Page 375 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Rethinking the Intranet

Historically, an intranet was defined as an employee-only web-based network for
communication, collaboration, self-service, knowledge management, and
business decision making. Most intranets were never designed to allow or
encourage social influence, even though they’re the ideal platforms for furthering
collaboration and knowledge sharing within your company.

Many of the intranets were originally top-down (management-controlled), rigid,
inflexible, and uninviting experiences that served the needs of the Corporate
Communications and Human Resources departments but not anyone else. They
were used to communicate messages from CEOs and senior management,
distribute company announcements, and provide human resources and finance
self-service forms to employees.

Intranets slowly evolved to include basic collaboration features and the ability to
create and manage department-level pages; they also grew to include key
performance indicator dashboards for senior executives. Yet for the most part,
these intranets were static, top-down, rigid tools that by their very nature
discouraged collaboration and social influencing.

For your intranet to go social and truly encourage collaboration and social
influence to take place, you must adapt it to enable clear communication,
collaboration, navigation, search, accessibility, and more. We give you some tips
on optimizing your intranet in the sections that follow.

Getting rid of the buzzwords

When you design your intranet, move away from the business and technical jargon
that you may have used to describe the intranet or label features on it. Don’t use
words like portals, knowledge management, digital dashboards, taxonomies, enterprise
collaboration, and codification. Use more inspiring language, words that employees
can relate to, in all your communications. In other words, humanize the intranet
through language but also through its design.

For example, the original intranet at one of Shiv’s previous companies, Razorfish,
was called “Mom 3000,” largely because, like a mother, it had all the answers to
questions that employees had. Because it was so advanced, the “3000” was added
to it. Needless to say, the employees all loved the intranet and grew attached to it,
not just because of all its features but because of its personality.

CHAPTER 24 Encouraging Employees to Advocate for Your Brand on Social Media 359