This is a little follow up on an earlier post where I advocated Microblogging as a tool to open up the internal communication in the enterprise.

This article lists some usage examples for microblogging.

1. Share news

You can send news items or reminders quickly, there is no need to post them on the intranet or use email. You can attach a link to an article on the intranet to a document, a photo or an external link. All topics are OK: News, information about new products or services, industry (competition) news, Internal marketing and many more.

2. Survey the opinion of employees

It is easy to set up a quick poll with microblogging. Ask a question (with an identifying hashtag) and wait for the votes to come in.

More...

Give employees a voice

Many organisations already have successfully implemented open communication or social tools in their intranet. Others are still hesitating because of various reasons like e.g. strategy, culture, technology or lack of recognition of the benefits.

The society has changed, organisations are now seeking for other ways to communicate with external customers. When will organisations themselves change? Recently I looked at Microblogging as an instrument to open up internal communication in the enterprise. In this post I elaborate on the impact it can have for the organisation and its employees.

Open Communication?

Come on, we are an open organisation

In this article I refer to communication that is interactive and between people:

Person A sends a message to person B. Person B receives the message, reads it, understands it, thinks about it and replies with a message back. Other forms are just sending information.

In traditional 'corporate communication' the focus is on sending information. This is usually done by email, a message on the intranet or a corporate newsletter. There is one limitation with this approach: The sender does not know if the message is received, read or understood as it was originally intended.

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There is an interesting discussion going on about the intranet homepage. Should it scroll or not scroll?

See the latest article from Step Two Design by James Robertson. The article refers to more posts:

Discussing the length of the intranet homepage

It is interesting, because many people have opinions about it. (I personally don't mind, I like both. And I like a lot of white space in it)

But I don't really understand the discussion. For me as an employee, I am mostly interested in what the company restaurant serves for lunch. I don't mind clicking 4 times or scroll 3 pages down to find the menu. I just want to know.

If there is content of interest on the intranet, it doesn't matter where it is, it will be visited.

The same is true for a website, a web-application or a desktop-application. When there is something that I want to know or need to do, I go there.

Also in real life. Normally I take the shortest route from work to home and do shopping on the way. But when I need something that is not available there, I just drive to the shop where they do sell it. Yep, it could take me some extra time.

I don't believe that the length of the homepage is an important factor for a successful intranet. Some intranet homepages fit on one page, others not. Basta! There is simply no 'one size fits all' for intranets.

This was my little rant about the discussion ;-)

Intranets 'live' by definition in closed networks. We don't know how other intranets look like, what the features are or what the success factors are. But we're very curious...

Stephan Schillerwein has on his website "Intranet Matters" a great compilation of very good intranet case studies.

http://intranet-matters.de/intranet-case-studies/

Also Elizabeth Lupfer has collected a useful list of case studies at SocialMediaToday:

Extensive List of over 30 Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Reports

For intranet case studies and Live Tours, IBF has opened its archives with presentations of the IBF24 event that took place in June 2010:

IBF 24, you can now start catching up on what you missed

Somewhat different, but the videos of IntraTeam (Kurt Kragh Sørensen) are very interesting. The site is in Danish, but some parts are also translated in English and the videos are mostly in English. The video archive contains interviews of intranet professionals amongst others: Martin White, Jane McConnell and James Robertson:

Indhold tagget med: Billeder & Video

Do you know another good resource with with intranet case studies, please use the comment area or you can let me know via the contact form (thanks!).

The intranet does not have to be fun to make employees happy

This is another article in which I try to create adoption and acceptance for the intranet in the organisation. I will take another angle and look at what motivates employees and what role the intranet can play to create happy employees. I believe we all agree that organisations need happy employees to be successful. It is another way of identifying good content for the intranet.

How employees are motivated

After research on the Internet I learned that there are many theories on how to motivate employees. I definitely do not want to interfere with these discussions, but for this article I selected these four general more or less accepted motivators:

• Money - simply put: employees expect a fair financial compensation for their effort
• Creativity - We are all unique human beings and we all want to put our personality and ideas into our work 
• Recognition - A shoulder tap is in many situations more worth than a financial raise / bonus
• Future - is the job secure, what are the options to grow in the organisation

Let's apply these to the intranet. 

Money

The reward that is paid and everything else that is related to money: compensation, bonuses, expenses, employee benefits and promotions

Owning an intranet is not the same as being responsible for it

Two examples that can happen with your intranet:

The HR department keeps all the employee data up to date for their own records, but they defer the responsibility for the 'People Find' to the owner of the intranet.

The IT department has delivered the intranet, it works fine and the roll out was a success. But after that they keep rolling out there own portals and platforms to the business. They see building the intranet only as an item on their work program.

There are some tasks that belong to the owner of the intranet and of course there must be:

• a main budget holder
• a chair of the editorial board
• a chair of the steering committee
• a unit to co-ordinate daily tasks
• a unit dealing with first line support
• a unit to co-ordinate with the IT department

You have noticed that there is no mention of "content" or "processes" in this list. These are items that can't be the responsibility of one unit alone.

More...

Many web projects end up in a conflict between the 'business units' and IT.

Why is that?

I found the inspiration for this article when I recently joined communexions (a new community for intranet managers). When setting up my profile I was asked:

Who’s right most often? HR, IT or Communications?

I answered this:

The departments that are correct are the ones that best work together. I have seen many bad examples.

- But at the end it are the people who have to do it, not the departments.

- The department that is most right, employs people that best try to understand others and actively try to work together.

- These departments have a culture where sharing (knowledge, ownership and responsibility) is actively promoted.

I tried to give a longer answer but there was no more room available. But this topic intrigues me already for a long time and I can't stop thinking about it.

Use Social Media to promote your brand or product on the web.

Are Social Media and Web 2.0 essential for your business?

... Or are they just hypes?

The article Before you start with Social Media mentions what being 'social' actually means. Just starting a blog because your competitor has one is just following the hype. And that will not help you.

For a long time many companies have done profitable business with traditional marketing techniques like advertisements, sales teams and account managers for maintaining the customer relationships. They didn't need a further or deeper relationship with the customer. This has gone well for many years and it might go well for the future too.

But now it is all different...

No doubt that social media has changed (and will continue) the world we live in right now. People don't want to be communicated at anymore. The power is with the people these days. People talk about your products and they reach more other people than the enterprise traditional marketing techniques did.

What is Social Media?

Is your company already social?

You might answer this question with "Yes of course, we have a company blog" or "We tweet all our product updates" or "Stupid question, we have 14943 friends on Facebook" or something similar.

That is very nice, but are you really socializing with your customers? Does it bring you anything?

Just starting a blog or forum does not necessarily mean being social. It could just be using new media for an old marketing approach.

Social Media, what is it?

To get a better answer to this question we better should rephrase the question to a more simple:

What is Social?  - and skip the 'media' word.

This shorter question will return different answers. Some keywords that could be included: interaction, listen, interest, others, relationship, connecting, sharing.

An answer could be:

Being social is listen to others and show interest, invest in an interactive relationship, connect to strangers and share information.

Scaling practices turn a relational database into a non-relational database.

A few days ago I read an article on the internet where the writer claimed to get a 4000% performance improvement when not sorting data on the MySQL database, but in the PHP code. As if there are only two types of databases: relational and non-relational?

He has a point. 
A long...long time ago, there were no relational databases. There were just databases, these are nowadays called hierarchical databases. Indeed these were a lot faster (2-3X), but you had to write a lot more code to get the data out and indeed sort the data in the application (you retrieved rows one by one and had to traverse manually through the table/recordset/ database). 

A simple query like e.g. 'select bla from table a, table b where a.id = b.id order by a.id' could easily costs a few pages or procedures (sections) to write in a 3GL language.

However, 4000% improvement can't be true, I would fire the query developer or the DBA on the spot who set up the database.