Subscribe to newsletterIntranets turning into marketplaces?
How far should organizations go in letting people pick and choose what they want to see and do on the intranet?
A participant in one of my global intranet workshops recently said, “There’s no point in saying we have mandatory global content that everyone must see. It’s not by putting it on the home page that will make them read it. They’re either interested or they aren’t.”
The person speaking is in charge of internal communication in a large global company. The company in question is in the early stages of a socially-driven intranet. When I say “early”, I mean they have a CEO blog, allow comments on all news items and articles and have just officially launched a social platform where numerous groups and teams are beginning to set up their tents!
My concern is that without a minimum of overall strategy, it’s the users who will suffer. They will not know where to find what. There are risks of redundancies.
But does that matter? Will the best “places” win? The ones where the most users congregate? The ones that offer the most value? Will the marketplace sort itself out?
What are your views on intranets morphing into user-driven spaces where people are completely free to pick and choose what they see and where and how they work on line?
9 Responses to “Intranets turning into marketplaces?”
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July 13th, 2010 at 12:18 am
There was a great article published recently about this topic in the New York Times – “Structure? The Flatter, the Better”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html
Essentially the article is saying that organisations are becoming less hierarchical these days. With the emergence of social media and online collaboration tools, what you know is becoming more important than where you sit in an org structure.
With these tools, it’s possible to “allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart.”
Basically this article is saying that if you have something valuable or interesting to contribute, people will listen and you will be recognised.
Seth Godin’s latest book ‘Lynchpin’ (http://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth-Godin/dp/1591843162/permissionmarket) also talks about this subject. He makes a good argument that the days of command and control are changing.
He says a lynchpin is somebody in an organization who is indispensable, who cannot be replaced. And with the low cost of technology these days (anyone can create a blog for free) it makes it possible for virtually anyone to become a lynchpin.
We can see examples of this in the intranet community with people writing blogs that add value not only to the community but to their own value as a lynchpin. Some of these appear on this website – Mark Morrell from BT, Peter Richards from Tabcorp and Patrick Sikes from HSN.
So I tend to agree that the intranet will become more of a marketplace where useful and valuable content will find a way to surface to the top and content that is not so helpful will just take up space and annoy the end users. The key I think is to somehow identify content that is valuable (and also not so valuable) and present it in such a way that it has most impact and adds the most value to the business.
July 13th, 2010 at 7:30 am
I thought of that the other day when watching how people are using Iphones/Androids/…. Download the app that you need and that’s it. As Intranets go mobile, we might see the same pattern. Download the Intranet apps that you need and that’s it?
July 13th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
I think the marketplace concept has to win. We’ve been doing a lot of benchmarking and measurement work lately, and there’s clearly content that gets read/viewed/consumed/used, and content that doesn’t. And generally, the former is interesting or directly useful to employees, while the latter is uninteresting and not useful. Putting it on the homepage does nothing to change that dynamic, though convincing business leaders of that (fairly obvious) fact is challenging at the best of times.
July 13th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Intranets turning into marketplaces – Jane McConnell…
This article has been submitted to IntranetLounge, a website with a collection of links to the best articles about intranets…
July 13th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Andrew, Ernst, Michael,
It will be a struggle for survival for many high level stakeholders.
A healthy culling! Darwin would approve.
July 14th, 2010 at 2:58 am
I have two brief thoughts on this for now:
1. Corporate communications and news is going to have to change. How, I don’t exactly know. I think it’s going to have to be shorter, more relevant and especially engaging. I think it will evolve well beyond what it is now.
2. We, as internal communicators, are going to have to find pull strategies rather than push. Allow employees to select the types of news of interest to them, put it where they will see it (e.g. in their personal profile on a social intranet), and allow them to share it.
July 14th, 2010 at 7:59 am
“Pull” is a large part of the answer. Of course we will have to teach people how to pull! Or make it as intuitive as breathing.
July 14th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Jane,
BT’s intranet has been following this approach since day 1 of it’s creation 15 years ago. It seems to work for us!
Our strategy has always been to give the users the choice where they start their journey – corporate portal, directory or news sites, etc – and make our intranet as open and as easy to use as possible.
And this is the key point which works for us…!
We have a set of standards based on legal, regulatory, business and user needs. We embed as many of these standards as possible into templates that are used for all content types on our intranet. It gives users what they demand – a consistent user experience so they can easily find what they need and move on to the next activity.
We also give users the choice to find what they need – RSS for news, search all content, A-Z index of sites, usable headings and links.
Satisfaction with our intranet users is around 80% so we’re giving (most) people what they want.
More detail on this can be found on my blog http://markmorrell.wordpress.com.
Mark
July 27th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
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