, is there a risk of subjects being talked about that present confidentiality risks?

3. If there is content on these pages that is relevant to the company, what happens when/if the person leaves, or simply closes down his/her page?

My recommendations:

1. Build the capacity of letting people have individual pages within your intranet.

2. Develop guidelines as to what the role of these pages is. It's more a question of saying that the scope should not include certain types of information, such as project-related than to actually prescribe what should be there. Leave a lot of space for creativity!

3. If you do not have this capacity internally, start a group on Facebook but limit it to members of your company (people with your domain's email).

4. Or, create a network that would let you include partners and other "outsiders", but make it a requirement to go through the administrator of the group.

One thing for sure: if people cannot do this internally, they will eventually do it through an external tool. If this has already happened, get involved, participate in or at least observe the group, but above all don't ignore it and hope it will go away.

If you haven't yet written your "e-behaviour" guidelines or business conduct and communication policies, you need to do it. And if you have them but they don't yet deal with employee activities online (internally on the intranet, email, etc.) and externally on the web and in social networking sites, now is the time to add this dimension.

The business value of news: connecting people to people.

Paul Miller has written a post on the IBF blog "Why Intranet news is under threat" that triggered some thoughts from my end.

News on an intranet is very tricky.  If done well, it will bring people together, trigger communication and innovation.

Here are three suggestions:

1. Balance between official and spontaneous
Balance the news between official corporate polished stories (which are important for building a sense of what the organisation is all about - officially!) and spontaneous news items from all corners of the organisation (which reflect information and activities from around the organisational world).
This requires an easy one-click publishing system of some sort (note I did not say "blog"!) so that people can communicate easily. These items should be published in a space clearly labelled and differentiated from the official internal news items.
Do not think that if you solicit news from entities around the world, from which you select some to be rewritten then published, that you are providing the type of news I'm talking about. I mean straight from the people.

2. Favor local over global
If you have portal technology with different news feeds, give the most space to local news, then professional, community, divisional, regional or whatever middle-level layers you have, and the least space to corporate.
Put local in the most prominent space on the home page, and corporate in a visible but not central place.
This guideline will most likely offend many corporate communicators.  If it bothers yours, let me know and I'll give you some explanatory ammunition to clarify!

3. Demonstrate the business value of news
Expand the concept of news beyond the "official corporate internal press releases".
Define different types of news and include updates on what people and teams are doing around the organisation.  Example categories: project news, hot topics in our business community, what's new with our customers, and so on. Include a link to a name and email for readers who want to know more.
If your intranet includes community and team spaces, enable people to publish news from these sources with one click.

A well thought-out news strategy can be a key way to connect people to people in your organisation and to give them a new way to communicate and collaborate.

Making intranets work (for communicators)

James Robertson, StepTwo, has made his presentation on Making Intranets Work (for communicators) online via slideshare. He gave it at IABC very recently, and it is focused on the internal communications angle.

More listening than talking - a new WoW (way of working) for communicators

Two items especially struck me in the comments about my post "Talking or listening ? What does your intranet reveal about your management style?

Giacomo's suggestion: "Take the list of top users (people that use a lot comments, forums and other stuff) and use them as beta-tester for innovations"

He's right. The very nature of 2.0 gives you clues as to how to learn to listen.
When people say "our culture/enterprise/intranet is not yet 2.0-ready" they are missing the point. It has no meaning to say we are "2.0-ready" or not.

Did we say "we are ATM ready?" (ATM = automated cash machines).
Did we say "we are cell phone-ready?"
No, these major technology changes just happened because they met a need that manifested itself when the solution appeared.

Matt's comment "Using old-style Forums & Bulletin Boards" is a reminder that in fact 2.0 is not new. It has just come to a head - a tipping point as some would say.

Even Tim Berners-Lee said that the web 2.0 is what the web was always intended to be. He should know!

Matt also says "...linking the intranet to other corporate communications channels (F2F gatherings, conf calls) can also be powerful - assuming that those aren't also top-down fests." Good reminder that you can't plug in a 2.0 tool to a context that is fundamentally anti-2.0.

This Thursday, I'm presiding day 2 of the annual conference for internal communication managers in Paris: "Rencontre annuelle des responsables communication interne". I'll blog it later, and let you know to what extent the new WoW is advancing in this part of Europe.

Among the speakers we'll have a Stefan Schwarz of Arcelor Mittal - creator of Creating History, an internet innovation where the new global Arcelor Mittal speaks to both internal and external audiences in the same voice. I met Stefan in a cafe in Paris some time ago, and we talked about the Arcelor Mittal communication strategy.

Without revealing any secrets, I can say that their philosophy of "dare and do" is admirable. If more companies did the same, corporate communications would not have the credibility issues it often has.

Talking or listening ? What does your intranet reveal about your management style?

Guy Kawasaki wrote a post in his blog How to change the world about a talk given by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and Guy's favorite quote was "You don't learn very much when you yourself are talking".

I was struck by how this comment applies to intranets that are too top-down (which is the case of most).

Intranets are the ideal tool for management to listen to employees, which of course means bringing a strong bottom-up dimension to the intranet.

Unfortunately, most intranets do not know how to listen.

A few suggestions...

• Have feedback buttons on all pages, where employees can respond to the authors of the pages
• Run frequent short polls on the home page, and share the results with employees
• Don't be afraid to ask real questions, such as: "does the intranet help you save time?"
• Then publish the results, with no editing!
• Initiate a blog from someone in management and  leave comments open
• Let people rate content pages, noting them "very useful", "helpful", "nice to know"
• Start an entreprise-wide encyclopedia like the Wikipedia, and let people define the organisation's vocabulary and acronyms

More ideas...?

Technorati Tags: intranet, intranet 2.0, intranet strategy, intranet2.0

Humanising the enterprise - blogging and intranet 2.0

Today I gave a one-day seminar on blogs and enterprises (in French) at UJJEF with Anthony Hamelle, from Occurrence, one of my partners when I do wide-scale intranet audits.

I dealt with internal blogs, how to integrate them into the intranet, what purposes they serve, etc. I presented the IBM blogging guidelines, as I have done in other presentations and seminars.

Once again, there was a significant pause in the room when I finished going through the 11 points, translating them into French. Then someone said, "This really humanises the enterprise." She was right. The guidelines are simple, strong, obvious once you've read them, and obviously written by bloggers.

IBM has done a lot of good in helping enterprises realise how they can facilitate blogging in a professional context while totally avoiding the "traps" that many managers fear: people will say anything, we can't control them, and so on.

I presented the IBM guidelines over a year ago in an Intranet workshop in London - in English this time - with several very large international companies present. None of them had blogs at that time. When I finished, there was that significant silence again. Then one of the participants said "Now I understand how I can do it."

I recommend that you read the guidelines if you are not familiar with them, and see what you think.

The guidelines can be read on James Snell's blog (Blogging @ IBM). I've copied the Executive summary below, but please take the time to read the detailed explanations on James' blog.

The 11 points are: (I quote)

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions."
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don’t provide IBM’s or another’s confidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory -- such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
0. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.

Note point 9, which I have not seen in other guidelines. It's a clear indication that bloggers themselves wrote these guidelines.

Do any of you have guidelines you'd be able to share with us?

Technorati Tags: intranet, intranet 2.0, intranet2.0

Writing for translation

Susan Harkus and Tomoko Gondow have written a useful article on how to write web or intranet content so that it is easier to translate:
"Writing for translation: Don't miss the opportunity" is published on the CIDM (Center for Information-Developent Management) August edition of their eNewsletter.

I quote from the article:

By writing for translation, an organisation can harness the power of instant translations in three ways:
* They can simply publish their pages, confident that web site visitors will use a preferred translation engine to read their web content.
* Their websites can offer automatic translations in key customer languages.
* They can utilise the user dictionaries of their installed translation software to overcome terminology problems.

Thanks James (StepTwo) for pointing out this article on Column Two.

Effective communications is two-way

Interesting blog entry by Toby Ward, Intranetblog, about using the intranet to improve communication with a brief case study of the Atomic Energy of Canada intranet.
(If you get a message asking for a password, just click 'cancel' and you'll get the page.)

I quote: "Effective communications requires two-way, synchronous communications – not just messages pushed on a one-way street from the top floor executive offices."

Definitely worth a read.

Defensive emailing

Amusing and relevant blog post from Kelly Forrister on Simply Kelly about email defense tactics. Simple, but I'd never thought of them before. Think I'll try them. Should work well on people who cc without thinking.

All this raises the old question of when to post on the intranet and when to send an email. See my previous posting on email vs many-to-many tools.

In an recent intranet audit I conducted, a manager talked to me about how hard it was to find policy memos in his company because sometimes they were emailed and sometimes they were posted on the intranet. There was no clear strategy, which made finding them pretty hard. Is it on the intranet? In my email in box? Does it EXIST???
He added that the reason so many policy memos were emailed was CYA ("cover your a- - " strategy) meaning that if you emailed it, no-one could say later that they had not seen it !

Technorati Tags: intranet

Email versus many-to-many tools

A manager in a global company who has just changed jobs sent me an email with the following question:

"My new boss says always to me, that he loves e-mail, that it is the best tool he ever had - 'and so do 90 % of the users, you just go and ask', he says. Do you happen to remember any good graphics or horror pictures or anything that could help me to get him understand the value of real collaboration supported by many-to-may tools instead of one-to-many?"

Do readers of this blog have suggestions? You can either post a comment or send your suggestion to me by email and I'll post it for you with or without your name, as you prefer.

Essential 3 dimensions make a mature intranet

Three dimensions of flow must exist for an intranet to be truly mature.
  I'll bet my bottom dollar that intranets with problems are weak in 1 or 2 of the 3 dimensions.

I've found that in Europe, the top-down and horizontal are relatively advanced, and that in North America, the top down and bottom up are strongest.

Interesting to note that in Europe, teams in different countries have long needed to collaborate. At the same time, there's been a slow acceptance to the idea that people in the field have "their word to say".

Personally, I have found that in N. American intranets, the notion of cross-company and cross -functional collaboration is much weaker than in Europe.

This was confirmed for me last year when I saw a chart on intranet maturity (direct pdf download of 76K) presented by Shiv Singh of avenue a razorfish at KMWorld & Intranets in San Jose last November. His chart shows collaboration as stage 3, with HR services and personal information management applications as stage 2.

The majority of companies I work with are large, complex, global and headquartered outside the US. In almost all cases, I would reverse stages 2 and 3. Most of them have collaborative spaces and applications long before HR and PKM.

Shiv and I discussed these differences (along with James Robertson of Step Two Designs). Complementary experiences from US, Europe and Asia Pacific. We looked for explanations, and agreed to pursue our discussion, but once the conference was over... it went the way of many new year resolutions!

Back to my original point: I have not yet seen an intranet with all three dimensions working optimally. Has anyone else?

Any comments from readers of this blog about intranet maturity, the collaborative stage, ....?

Talking to Senior Management

How can you make high level people, most of whom are super intelligent and highly dedicated to their jobs - otherwise they would be not be there -- aware of what an intranet can contribute to their company?

Is it because most intranets are run by Communications or IT - both functions who do not - in most companies - have a strategic business-oriented approach to the intranet?

Does Communication talk too much about "shared visions" and "common cultures"?

And IT too much about bandwidth, SSO, compatibility, migration and other concepts that do not strike the business managers - although they all have strong impact on the business?

There is a need for interpreters - people who can speak all three languages - culture and vision, technological concepts and business value - and can bring all three angles together.