Sean R. Nicholson

For the last few years, I have been using this blog and my @seanrnicholson Twitter account to provide information about Intranets and their impacts on organizations. Looking back of the relationships I have built, lessons I have learned, and responses to the blog articles and tweets, I’d say it’s been a resounding success.  But, things change…and in the digital world, sometimes things change quickly.

Last year, I was offered a unique opportunity to leverage my extensive experience building internal networks outside of the corporate walls, building relationships with online communities and helping companies build their social media strategies. It was a big decision to move beyond my Intranet/ECM focus to broader social communities, but I decided to take the plunge and haven’t regretted it for a moment. My experience building internal communities, identifying ways for employees to share knowledge, and developing measurement plans for Intranet and ECM solutions has translated directly to the world of social media.

As part of my new role, I have been tweeting at @socmedsean and blogging at SocMedSean.com about trends and new opportunities for organizations to leverage the power of social media. What I have found, however, is that the world of social media community building is very similar to the world of Intranet community building. In fact, I continue to recommend to clients that they engage their Intranet professionals when developing their social media strategies.

After all, many of these folks have been building communities for over decade and understand the opportunities, challenges, and risks involved with online engagement. Both are tasked with identifying their target communities, listening to their needs, and then finding ways to meet those needs through engaging and sharing, so it only makes sense for them to collaborate. Unfortunately, I have noticed that Intranet Managers and Social Media Managers often don’t connect and share their strategies and experiences. What this leads to is a lot of re-inventing the wheel. Yech!

In an effort to bridge these communications and find ways to connect professional community managers (both internal and external), I have decided to create a new community at WithInFluence.com focused on sharing community-building thoughts, best practices, and experiences.  This community is a closed-community, available by invitation-only to professionals who manage communities as their primary responsibility.

The community is a work in progress and I am currently looking for a few brave souls (aka “beta testers) who are interested in participating, sharing, and providing suggestions on how to tweak the functionality and grow the community.  Interested? Send me a DM via Twitter at @socmedsean and I’ll send you an invite .  I’d also be interested in hearing your thoughts/comments about this kind of community in the comments.

Cheers!

–Sean

Sean R. Nicholson

2010 has been a great year for Intranets. Web 2.0 finally came out of its shell and the explosive growth of Facebook,  Twitter, and YouTube brought social tools to the mainstream. This, in turn, helped many organizational leaders understand that capturing and sharing information inside the enterprise had a lot of potential, when social tools are leveraged.

In some cases, the same leaders who, in 2009, claimed that social media was “just about people sharing what they ate for breakfast” or “just for kids” finally began to understand that their employees wanted to engage in social media in the workplace and use it to share their work knowledge. As a result, Enterprise 2.0 took some great strides as organizations either added social components to their existing intranets or “ripped and replaced” them with new, social offerings.

The intranet-focused conversations in 2010 were beyond great. When I look back at my 2009 post, it’s great to see that most of the same folks that were blogging and tweeting in 2009 continued to share their valuable knowledge and experience in 2010.  To capture how great 2010 was, I looked back at the blogs of some of my favorite Intranet tweeps and thought I would share the posts I really enjoyed one more time.

In July, 2010 Carolyn Douglas (@carolyndouglas) gave a great breakdown of critical elements any organization should consider when determining whether they should buy or build an Intranet in her blog: When Looking at Intranets: Should you Build or Should you Buy? If you’re considering implementing a new Intranet in 2011, this is a great place to start.

One of my very favorite posts of 2010 came from Elizabeth Lupfer (@socialworkplace), who authors a blog called The Social Workplace. Check out her  article Will The Real You Please Stand Up?. This great article focuses on the need to be authentic in who you are, online and offline. This article is as important inside the workplace as it is outside.

My favorite Intranet series this year came courtesy of Rachel Lai (@rachellai83) in the form of  her series detailing the activities that occur each day on an Intranet. The series, entitled  A Day in the Life of an Intranet is a must read for any internal communicator or Intranet professional.

In an article he wrote for CMS Wire in October, 2010, Toby Ward (@tobyward) explains that enterprise social media has become a necessity.  The article does a great job clarifying the need for a social Intranet, as well as some of the barriers that may be encountered during the implementation.

One of the biggest fears that executives face when it comes to a social intranet is that of open communication. What if an employee says something they shouldn’t? What if private organizational information is exposed erroneously? In his September post, Open Communication – Skepticism and Fears, Bas Zurburg (@BasZurburg) exposes this fear, amongst others. A great read for anyone trying to convince their leadership of the value of a social Intranet.

In his October article, Beware of simplistic rules and strategies, James Robertson (@s2d_jamesr) did a great job explaining the dangers of setting arbitrary limitations on your enterprise because it’s easier to define a simple strategy and stick to it, rather than understanding what would really work best for your organization. The article caught my eye because I see these limitations time and time again within organizations, and rarely is there a sound business reason for some of the strategies and tactics.

I’m a sucker for a good game, so when Alex Manchester (@alex_manchester) wrote an article called Enhancing the intranet with game theory and gaming mechanics, I was hooked. In the article, Alex explains how multi-player online gaming and virtual environments are potential tools for developing employee collaboration and engagement within the enterprise.

I hope you enjoy and here’s to a great Intranet 2011!

–Sean

Sean R. Nicholson

Ahhh…reinventing the wheel. It’s an age-old tradition for a lot of organizations, especially when it comes to changes in technology.  Some new class of productivity software comes along and the entire IT organization has to come to a grinding halt while a new strategy is defined. Remember stopping to define an ECM strategy? Or maybe it was an ERP strategy. Or could it have been an CRM strategy. Don’t even think about that amount of time and energy devoted to developing a .com or eCommerce strategy!

Sound familiar? Ever been locked in the “paralysis by analysis” situation where you can’t get anyone to decide because there are just too many so-called “experts”, “gurus” and “SMEs” guiding the conversation? Ever felt like you’d rather just DO something rather than sitting in yet another, non-productive meeting discussing what might happen?

Unfortunately, many organizations are living this situation right now when it comes to defining their social media strategy.  So many new tools, so many new rules, so many unknown risks…where to begin??  But the reality is, the questions being asked aren’t that different from those that have been explored in the past.

For instance, these are some of the questions/concerns facing the enterprise with respect to social media:

1) How do we engage our customers?

2) What tools should we use to listen to our customers, capture information, and interact?

3) What do we do if a customer says something bad?

4) What do we do if a customer says something good?

5) How can we best learn from our customers to create new products and services?

6) How can we make sure that we’re communicating effectively with our customers?

7) Are there experts out there that can help us engage our customers?

8 ) Do we need to put policies and guidelines in place setting expectations for how we interact with our customers?

9) How do we keep our customers coming back and engaging with us?

10) How do we measure the Return on Investment (ROI) on customer engagement?

Sounds about right…Right? Now, flash back 10 years and see if these (slightly modified) questions sound familiar:

1) How do we engage our employees?

2) What tools should we use to listen to our employees, capture information, and interact?

3) What do we do if an employee says something bad?

4) What do we do if an employee says something good?

5) How can we best learn from our employees to create new products and services?

6) How can we make sure that we’re communicating effectively with our employees?

7) Are there experts out there that can help us engage our employees?

8 ) Do we need to put policies and guidelines in place setting expectations for how we interact with our employees?

9) How do we keep our employees coming back and engaging with us?

10) How do we measure the Return on Investment (ROI) on employee engagement?

Sound familiar? These are the questions that organizations found themselves facing when they were analyzing the value of a corporate Intranet portal and the additional of Web 2.0 components like discussion forums, knowledge bases, and (more recently) wikis and blogs. Seems like very similar questions have been in front of organizations for a long time and, in most, serious time and energy has been devoted to answering the employee engagement questions.

My point isn’t to say that employees and customers are the same and the same rules should apply. Having worked extensively in the Intranet space and currently being very involved in defining organizational social media strategies, I will tell you that employees and customers are very different. My point, however, is that if you are in the process of developing your social media strategy and you haven’t invited your Intranet Manager to the table for the discussions, you are missing out on some potentially useful experience and input.

Maybe, by involving your Intranet Manager, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel….just modify one that already exists.

Sean R. Nicholson

First, let me start off with a bit of a disclaimer. I’m not an anti-Facebook zealot and my goal isn’t to discourage the use of Facebook by companies and organizations. To the contrary, one of the biggest roles of my job is to explain how social media channels can be used effectively by organizations and within organizations. So, with that said, my goal with this series of posts is to educate anyone considering the use of Facebook as their corporate Intranet to seriously reconsider. Using Facebook for a corporate Intranet is like using a hammer to loosen a nut. It can be done, but there’s a lot of risk involved.

So, to help you understand why Facebook shouldn’t be considered when selecting the platform for your Intranet, here are 10 more reasons why it just doesn’t stack up to the competition out there.

10) No integration with organizational LDAP – Your employees are going to want to login using a “single sign-on” with your company domain. Facebook does not provide this type of integration, meaning that your users will need to manage separate accounts. Not a huge problem (because they probably already do), but most platforms built for Intranets will include this functionality, reducing the number of logins your employees require.

9) No document sharing – Don’t be confused by the recent announcement that Groups will allow the sharing of documents. That’s a bit of a misnomer. Facebook does not currently allow for the storage/sharing of documents and the new  “document’ functionality will simply allow members of the group to create a “document” (think Notepad) and share it within the group. You won’t be able to share PowerPoint decks, MS Word docs, or Excel spreadsheets. This means that your employees will be using local drives or shared network drives to save information, which can turn into an IT nightmare. Retrieving lost documents or dealing with document versions without a system designed to handle the complexities will consume a lot of IT bandwidth.

8 ) Search isn’t designed for Intranet purposes – If you have an Intranet right now, ask your employees which functionality they wish worked better. My bet is they’ll say “search”.  Facebook’s search is designed to find people and pages, not information. Even if Facebook did add document storage and sharing, the chances of your employees actually finding anything would be slim to none.

7) Facebook is architected as an entertainment platform, not an organizational Intranet – Ever build an organizational information taxonomy for your Intranet? It can be incredibly painful, even with the right tools. Facebook doesn’t offer you the flexibility to build your Intranet navigation structure in a way that will work for your team. Instead, you’re stuck with what they give you. Also, you’d better hope they don’t change it in the future. Also, would you really want your intranet competing for resources with the likes of Farmville and Mafia Wars?

6) Changes that might not be in the interest of your organization – Facebook is in the business of making money…for Facebook. They aren’t really interested in making your organization successful and if they need to add or change functionality that is adverse to your organizations needs, there’s likely nothing you can do about it. Facebook will do what’s good for them and their future, not yours. If Facebook feels it’s more important to their pocketbook to place your competitor’s ads on your private group, they’ll do so.

5) Groups are limited to 250 members – The recent enhancement of Groups functionality has spurred additional interest in Facebook as an Intranet platform. Keep in mind, however, that in the announcement of the new Groups Mark Zuckerberg continually mentioned the 250 member limitation and that these groups are really intended to be used on a smaller scale.

4) Discussions and walls offer no pre-moderation options – Although many organizations don’t want post moderation in their intranet discussion forums, there are some that do. With Facebook, there is no pre-moderation of wall posts or discussion posts.  That means when an employee posts it, it goes live. This makes some Intranet managers uncomfortable.

3) Employees may not like the “forced” blending of work/social – Many of your employees may view Facebook as their personal social network and may not like the forced blending of their personal and professional lives. Before setting your mind on Facebook as your Intranet platform, you might want to get the input of your HR executives. They may feel that what’s out there on Facebook isn’t really the business of the organization and blending business/personal poses a potential risk.

2) No integration with your other enterprise applications – While Facebook does offer an application platform, it is definitely not geared toward integration with a corporate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool or an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. Your corporate Intranet should be the place where your employees work and where they can access their timecard apps, PTO management system, online form builder, ECM system, and ERP applications. Facebook just doesn’t offer the service-oriented architecture that is required to serve as a centralized portal.

1) Privacy, privacy, privacy. Facebook was not developed with privacy in mind. In fact, the concept of Facebook is pretty much anti-privacy. Share everything…and restrict access to those things you don’t want shared. A corporate Intranet should be exactly the opposite. Share nothing, and decided what you want shared with the outside world. Can you imagine sensitive documents being shared on Facebook and someone accidentally forgetting to set the right restrictions? For a private company, it could be a nightmare. For a public company, under FTC regulation, it could be full-blown Armageddon.

So there you have it….10 more reasons that Facebook shouldn’t be considered for a corporate Intranet. Have suggestions for the list? Feel free to add them in the comments!

Sean R. Nicholson

The launch of the popular Social Network movie coupled with Facebook’s recent enhancements to their Groups functionality has fueled the requests for my opinion as to whether Facebook is becoming a viable platform for an organizational Intranet. I’ll be writing a blog post this weekend detailing the technical/functional reasons that Facebook still isn’t a good choice, but in the meantime I wanted to share this funny video pointing out that many employees just don’t take Facebook seriously.

One of the most difficult hurdles for any Intranet to overcome is adoption and if your employees don’t take the Intranet and the content that it hosts seriously, then adoption will never follow. So, in light of that….is this how your employees feel about Facebook?

I’m not saying that Facebook will never be a suitable platform, it’s just not ready right now.

Sean R. Nicholson

Ready to roll out your new Enterprise 2.0 Strategy? Looking to save the company millions by implementing an internal social strategy? Think that implementing a blog will help you increase sales, cut support calls, and help unclutter your email Inbox?

Before you jump into the deep end and propose implementing any E2.0 solutions, you might want to take a look around and assess whether your organization has an understanding of what E2.0 really is and whether it is ready to take on an internal social strategy.

To help you along, here are my top 10 signs that your organization hasn’t quite figured out what Enterprise 2.0 really is:

10. Executives don’t know the difference between SAS and SaaS.

9. The person that manages your document management system never talks with the person who manages your Intranet.

8. A single organization (HR, Corp Comm, etc…) has complete control over the future roadmap of your Intranet.

7. You believe that social media has no place in the work environment and/or your organization has blocked communication channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

6. Your CRM system hasn’t been upgraded in more than 5 years and has no social media integration.

5. Your executives groan when they hear terms like Wiki, blog, knowledge base, or community.

4. You’ve been working on a SharePoint implementation for more than 12 months and believe it will be a turnkey Enterprise 2.0 solution.

3. You don’t know the difference between an Enterprise Content Management system and Document Management system.

2. You have no clue as to what a Service-Oriented Architecture is.

1. You continue to buy and install software that relies on a desktop client, instead of being accessed through the browser.

There you have it…10 signs that your organization hasn’t figured out what to do with E2.0. Have another good example? Have a suggestion on how to overcome any of these? Feel free to share in the comments!

Sean R. Nicholson

Let’s face it, new employees who come to your organization right out of college are probably pretty familiar with social media. Most have been on Facebook since its inception and some have been Tweeting nearly as long. The question is whether they understand the business acumen and fundamental principles of social networking to do it correctly in the workplace.

Recently, Andrew McAffee wrote an outstanding article on two common mistakes that Millennials make at work.  The article emphasizes the fact that Generation Y has been trained to overshare their personal information, which can result in the first mistake of creating informational clutter in the workplace. The second mistake comes from a lack of an organizational hierarchy and the appropriate channels and communication practices to be used in the workplace.

For instance, posting a message on an executive’s social Intranet Wall saying “That preso was just 2 cool! I’d luv to wrk on the project if you need a hand!” may not impress the executive and may end up damaging the employees reputation. The reality is that Millennials need assistance in understanding the workplace and the difference between sharing information on Facebook and leveraging the social Intranet at their company. Any training focused on Gen-Y needs to help them understand the rules of the workplace, any policies that are in place, and the difference between social sharing and workplace sharing.

The issue of training isn’t limited to the Millennials, though. Take a look at the Baby Boomers and you may run into highly-efficient employees who are heavily reliant on phones and email and have no understanding or desire to learn about social media. “The Facebook” or “The Twitter” are just toys that kids play with and may not have any perceived value in the workplace. These social media ostriches require a different approach for training on the value of social media.  Often, the value needs to be tied to workplace productivity, return on investment for the effort, or furthering a business goal. Often, tying proposed social activities to customer service or call center activities can provide them with the frame of reference to demonstrate that social media isn’t just people talking about what they had for breakfast.

Gen-Xers aren’t immune to the issue, either. Although Gen-Xers grew up around computers, email, and the Web some have a tough time seeing social media as more than just an activity for connecting with old high school friends. Educating them on the value of collaboration and the cost savings that can be associated with it will be required to get buy-in on a new social Intranet.

The fact is, social media brings a new style of communication into the workplace and social Intranets that offer features such as status updates, wikis, threaded discussions, and microblogging also require a new level of training to help employees understand the new tools, leverage it to the fullest in their daily activities, and share only what is business appropriate.

Have a great story about a success in training your organization on the use of a social Intranet? Feel free to add a comment and let others know about the approach you took or success/failure story.

Sean R. Nicholson

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether Facebook is a suitable platform for organizations to build a corporate intranet. The fact that most employees are already on Facebook, combined with the low pricepoint (aka Free) often leads fiscally-focused executives to make statements like “Why build an Intranet, we can just use Facebook.” To see some interesting opinions on the topic, I suggest you check out this thread on the WorldWide Intranet Challenge LinkedIn group.

If you have ever thought about building your organizational intranet on Facebook, I suggest you stop and take a moment to read the following paragraph:

Facebook has no interest in being your organizational Intranet. They don’t care about your privacy or your organizational Intellectual Property. Facebook cares about attracting as many visitors to their site each day as possible so they can increase their ad buy and make more money. They love to release security-flawed features to generate lots of buzz in the press, which generates more traffic and makes them more money.

So, let’s put this issue to rest, once and for all. Facebook is not a corporate Intranet platform. Facebook does not care about your business. Facebook doesn’t care about your employees. If you want to trust your organizational information and intellectual property to a company like Facebook, then please let me know so I can stay as far away from your stock and products as possible.

Recently, Mike Watt, of Intranet Connections gave me a tour around the new Intranet Connections Version 10, which now includes an online form builder. Having built my own form builder application a few years ago for a Fortune 500 company, I have a deep appreciation for how difficult this module is to architect and implement. The beauty of Intranet Connection’s form builder is that it’s simple, easy-to-use, and doesn’t just build “plain jane” forms that send an email.

Instead, the form builder allows user to create standard form fields, pre-populate fields with database-driven SQL queries, add form validation (required fields) and….wait for it….WORKFLOW! Yes, Intranet Connections has paired their form builder with a workflow tool that allows the creator of the form to create a review or approval process for the form once it is submitted by the user.

If you look around at social Intranets today and the rich feature-sets that offer, it may seem like I’m getting excited over a relatively small piece of functionality. After all, a form builder is hardly the sexiest tool out there. But think about it….how many forms do your employees fill out each day? New employee forms, pay change forms, benefits enrollment forms, password change request forms, time off request forms…the list goes on and on. The amount of time and energy (not to mention trees) that can be saved by converting paper forms to electronic forms is staggering.

Intranet Connections v10 Offers An Easy-To-Use Form Builder Application

If your Intranet doesn’t have a form builder, you might ask your vendor “Why not?”. If you do have a form builder, are you using it to it’s maximum potential and digitizing all those paper forms?

Now…if we could just use that form builder to update the cafeteria menu <G>!

I’d be interested to hear feedback/thoughts/experiences with Intranet form builders. Let me know what you think!

Angie Cullen

When building a business case around a social Intranet, there are a few key components to consider.  Here are five suggested features that you might ask your potential vendors to demonstrate.

Forum Collaboration
By using a forum or threaded discussion  tool, you can engage your employees around specific topics and challenge them to start talking about topics that matter to them. For instance, Project Managers might discuss the project they are working on along with the status of that project, IT employees may share valuable technology updates, and HR personnel may share links to recruiting best practices.  Be sure that the tool  allows employees to create a profile and specify the topics they are interested in. This also provides a way for employees to get to know their colleagues and share information.

Social Tagging and Ranking
Although search engines are getting smarter by the minute, nothing replaces the ability for an employee to indicate whether an article or piece of content was useful to them in their job. Especially if the search engine takes that ranking into account in ordering their search results (e.g. articles they ranked higher, should be placed higher in the results). In addition, if employees are able to add their own keywords that helps influence search results, they will be able to find information that is more meaningful to them much more quickly.

Document Storage & Collaboration
With a document storage and collaboration tool, employees can find and share documents easily.  This tool will allow employees to create, open and edit documents by placing them in a centralized location that’s easy to access. Having this tool will allow multiple users to work and collaborate in real-time, based on the permissions that are set by the owner, on a document simultaneously.  A document collaboration tool can also help you cut down on storage costs. Employees will no longer need to email a status report, PowerPoint deck, or Excel spreadsheet to the entire project team (these multiple copies take up storage on the email server). Instead, they can simply email a link to the single copy stored on the Intranet and use check in/check out functionality to edit that single document.

Expertise Finder
Employees consistently rank the company directory as one of the most used functions of their Intranet. An expertise finder takes that directory one step further and allows users to identify employees that hold specific knowledge or expertise. This is paired with the ability for employees to create their social profiles and self-report their skills. Similar to tagging content, employees should also be able to tag other employees with terms that they could use in the future to find that expert again (e.g. tagging someone as “Intranet administrator”)

Knowledge Base or Wiki
Your employees have a great wealth of knowledge and given the opportunity many of them want to share it. Be sure to ask your potential Intranet vendors whether they offer a knowledge base or wiki functionality that would allow your employees to quickly, easily share nuggets of knowledge that may assist other employees. Keep in mind that it must be easy to use and be integrated with the search functionality so employees can use a single search to locate people or content.

These five key components  are just a few of the items to consider when reviewing potential software solutions for a social Intranet. Be sure to ask each of your vendors to demonstrate the functionality and consider inviting a few of your end users or members of your Intranet Governance Council to the demos to get their input, as well.

Have additional features that you think would be critical to a social Intranet? Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think is important or what has turned out to be a popular social feature for your employees.