Page 376 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Don’t try to control too much

Most intranet managers now realize that collaboration functionality is essential
for the success of any intranet. But many still launch those collaboration tools
with overly restrictive controls limiting the amount of collaboration that can take
place. Whether it’s wiki functionality or group and department pages, make the
default setting on all pieces of functionality open to everyone.

By default, let everyone view and edit every page on the intranet unless something
has specifically been designated as confidential. And while you’re at it, don’t
dictate how and with what tools your employees should collaborate; let them
make those decisions.

Surfacing the connections

Instead of focusing only on publishing information and providing business appli-
cations to the employees, look for ways to connect people to one another. Let the
intranet reveal strong and weak ties between people and create communities
based on the information and collaboration needs of employees.

Make it as easy as possible for the employees by building functionality into the
intranet so that people who have shared interests and objectives are linked to each
other automatically. This doesn’t mean publishing organizational charts but
rather quite the opposite — having the intranet tell people who else within the
organization has similar interests or objectives and encouraging them. The Google
employee intranet, Moma, approached this by having each employee’s goals and
objectives visible on the intranet right next to contact information. That way, an
employee would know whether their proposed conversation or project
recommendation would be of high or low interest to the other employee even
before contacting her.

Taking search social

Intranet managers generally believe — and rightly so — that search is the killer
application (in a good way) of their intranet. They also recognize that search is
extremely difficult to get right, primarily because employees expect the search to
work as well as Google or Bing, even though the intranet search budget is minis-
cule compared to how much those companies invest in search.

One way to mitigate this is by incorporating social features into the search experi-
ence and by combining it with the telephone directory. When you prioritize search
results based on what other users find to be useful and link the results with the
specific users who find the results valuable, the perception of search increases
dramatically because people in an organization are typically interested in the

360 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM