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.

Sean R. Nicholson

Sometimes opportunities knock quietly….and sometimes they hit us with explosive force. The trouble is, we often miss them even though they are staring us right in the face. As an example, take a look at the recent volcanic explosion in Iceland. This natural disaster has demonstrated the need for business travelers to have access to their corporate information, regardless of where they are located.

The reality is that modern business travelers are more reliant on technology than ever. Sales professionals need access to updated rate sheets and sales contacts, marketing professionals need their product collateral, legal professionals need access to up-to-date case notes, and the list goes on. Without access to the critical information required to do their jobs, traveling professionals would be at a significant disadvantage to those that are able to access their corporate information remotely.

The MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite captured an Ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano over the North Atlantic at 11:35 UTC (7:35 a.m. EDT) on April 15, 2010. Credit: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team.

In addition, the ability to keep in constant contact with employees in the home office allows travelers to make alternate arrangements for travel,meetings, and information distribution. If a sales professional is stuck in the airport in London but has access to email, their travel reservation system, and their Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system, they could reserve a train ride to France, reschedule a business meeting with their customer, and send updated product information…all from the airport.

Estimates indicate that the recent eruption caused more than 100,000 flights to be canceled. Business travelers from Okinawa to Orlando were impacted and their activities potentially disrupted. In many cases, however, employees were able to continue operating remotely due to application access provided via Virtual Private Networks (VPN), remote meeting technology like GoToMeeting, and Web-based email systems.

As a result, Intranet professionals should be looking for ways to highlight the importance of portal, security, and productivity benefits offered by Intranet applications. Demonstrating to executives how internal social media kept employees in touch and helped them conduct business during potentially disastrous times demonstrates the value of investment in an Intranet infrastructure and highlights its benefit.

I’d love to hear stories of travelers who benefited from remote technology and access to the corporate intranet. Feel free to comment and share!

Sean R. Nicholson

About a year ago, I had a conversation with a then SocialMediaphobe who tried to convince me that social media was a fad that had no future in the workplace. His argument was that Facebook was too personal and Twitter too truncated to ever offer any value to business culture. I tried to convince him that, like all emerging technologies, social media was still finding its place in the workplace, but it was slowly, almost imperceptibly changing the way we communicate. His response was to try to dissuade me by saying “it’s just a bunch of people talking about what they ate for breakfast.”

As I look back the amazing strides social media has taken in the last year, even I’m amazed. The importance of short, meaningful messages tugged at my heartstrings as major news outlets like CNN and MSNBC relied on Tweets from survivors of the tragic earthquake in Haiti to keep us informed. YouTube has become the second largest search engine in the world (arguably the largest content engine), and Facebook continues to grow at astonishing rates, becoming one of the largest photo repositories on the Web.

Yet, somehow….corporate executives continue to ignore social media like it’s going to go away. These social media ostriches often argue that Social Media is a “B to C” (business to consumer) activity, meaning that businesses can only use it to market directly to consumers. They argue that companies selling “B to B” (business to business) can’t effectively leverage social media, because it’s the wrong market and businesses don’t pay attention to social media.

Little do they understand that businesses are not faceless organisms that make decisions without human input. On the contrary, business decisions are influenced by people and made by people, making “B to B” marketing almost irrelevant in a world where social media dominates the conversation. Executives need to understand that consumers of all type rely on product advice gained from other consumers, and the value of marketing Web sites that expound on the value of their product is diminishing. Need more convincing? Take a look at the Answers section of LinkedIn and you’ll find thousands of professionals (working for businesses) asking for recommendations on ECM, CRM, Intranet, and back office software. Yes…they even ask for advice on what blogging and social media platforms to use.

A shining example of a “B to B” corporate executive leveraging social media is Carolyn Douglas, the CEO of Intranet Connections. Her passion about Intranets, collaboration, best practices, and social media are evident in her blogs and tweets. Her thought leadership in the Intranet industry influences her peers, colleagues and customers on a daily basis. She demonstrates that although her business is technically “B to B”, her social media communication is aimed at interacting with people.

Great examples of executive leadership can be found in the “B to C” markets, as well. Just look at leaders like Marc Cenedella of TheLadders.com or Bill Marriot of Marriot Hotels. Each has established a meaningful blog and/or twitter presence that educates the public on topics ranging from interviewing tips to downtown revitalization efforts. Both activities are ancillary to their business, but provide meaning to their readers. The effect of the trust they earn from their readers is often carried over to the brand the represent.

And product marketing is just the tip of the iceberg when looking for social media opportunity. The value of collaborative activities inside your organization can justify an investment relatively quickly. You see, your employees are people, and people like to share. They share their stories, experiences, and knowledge. They talk around the water cooler, at the coffee pot, and at their cubes. At work, they feel valued and important when another employee is able to use a past experience to solve a problem. They get frustrated when they discover that the knowledge in their head could have been useful to another employee in a previous experience.  It’s the age-old knowledge management problem. How do you get the knowledge out of your employees heads and into a media that can be shared and leveraged by other employees?

The answer is social media. Give your employees and platform and they will share. Sure, they’ll share personal information, too…but mixed in with stories about their weekends, cats, and World of Warcraft are valuable nuggets of corporate knowledge that can help you solve problems, produce new products, and deliver a higher level of customer and employee satisfaction. It’s up to you to find ways to filter or segment that information to uncover that which is valuable to your business, but once you do…you’ve unlocked the potential of your employees.

In summary, social media is not about people eating oatmeal. Well…actually it is. But it’s also about people solving problems and people serving customers and people buying products. Social media is about your employees and your customers. It’s about your friends and colleagues. It’s about what they want, and what they want to offer. It’s a valuable tool that will provide insight to markets, products, and ways of doing business that you probably never thought about.  It’s up to you to get involved and show leadership. Good luck!

P.S. I’d love to hear from Execs who have taken the plunge and how your efforts are proceeding. Feel free to comment or email using our contact form.

Sean R. Nicholson

2009 has been a great year full of exciting opportunities, great projects, engaging conversations, and healthy dialog about the topics of Intranets, Enterprise Content Management, and Enterprise 2.0. As I reflect on the events that have occurred over the last year, I’m amazed at how much has transpired and how many new people I have had the honor of connecting with.

Here are some of the highlights, that I thought I would share. In 2009, I am please to have:

• Started the IntranetExperience blog as an effort to capture some of my Intranet design and implementation experiences and share them with others.
• Created a Twitter account, which drove me to read hundreds (maybe thousands) of articles posted by fellow Tweeps.
• Compiled a following list of more than 600 invaluable resources who tweet on Intranets, Enterprise Content Management, Social Media, and Enterprise 2.0.
• Earned the privilege of being followed by more than 700 folks on Twitter who think I might have something valuable to say everyone once in a while.
• Connected online with some amazing Intranet resources including:
  • Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media;
  • Carolyn Douglas and Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections;
  • James Robertson and Alex Manchester of Step Two Designs
  • Peter Richards, who writes the Wheat and Chaff blog
  • Jane McConnell of NetJMC
  • Christy Season, who blogs at ChristyWeb.com
  • Wedge, who blogs at kilobox.net
• Engaged in thought-provoking dialogs on enterprise content management with ECM gurus like:
  • Cheryl McKinnon of Nuxeo
  • Martin Sumner-Smith of OpenText
  • Carl Frappaolo and John Mancini of AIIM
  • Sascha Ohler and Mike Wessel of Perceptive Software
• Had incredible face-to-face conversations with other Intranet and ECM professionals including folks like:
  • Karl Geisler
  • Jeff Allen
  • Michele Sperle
  • Dan Dillon
  • Ken Berlack
  • Dan Kneeshaw
  • Angela Cullen
• Developed 20 different subject matter-oriented lists on Twitter of outstanding experts in their respective areas.
• Helped educate others that social media isn’t just people blogging about their families and tweeting about what they ate for breakfast. I successfully convince others that tweeting is a good thing, and some of them have even stuck with it.
• Worked with great folks like Patty Dugan, Matt Feeny, Jill Ducey, Paul Arhnold, and Jeremy McNieve to develop an initial Social Media strategy around Twitter.

All of this, on top of enjoying a great day job, spending quality time with my family, and carving out a bit of time for myself.

Not too shabby, if I don’t say so myself.

What’s even better is I have even higher hopes to build on the foundation of 2009 and expand these activities, conversations, and opportunities in 2010!

A special thanks to everyone I have listed here for their thoughts, comments, and engagement. And to anyone that I might have left off, this post is likely a work in progress and a gentle reminder of any accomplishment that should be added to the list is much appreciated.

Happy New Year to everyone and my 2010 be your best year yet!

–Sean

Sean R. Nicholson

Although I’m a huge fan of Twitter, I have never been a big fan of the native Twitter search engine. As a result, I’m always looking for better ways to keep up with tweets on Intranet topics.  While Tweetdeck is by far my favorite tool, I have to say I was curious when I heard that both Bing and Google were going to provide search interfaces into Twitter. Bing was first out of the chute and their solution is pretty nice. Not only does it provide you with an updating feed, it allows you to easily retweet content and see the most common links being shared about Intranets (or any topic).

My plan is to leave Bing open for the next few days and see how I like it. Let me know if you’ve been using it and what you think.

Bing allows you to easily monitor Tweets relating to Intranets (or any other topic)

Sean R. Nicholson

As a follow up to my 99 Great Intranet Resources and 99 Great ECM Resources posts, I have also created a list of 99 great Internal Communications Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who tweet about employee engagement, thought leadership, internal mass communication tools, and intranets…these are your folks!

Sean’s list of 99 Great Internal Comms resoureces on Twitter

Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean R. Nicholson

As a follow up to my 99 Great Intranet Resources post, I have also created a list of 99 great Enterprise Content Management Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who know, speak, live, learn, and love ECM, these are your folks! Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean’s ECM Twitter List

Sean R. Nicholson

I took some time this weekend to categorize my Twitter friends and followers into various Twitter lists. If you’re looking for some great Intranet resources to follow, this list contains 99 great folks who tweet about all kinds of Intranet topics ranging from taxonomies, governance,  platforms, and products.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean’s Intranet Twitter List

Sean R. Nicholson

Having been in the field of information management for quite a while now, I have developed a few credos that seem to prove more and more useful as the volumes of organizational information continues to grow. I used to drive one of my previous team absolutely crazy with this one:

“The only thing worse than no information is BAD information”

Think about it. When you have no information, you seek out answers, solutions, and advice. When you have bad information,  it’s likely that you don’t know it’s bad, so you react to the information. Only after you have used the information and determined that it was incorrect do you (after a few choice words) continue your search for good information.

Take an example of a call center representative who answers the phone and provides the customer on the other end with what they think to be the most current product prices from a document they printed yesterday. Little do they know that a new copy of the rate sheet was published a couple hours ago with significant rate changes that is now impacting their potential sale.

Did they have information? Yes! Was it good information? No!

The reality is that organizations are generating more and more information on an hourly basis. Take a moment and think about all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, voice mails, and sticky notes you generated on a daily basis just 3 years ago. Now, add modern day blogs, tweets, text messages, forum posts, comments, status updates, videos, podcasts, and wiki posts to your list and what do you get? More information? Definitely! But the larger problem is the fact that the information is now spread out in more places, making it harder for other employees and customers to find it.

In the past customers could simply call a 1-800 line for support and get one-stop service. In the modern day of social media, though, they can call the 800 number, tweet their problems, look for solutions in a knowledge base, email, complain in an online forum, post a video on YouTube of your product malfunctioning, or blog about it. Compound the problem with the fact that your employees are having a difficult time finding the most current methods to resolve the customer issues and you have quite an information disaster in the making. In fact, it’s a situation that could have a negative impact on both customer and employee satisfaction.

For some, the temptation might be to throw their hands up in the air and surrender to the fact that there are just too many channels out there. If you’re curious as to how confusing it really is, just take a look at all the new channels being created in the social media space alone via the Social Media Prism! Now think about what your employee-to-employee and employee-to-customer communication channels are going to look like in 5 years. Believe me…I understand the desire to just crawl back in bed and ignore social media. The reality is, however, that few business ever succeed by ignoring change. Instead, you’re going to need to stop dismissing social media (both internal and external) as a fad and start working on how to resolve the issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic product that I can sell for $19.99 to serve as the magic bullet. This one’s going to require smart people in your organization rolling up their sleeves and building a solid information management architecture. No, it’s not easy, but it’s going to be a requirement for businesses to survive in the future! A good place to being would be by looking at the following criteria:

1. How do your employees work? Are they being asked to store information in multiple locations (e.g. My Documents, file shares, document repositories, WIKIs, etc…)?
2. Do your employees know where to go for the single source of truth? (hint, hint…it should be your Intranet)
3. Where are you storing your information? In legacy applications that aren’t searchable? In repositories that require no periodic content review?
4. Does your organization offer a single search interface that allows employees to search information in multiple repositories?
5. Is your information governance killing your employees ability to share information (e.g. no blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc…)?
6. How are your customers interact with your organization? Are they seeking answers from multiple sources (e.g. Phone, website, Twitter, etc..)
7. Do your customers know where to go for a single source of the truth (hint, hint…it should be your Web site)
8. Do you have the infrastructure in place to respond to new types of interactions? Do you have corporate accounts for sites like Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does someone monitor searches on your company and products?
9. Are you making it as easy as possible for your customers to get help and resolve issues?
10. Are YOU embracing internal and external information tools that will allow your employees to share information more easily and provide customers with more ways to serve themselves or seek assistance?

If you haven’t started a review of your current information architecture, it’s time to start and because I find the Social Media Prism to be so useful in explaining the external growth challenge that faces organizations, I have also put together an internal information stratification diagram that hopefully will help IT, Intranet, and ECM professionals demonstrate the internal complexities that exist inside the firewall.  Click on the image below for a larger view or feel free to print out a PDF version.

As always….this is a work in progress and all input, comments, feedback are welcome!

Internal Information Stratification Wheel

Sean R. Nicholson

Imagine, for a moment, that you have accepted a new position as a corporate executive tasked with figuring our how to make your company work better, faster, cheaper.

Along with the details of your position, you have been informed that you have access to a wealth of competitive intelligence, product experience, and innovative thinking at your fingertips. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?But what if you had no means of capturing, storing, and retrieving that information? Bad situation.

It’s likely, however, that it would be easy to justify an investment in a tool that would allow you to leverage the information. But what many execs don’t realize is that they actually have the potential for this exact type of information at their disposal…if they were to invest in a social Intranet platform.

Classic Talent Management Systems vs. Social Intranet

For years, Intranet and HR professionals have been working to implement successful “Talent Management systems” with very little measurable success. The difficulty with legacy Talent Management systems is they required manual updates of employee history, competencies, training, and certifications and they rarely provide the employee with an opportunity to share their experience.

One of the  biggest shortcomings of these systems was the method used to capture and maintain the information. The process of updating employee records usually occurred (if at all) once a year during the employee annual review process. Managers would discuss employee competencies at the review and either update the system themselves or ask the employee to provide the updates. Unfortunately, a once-a-year update doesn’t provide the timely information required to operate a business and since the system was rarely referenced to identify subject matter experts, employees had no motivation to keep them up to date. As a result, these Talent Management systems quickly became outdated and useless and future investment in these types of tools were difficult to justify.

As Social Intranets are becoming more commonplace, however, a unique phenomena is occurring. Employees are sharing their previous experiences, subject knowledge, and expertise with fellow employees, management, and executives each day, providing a huge resource for internal knowledge that changes by the day, hour, and minute.

The Engagement Experience

To see how Social Intranets can play the valuable role of a Talent Management system, imagine a situation where a Sally Sales, a Sales Executive, creates a post on the Intranet forum asking:

Sally Sales: I am traveling to SmithCo Enterprises tomorrow to show them a demo of the latest version of our ERP  software. Does anyone have information about their culture, personnel, etc…that they can share?

Sam Support, a customer support rep – a role that isn’t traditionally engaged by Sales for input – posts back stating:

Sam Support: FYI, I used to work at SmithCo and you need to be aware that they are wary of “vaporware”. Be prepared to show the software in action and provide them with references of other customers who are using the latest version.  Also, I worked as a contractor with the team that implemented their existing BigCO ERP system and they have some serious limitations that need to be addressed relating to the accurate matching of POs, receipts, and invoices. If you can show how well we address that requirement, it will go a long way.

Able Accountant, an invoicing specialist chimes in with another post stating:

Able Accountant: I have used both our new version and the BigCO system they are using and the difference is night and day. Our automatic invoicing abilities are significantly better than BigCO and our implementation timeline averages 12 months, where BigCO’s implementation at my previous company took 36 months and was almost $1M over budget.

…and the conversation goes on.

While this type of dialog obviously helps the Sales Exec know how to refine their sales pitch, approach their prospect, and hopefully win the deal, there is a secondary benefit that is occurring behind the scenes. Employees are identifying what they know, where they have worked, what skills they hold, and whether they can be leveraged as subject matter experts on a specific product or topic.

As a result, the next time any Sales Executive is selling to SmithCo or any company where BigCo is implemented, a simple search of the Intranet for the terms “SmithCo” or “BigCo” will identify Sally Sales, Sam Support, and Able Accountant as resources that have information and experiences with the BigCo product. This is the exact result that Talent Management systems have sought to accomplish for years.

Through this one interaction, employees have reported to the company that they have valuable competitive information and the fact that they respond to posts like these frequently keeps their information up-to-date. While neither Sam or Able were hired into a position specific to tackling BigCo as a competitor, the fact that they both have and shared previous work experience potentially helped the company make a sale.

As the newest executive looking to improve processes and drive revenue through employee productivity, you now have a gold mine waiting to be tapped.