Wake a marketer in the middle of the night, and it’s likely he’ll scream: “Mobile!”
Now that same word is surfacing in the dreams of employee communicators and intranet managers everywhere.
Of the 10 winners of the 2010 Nielsen Norman award, six had mobile features on their intranets, said Amy Schade, co-author of the Nielsen Norman Group’s 2011 Design Annual, during the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s monthly Intranets Live program.
But what should a mobile feature do?
“That’s still being hashed out,” Schade said. “The more specific the function of a mobile tool, the more successful it tends to be.”
Paul Miller, CEO of the London-based Intranet Benchmarking Forum, echoed Schade’s remarks during the 90-minute, Web-based show.
Miller expects the mobile intranet of the future to perform many—if not all—of the functions of the desktop version.
“I don’t want some cut-down version of the site,” Miller said.
Why all the excitement over mobile? A quick glance at the tablet computer market tells why:
Nearly 10 million tablets were sold in the last three months of 2010 alone. That’s a 120 percent increase over the same period last year. Analysts expect sales to grow another four-fold as tablet fever continues.
It’s only a short jump from these sales statistics to an overriding conclusion in the corporate communications world: If employees are staring into smartphones and tablets on the personal side of their life, it won’t be long before they demand that employee communications get in on the act.
The Intranets Live program also featured its usual panel of intranet managers and experts. In addition to mobile, the panel highlighted five other trends, tips and essentials for great intranets:
1. Usability is key.
People on intranets are in a hurry, said Marc Wright, chairman of Simplygroup and guest co-host. The more extraneous stuff you have on your intranet getting in their way, the less they’re going to really use it.
Kevin Cody, owner of SmallWorlders collaboration, the company that designed Heineken’s BrandPortal, its intranet for marketers, said a recent survey found people aren’t that interested in having a dozen social media tools in their faces.
“They just wanted to be able to get to their assets as quickly as possible,” he said.
2. Appearances do matter.
Jennifer Vickery, senior digital content strategist at IBM, showed off her company’s new intranet as a work in progress, two days after its beta launch. One thing she was most excited about? She got to work with art designers on it. IBF CEO and founder Paul Miller said that’s worthwhile. “People want to look at things that are pleasant to look at. It shouldn’t be all about functionality,” he said.
As Cody took the hosts through the Heineken BrandPortal, many made comments about how slick it looked—almost like an external marketing website. Each section, for instance, was branded for its own specific campaign.
“Marketing people tend to be very sensitive to the look and feel,” Cody said. Miller said the site is bold and might make other Heineken employees jealous they don’t get something so pretty.
A recent survey found people aren’t that interested in having a dozen social media tools in their faces. “They just wanted to be able to get to their assets as quickly as possible,” he said.
3. Give employees avenues to share knowledge.
Another common trait among Nielsen Norman winners, said Schade, is what she called knowledge sharing, which can include comments on blog posts or wiki-like areas where employees can post resources.
Employees now expect to be involved in those sorts of conversations, Schade said, where they probably didn’t five years ago. IBM’s revamped intranet had one example of what Schade said was a good knowledge-sharing feature, a Quora-like question and answer widget on the homepage. Any IBM employee may ask a question, and anyone who feels qualified to answer may do so, said Vickery.
4. Enable employees to use tags.
Search remains problematic for intranets everywhere, including at IBM. However, Vickery said one way the company has made searching its intranet better is by giving employees the ability to tag articles by topic. Any employee may tag an article, which could help others who may be looking for the same thing but aren’t using the search terms originally included.
5. Your intranet shouldn’t be like someone else’s.
When Heineken came to SmallWorlders for its marketing intranet site, the company initially asked for the site to look just like that of Ogilvy, another SmallWorlders client, Cody said. But that site wouldn’t really work for Heineken, Cody said, because, for one thing, it was already somewhat out of date. As a joke, SmallWorlders created a version of the Ogilvy site but simply changed the color from red to green for Heineken. What the company really did for the Heineken marketing intranet, however, was build it from the ground up, getting approval as it went along, Cody said, resulting in the bold and award-winning site the Dutch brewer has now.
Source: Ragan.com
