Social Intranets Taking Shape

By on January 7th, 2011 In Employee Communications, Social Media

It’s no secret, but in case you didn’t hear I made the move back to corporate America last summer and with the move I have turned my focus back to my roots — employee communications. As we begin the new year, I plan on focusing my VPRB posts on internal communications issues because not only is it relevant to me I know many of you also work in employee communications roles. I hope we can learn from each other on this topic moving forward.

One of the biggest changes internally since I last worked for a company waaaay back in 2000 is that print is pretty much dead and intranets have become the primary means of employee communication. Here at Apollo Group, we are wrestling with how to evolve our intranet and at the same time exploring ways to incorporate social networking into the culture. The transition has been a challenge, mostly because there are so many stakeholders and so many options.

According to a recent post at Prescient Digital Meeting, “Social media is all the rage, and most organizations now use social software in some form on their intranet (present on 87% of organization intranets, according to the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Study).” Our intranet is built on top of SharePoint, which is the primary document sharing tool at the company. As we look to redesign the intranet and incorporate social features, obviously we are considering what SharePoint offers, both in the current version we run (2007) and the latest version (2010). But beyond that we have been experimenting with other social tools (Yammer), and researching other solutions including Jive, Newsgator, Chatter, Pulse, BuddyPress, PeopleSoft and others.

Everyone has an opinion on these solutions. Some cost a ton, and others are free. Some require development, others work out of the box. In some ways I wish we could just start a Facebook group for employees and leave it at that! Since I’ve been out of employee communications for so long, I’m wondering how may of you have faced this same challenge and if so, what solution did you finally implement? I think it’s kind of funny that I thought the challenge would be more about getting management on board with social networking in general, but that seems to be a moot point as more and more folks in the business are coming forward asking for social networking solutions.

Comments

Janet Traylor Says:
January 7th, 2011 at 10:19 am

Len, I agree with your comments. One year ago, my team launched a brand-new intranet at Kitchell. We built it in SharePoint, with scant outside resources (after a lot of self-education on our part). Challenges we met successfully included design of our home page and customized branding (out of the box, Sharepoint is pretty dull). But by far our greatest challenges had to do with governance. How an organization solves this piece of the puzzle is intricately connected with organizational structure and culture. In our case, it required a lot of deep discussion, process mapping, planning and decisions about which features we would roll out, and in what sequence. There are many, many things to address. Rolling out SharePoint without thorough discussion and a clear plan can lead to a lot of headaches. My team did excellent work, some of the best I’ve seen for a team of its size (tiny). I’d be happy to share my experience with you in person sometime if you’d like.

Amanda Says:
January 7th, 2011 at 3:39 pm

what is the obsession with sharepoint in corporate culture? what an utter piece of crap.

what I find most fascinating most about the pursuit of the ultimate interior communication tool is that most companies look to reinvent the wheel instead of acknowledging both reality and what’s out there. The best communication will occur when you’re present where people are most… Len has a great point with Facebook. Use existing technology. Gchat is a superpowerful tool. Sharepoint and its neighborhoods actually discourage interactivity, IMO.

I don’t think BP is there yet- I really still like BaseCamp.

Chris Says:
January 7th, 2011 at 4:50 pm

Have recently been working with a company called InGage Networks that offers an end to end solution that may be more comprehensive than anything else in the market. Might be worth taking a look….
http://www.ingagenetworks.com/

Janet Traylor Says:
January 10th, 2011 at 4:50 pm

Amanda, I don’t disagree with your sense that corporate America is obsessed with SharePoint. In many mid-sized and larger companies, IT drives technology adoption. This sometimes means there’s a heavy predisposition to enterprise solutions, especially the ubiquitous Microsoft products.

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