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Part webinar, part conference call, part podcast, the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s Intranets Live invited Ragan Communications CEO Mark Ragan to join in this week as one of four guests, along with SAS Internal Communications Manager Becky Graebe, Socialcast CEO Tim Young and IKEA Intranet Manager Linda Tinnert.

Graebe and Tinnert showed off their company intranets, and Young spent some time taking the webinar’s nearly 160 participants for a spin through Socialcast’s Facebook-like interface.

The 90-minute webinar offered a ton of great information about intranets and the future of internal communication, but for the sake of brevity (more on that later), here are seven useful tips for communicators:

1. Bring what’s outside in. A company’s intranet “sometimes resembles a dumpster,” Ragan said, with long articles, boring columns and hard-to-find information. Intranets should look more like the most appealing parts of the Internet, he argued. As Young demonstrated SocialCast, Intranets Live host Paul Levy remarked that it looked a lot like Facebook. Young said that was intentional, so it would be easier for employees to use without a huge learning curve. “We wanted to reduce that starting friction,” he said.

2. Shorten it. Even the hottest mode of communication—right now, video—can get stale when it’s too long or too boring. “Yes, video is extremely hot,” Ragan said, “but it’s going to be cold very fast if you’re doing five-minute video segments on ‘the only constant being change.’”

3. Make things easier to find. One of Intranet Benchmarking Forum founder Paul Miller’s predictions for 2011 was that accurate and useful searches would continue to be frustrating for intranet managers. Tinnert agreed that search has been the No. 1 roadblock for her at IKEA. Graebe said one thing SAS does to make recent information easier to find is that they make an archive of five days of the intranet home page available to employees so they can jump straight back to items from a few days earlier. Employees also have the option to search location-specific news or recent news rather than searching across the entire intranet.

4. Consider the effects of main-page news. Some companies whose intranets get high benchmarking scores have no news on their main intranet pages at all, said Miller. That’s not a necessity, but companies with lots of task-based material and applications test well, Miller said. “I think most intranets are too news-heavy,” he said. SAS gives employees the option of hiding news items on their intranet’s homepage, Graebe said, and it has an internal newsstand where employees can subscribe to different types of news. IKEA has mostly sales and performance figures on its intranet homepage, Tinnert said.

5. Break the fear barrier. Fewer than two-thirds of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s members allow comments, Miller said. Why don’t the others? “It’s usually around fear,” he said. Miller said everything on intranets should be open for comment and that the worries about negative comments will melt away over time.

6. Don’t rewrite the rule book. Socialcast’s functionality is very similar to Facebook’s, again, so that people familiar with the world’s largest social networking site can ease into it. But it gains huge value through its security options­—it could be deployed with Sharecast itself, in an internal cloud of information or behind a firewall, Young said—and how it can be integrated into intranet pages. Young displayed an example of how Socialcast conversations could be embedded via a widget on intranet pages—in this case one about 401(k) policy.

7. Broaden your horizons. Though 2010 was a year in which people really fixated on the Twitter-like Yammer tool and on Sharepoint, Miller said, 2011 will probably see more intranet managers branching out into other technologies. Likewise, the language of internal communication is likely to change. “We’ll stop talking about social media and enterprise 2.0 and start talking about collaboration,” he said.

Source: www.ragan.com