Leadership involvement is vital to social intranet success

Evidence continues to mount that social intranets have the potential to produce big results for organizations. The ongoing McKinsey & Company study points to outcomes ranging from increased market share to reduced time to market, along with a host of other positive results. Studies from MIT and Aberdeen Group show productivity gains among employees using social intranets.

Yet a recent study from IABC and Prescient Digital Media suggests that 39% of companies don’t have any social components on their intranets (the number is as high as 49% in other research), and a substantial number of those that do have only one (like a wiki or a… Read More »

Most employees don’t use intranet social media. Here’s how to fix that.

For years, employees have been subjected to the “Godspeed” method of their employers introducing new communication technologies to the workplace. Here’s how it works:

The IT department configures the new technology, subjecting it to rigorous testing to ensure that the bits get to where they’re supposed to go and that the tool works they way it’s supposed to without interfering with other systems. Once they’re sure the technology works right, they issue the following instructions to the workforce:

“Godspeed.”

As a result, each employee is left to his own devices to figure out how—or if—he’ll adopt the technology.

I’m not blaming IT,… Read More »

Eight tips for getting employees to comment on CEO intranet blogs

Whenever I raise the issue of leader blogs on intranets, the same issue inevitably arises, as it did during a workshop I conducted a week or so ago on social intranets and again at an intranet conference in New York earlier this week. It goes like this:

My CEO/president/senior executive is blogging on the intranet but employees aren’t leaving any comments. He/she posted a really important/interesting item but got only two/four/six comments. He/she is thinking that it’s not worth the effort if nobody’s going to comment.

While I can’t speak to each individual company or post, I can make some general recommendations about how to get… Read More »

FIR Interview: Toby Ward on the 2011 Social Intranet Survey

Prescient Digital CEO Toby Ward teamed up with the IABC Research Foundation to study social intranets. In this FIR interview, co-host Shel Holtz talks with Toby about some of the key findings of the study, which is due to be released in mid-October.

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About our Conversation Partner

The founder and CEO of Prescient Digital Media, Toby is a senior Internet… Read More »

Guest post: Curating news about the company for the intranet

During a recent talk on content curation, I showed a page from American Electric Power’s intranet that included news about the company from external sources. Several in the audience wondered how the communicators at AEP curated that content, so I asked Internal Communications Director William Amurgis for a quick rundown. Instead, he replied with an email that was good enough to be a blog post—and William gave me his permission to turn it into one.

by William Amurgis
Director, Internal Communications, American Electric Power

We’ve explored automated feeds over the years, and found them to be either too inclusive (too many redundant or… Read More »

Just for you: A discount code for Social Intranet Summit

I’m speaking later this month at the Social Intranet Summit—keynoting it, in fact—and I’m thrilled to be able to ofer a discount code so you can get in for a lower price.

Register using the promo code SISVSHEL and you’ll get a 20% discount. The price is $599, but it’ll cost you about $120 less than that.

That’s a great deal to hear the lineup of great speakers the folks at Thoughtfarmer—the social intranet platform, sponsors of the summit—have lined up. My good friends Toby Ward, Thomas Vander Wal and Ron Shewchuk will be there, along with the always thought-provoking Stowe Boyd. I don’t personally now the other speakers, but I’m… Read More »

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