How Arla made their intranet more social

‘Social’ was a major buzzword for intranets in 2011. As is often the case, it is far from easy for intranet professionals to figure out what the concept behind the buzzword means for the business and how to back it up with a business case. However, it is clear that many managers and employees now expect social, so where and how to start?

Danish dairy company Arla Foods, took the first small but important step in the direction of social, when they introduced a simple thumbs up or down rating feature on internal news…..

Read the entire article at the J. Boye blog. Yours truly have a few comments in the post as well…

Vanity Pages: It’s not presentation – It’s marketing!

A comment on the blog post “Vanity pages: how to transform them” by Jane McConnell

---

You can’t – and shouldn’t – stop people from creating “vanity pages”. Telling people that they can’t have one can easily be perceived as ”Sorry, your department is not important enough for the intranet”.

Since the ”type 3” page is often the first page that is created by a given entity, it requires active participation/coaching from the intranet/content manager to avoid that the editor falls into one of these traps:

1) Lack of clarity
Presentation of the department/function by using lots of internal jargon, acronyms, and fluffy buzzwords that doesn’t make sense unless you are working with eg. Finance.

2) Boooooring…
Explain in great, lengthy detail creating a wall of text that nobody reads – possibly ganished with a mission statement from Senior VP XYZ

3) The too simple approach
”Welcome to the website for department ABC – click the powerpoint link below to read more about what we do” – Say no more…

Users don’t know your acronyms, they don’t care what your Senior VP thinks, and they certainly don’t want to go through your 34-page department presentation!

In stead you should treat your readers as customers: Find out what you have to offer that could be useful for the reader and combine this with a short and down-to-earth presentation, what you do, and who to contact.

In my experience this approach can be a little controversial since you often find yourself telling people that they need to focus on something different than what they perceive as important. That said, it is also fairly easy to get them to understand that this is not a presentation – this is marketing!

Don’t focus on what you do – Focus on when and why users should contact you!

There – I did it!

I finally got around to creating a blog – something that has been on my mind for quite some time inspired by some of the people I follow and the fact that sometimes a 140 character tweet just isn’t enough!

This blog is an attempt to create a place where I can share some of my thoughts on what I hear, see, and think in my professional life which – at the moment – evolves around intranets and how to engage people in collaboration and dialogue online.

I may be stumbling around in the beginning to find my feet in the blogosphere, but I hope that you will check back from time to time and feel free to leave comments – after all that’s half of what blogging is all about!