The latest, a case study detailing the efforts by financial services company Northwestern Mutual to take advantage of social media on its intranet, is particularly important because the company under the microscope isn’t high-tech. In fact, insurance companies are traditionally among the most conservative organizations when it comes to embracing new media.

But Norwestern Mutual jumped into social media with both feet, first invetigating the potential in 2005 and then deploying both employee blogs and RSS.

The company’s blogging effort was designed to achieve three specific goals:

• Efficient and accurate communication from management to employees
• A feedback loop from employees to management.
• Inter-employee communication.

The initiative was pushed by Northwestern Mutual’s Assistant Director of Corporate Relations, Andrea Austin, and taken up by the cross-functional Public Affairs Committee. Several concerns needed to be overcome, though, including fears that internal blogging would sap employee productivity (where have we heard that one before?), issues raised by Human Resources, and security concerns, among others.

Once these were addressed, the blogging platform—Mutualblog—was rolled out. It became evident quickly, though, that RSS would be required to make blogging practical. NewsGator provided RSS functionality for the company.

While the bloging initiative was designed to improve the culture of openness and honesty, the biggest benefits were seen in project and team management. About 70% of the active blogs at Northwestern Mutual focus on project management.

Nobody doubts that the blogging and RSS effort has produced business value but, not surprisingly, it isn’t easy to measure. Still, there is strong evidence that communication has improved and team and individual productivity have increased. Contrary to the concerns expressed by some that employee blogging will drain productivity, Northwestern Mutual’s experiment has shown that it helps address information overload. According to the case study:

Blogging has provided a partial solution to the (information overload) problem, allowing employees —- especially the geographically distributed field force —- to engage new content at their leisure, cutting down on conference calls, meetings, and email overload. The firm has even higher hopes for the recently launched RSS solution, which it expects to help cut down information overload as opt-in emails, newsletters, and corporate portal content transition into the RSS channel.

Next up for Northwestern mutual are efforts to drive greater employee adoption of blogs, bringing wikis and podcasting into the mix, and applying the social media efforts that have worked behind the firewall onto the World Wide Web for external communciation purposes.

The full study goes into considerable detail on Northwestern Mutual’s social media efforts. It costs $279, which is pretty damn cheap for any communicator looking for evidence to convince the powers that be that the naysayers are wrong and, when executed strategically, social media on the intranet produces real bottom-line business value.

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Most intranet search delivers lamentably poor results. Time and time again, I hear staff plead: “Why can’t we just get Google?” But buying Google-or any other search engine for that matter-will not solve the problem.

There are three reasons why Google works so well, and two of them have absolutely nothing to do with technology. Certainly, Google is a great technology. It is well designed, fast, robust.

The next time you search with Google, pause for a moment and observe the first 10 results. No matter what you have searched for you can be pretty much guaranteed that every one of those first 10 results wanted to get found.

Not alone did they want to get found, they worked hard to get found. They created web content in a way that maximizes its chances of getting into the first page of search results. Most intranet content doesn’t want to get found.

I talked to a person a while ago who was back from a conference. In getting permission to go to the conference, he was told that he would have to do a report on the conference and publish it on the intranet. I saw what he was about to publish and it wasn’t very good.

The author readily admitted it wasn’t very good. In fact, he didn’t want it to be good because if it was good then he’d be getting lots of emails with extra questions and that would be a waste of his time, in his opinion. This person had no incentive to share, no incentive to write quality content, no incentive to get found.

If you want to find a bad website, just look for one that has poor linking. If you examine a particular piece of content and see very few links by the author to other pieces of relevant content, that says a lot. If you see lots of PDFs and PowerPoints and other files, that says a lot too.

What it says is that the intranet is being treated as a document management system. It is a place where you store content; a data warehouse. Authors don’t have time to think about linking content to other relevant content.

For example, let’s say you’re in the section where you book a taxi. It would be useful to link to the policy relating to booking taxis. If you have content on 2006 annual sales for Product X, then it would be useful to link to 2005 annual sales for Product X.

Linking is a key way modern search engines use to understand what content is important and what content is not important. Basically, the more content gets linked to the more important it is.

Too many intranets are being filled with garbage-poor quality, badly written, badly structured, second-hand content. This content is “put up” by an army of low-skilled put-it-uppers. It doesn’t matter what sort of fancy search technology you have-it’s garbage in, garbage out.

Until organizations deal with their content professionally, they will get the search results-and the intranets-that they deserve.

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The Global Intranet Strategies Survey was conducted in June and July 2006 by NetStrategyJMC, and is well worth reading. Participants included 101 organizations headquartered in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific, and ranging in size from under 5,000 to over 100,000 employees.

Some of the key findings of the survey include:

The intranet has entered maturity as a primary information tool. However, its value as a productivity and collaboration tool is not yet fully established, and its potential for creating business value is far from being understood.

Senior management perception of the intranet is out of sync with reality on the ground. It is largely unaware of the usefulness of the intranet for employees for their work.

In general, intranets lack sufficient funding and resources, although almost half of the respondents say they expect their 2007 and 2008 budgets to increase.

There is a trend towards centralization and more HQ control of budgets.

Decision-making is an issue for most organizations. It is slow and suffers from political issues.

The primary strategy drivers for the intranet are “building a common culture”, and facilitating knowledge sharing, collaboration and teamwork.

A primary obstacle for the intranet achieving its full potential is that is it too communication-oriented.

Intranet evaluation is irregular and inconsistent.

Only 1 out of 4 organizations is obliged to demonstrate return on investment to justify new or current intranet investments.

Intranets have tremendous potential. They can make staff more productive. They can significantly reduce costs. They can help staff who are geographically dispersed collaborate effectively.

A great many intranets are not achieving their potential because, at a very basic level, they are not being managed. Nobody is really in charge and there are no proper business metrics in place to measure success.

This survey states that senior management is “out of sync” and “unaware of the usefulness of the intranet for employees for their work.” The reason senior management is out of sync is pretty obvious:

The intranet’s potential for creating business value is far from being understood.

Intranet evaluation is irregular and inconsistent.

Only 1 out of 4 organizations is obliged to demonstrate return on investment to justify new or current intranet investments.

The primary strategy drivers for the intranet are “building a common culture”, and facilitating knowledge sharing, collaboration and teamwork.

For too long, intranets have put forward fluffy business cases that espouse knowledge sharing and communication. Until intranets prove that they can increase productivity and reduces costs, they won’t get respect from senior management.

The intranet has the potential to play an active role in making the daily work of staff more efficient. It can help people find experts. It can provide crucial information that helps make a sale, or solve a problem for a customer. It can help staff book training, meeting rooms, flights, trains, hotels.

Intranets can be-and in many cases are-business critical. But to be seen as business critical by senior management, they must show clearly how they are increasing productivity and reducing costs.

If you’d like a copy of the 2006 Global Intranet Strategies Survey, please contact Jane McConnell. mailto:jane@netjmc.com

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When staff in a large organization were asked how they would like to see their intranet organized, they gave interesting replies. They preferred to see their own section or department structured from an organization-centric point of view. So, if they worked in HR, they wanted the HR section organized based on the HR organizational chart structure.

However, the staff who worked for HR did not want the other sections of the intranet organized from an organization-centric point of view. They much preferred that these other sections be task-based.

When staff went to these other sections they had tasks in mind (book a meeting room, find a logo, etc.). They didn’t want to have to understand how that particular part of the organization was organized. They just wanted to complete a task as quickly as possible.

Here lies a key challenge of intranet management. There are many benefits from a traditional organizational perspective of having an organization-centric intranet. For starters, having a department represented in an intranet structure can be seen as a sign of status and importance. If a department has lots of pages and is linked from the intranet homepage, that is an indication of how important the department is to the organization.

Someone responsible for a departmental intranet can clearly and easily show their boss the results of what they have been working at. There are lots of pages with the department’s name on it. It’s easy to show you’ve been busy working hard. It’s also easy to tick a box and say, yes, our department is represented on the intranet. We have met our objectives.

None of the above is good management. None of the above will help your intranet succeed. In fact, organization-centric intranets are a recipe for failure. The reason why is quite simple.

Let’s say you have an organization of 1,000 people, and 50 of them work in Human Resources (HR). An organization-centric intranet will work great for those 50 people, but it will not work very well for the 950 people who need to book training, find job vacancies, and read up on pension options. I have seen organization-centric intranets where you have to click six levels down before you even see the word “training”.

A task-centric intranet will work for everyone who comes to the intranet to complete tasks. It will prove challenging, though, to those who are responsible for creating the content and applications that are needed to complete these tasks.

An organizational structure for people and departments is essential to the success of the organization. But it can take on a life of its own, constantly trying to prove its own importance. The way you effectively organize the people in a department is not the same way you organize the content that these people create.

We rarely go to HR because we want to know how that department is organized, who works for who, etc. In fact, most staff have absolutely zero interest in HR. They just want to go on a good training course, find out about the latest internal job vacancies.

Staff don’t really care about-nor have any interest in-who is responsible for managing these common tasks. Nor should they need to.

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Much has been made of knowledge management over the years. We’re all living in the knowledge society and economy and we’re all knowledge workers. But what is the foundation-the corner stone-of knowledge management?

There are two basic types of knowledge. Formal knowledge is found in books, reports and videos (this is what we call content). Informal knowledge resides in the head of the knowledge worker.

In a typical organization, it is often the informal knowledge that is the most valuable. It makes the sale, delivers the service, solves the support call, builds the brand. You just need to get to talk to the right person, quickly.

In the past, most organizations had pretty good solutions for the transfer of informal knowledge. The basic system was called apprenticeship, but there were many other structures put in place to make sure you got to talk to the right person.

Times have changed. The efficient transfer of informal knowledge now has to meet the following challenges: 1. The apprenticeship model has severely declined, if not become extinct in many organizations 2. The person you need to talk to is quite possibly not in the same physical place as you are. (Historically, most of the people you needed were within walking distance.) 3. The person you need to talk to left last week. Who else really knows about this stuff? 4. Skills and knowledge keeps changing. The best person for this job only became the ‘best person’ four months ago. Outside her small team, nobody else knows that she’s so good. 5. Managers and other senior knowledge workers used to have support staff to help them find who they needed. Not anymore.

There is nothing more important for a knowledge organization than to quickly and efficiently connect the right people. It’s the foundation-the corner stone-of knowledge management. It is the foundation for success of the company of today-let alone the company of tomorrow. So, why do so many organizations do such a bloody awful job of it?

Because management is living in the past. It thinks the old networks and structures are sufficient to allow for the efficient flow of informal knowledge. That is simply not the case. And senior managers are often blind to the growing problem because for them it is not a problem.

I heard one CEO comment that he had no problem finding other people. That’s because his search engine was his secretary.

Time and time again, I have seen organizations invest heavily in intranet technologies, while almost totally ignoring the vital processes required to make the intranet a success. Basic staff directories are woefully maintained. Experts have no incentive to enter their details into ‘expert databases’.

To efficiently allow one knowledge worker find another, quality content is now required. In a modern organization, a skill or piece of knowledge that is not formally recorded is very difficult to communicate.

At the most basic level connecting two people means having an email address or telephone number. And if the telephone number is wrong …

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Intranet and portal steering committees face a multitude of challenges when it comes to making decisions about online content. First of all, they must determine which content to provide. Then, they need to develop a linking strategy and establish taxonomy-system of categorization. The Cost and Business Matrix can help committees prioritize, while at the same time serving as a guide for assessing and optimizing links from home and sub-home pages to content across their Intranet/portals. This can be especially valuable for organizations standardizing their corporate-wide intranets or redesigning or establishing new Intranet/portals.

It can be a costly mistake-both in terms of expense and lost business efficiency-for steering committees to automatically migrate existing content to new Intranets/portals. Rather, a committee should analyze the total cost of content versus the delivered business value prior to online publication.

One proven approach to determining the real value of online content is to use our Cost and Business Assessment Matrix. This matrix helps committee members determine the:

• Total cost, including fees for initial development, whether that means generating totally new content or adapting existing offline resources to conform to online models. Additionally, the committee needs to calculate costs related to ongoing content maintenance, which might include updating and, if applicable, translation services.
• Business value. The important factors in determining real business value are “Reuse” (frequency of access in a given period of time) and “Business Efficiency Increase” (the real value to employees in helping them increase efficiency).

As you can see below, it is not necessary to calculate the exact costs in dollars/euros but simply to estimate the appropriate values, which can be expressed as low, medium or high. When steering committee members come to consensus about the appropriate values for these terms they are, in effect, imbuing them with those quantitative values. This approach results in a quantitative measure that allows a committee to prioritize content categories.

Table 1: Simplified Cost and Business Assessment Matrix

Once you agree upon the meaning of qualitative terms like “low”, “medium” and “high”, you can give the terms numerical values ranging from 1 to 3, then add the values of individual cost factors and compare the result to the result of the multiplication of the Reuse Factor and the Business Efficiency Increase. The steering committee should look very closely at content categories with high Reuse Factors. Those are the content categories that can deliver the highest business value, even when their individual increases of business efficiency are medium or even low.

Along with helping you decide which content to publish, this matrix helps you determine whether or not content categories or specific content pieces should be directly linked from the home page (see, PracticeByte “Common Mistakes – Home Page Design“). For example, the steering committee should strongly consider linking highly reusable content directly from the home page. This might include categories such as company templates and forms or specific content pieces such as employee directories. The steering committee can then apply the matrix to sub-home pages. This process can be especially valuable to companies that use link categories on home pages, because it helps them to determine order within link categories; they are able to place highly accessed or strong business-related links at the beginning of category links.

The matrix allows steering committees to drill down still further, by applying the assessment to such content types as forms for various departments, business units or regions. And companies that deploy their Intranets/portals in multiple languages can add “translation cost” as an additional criterion, giving them an accurate assessment of maintenance costs and related translation costs balanced against the Reuse Factor and Business Efficiency Increase. Based on the results of the assessment, companies may decide only to translate some selected content. (For more information, see PracticeByte “Global Multilingual Intranet – You Don’t Need to Translate Everything, But Stay Consistent.”)

Effective use of a Business and Cost Matrix can provide clear competitive advantage as companies develop Intranet/portal strategy; it allows you to make the best use of your content development funds to create real increases in business efficiency.

Learn how we assisted leading companies in building effective Intranets and Employee Portals.

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Nicolas Brki is the founder of www.effinfo.com, a European Web-Advisory research company. Before, Nicolas was a senior advisor at Giga (now Forrester). Nicolas helped global companies to increase the effectiveness of their Web sites, Intranets and enterprise portals.

Prior GigaGroup, Nicolas was the technical director of a French consultancy focusing on Internet technology solutions and a consultant at Accenture’s Centre for Strategic Technology.

I got an email about it yesterday and my first thought was: yet another expensive report about intranets with the same old late-90s view about them and the org-chart approach on how to use them.

But then I read the synopsis (PDF). And then I looked at who the authors are. And I concluded: this one looks very different.

This is the first report of its type I’ve seen which includes a significant focus on social media such as blogs and delivery mechansims like RSS:

[] Helping you understand new technology such as RSS, wikis, blogs and social computing and whether you should include them on your organization’s intranet.

What you’ll take away:

* Expert advice on whether you should integrate new technology into your intranet, and if so, how to go about it.

* A weblog strategy used by a major consulting firm that interlinks five different types of blogs in order to disseminate employee, client and sales lead information much faster.

* Extensive lists of further resources – websites where you can download RSS, urls for best-practice CEO blogs or download and employee blogging guidelines that you can adapt for your own company.

* Case studies on implementing RSS at Siemens, and social bookmarking and wikis at IBM.

I know two of the nine authors – Euan Semple and Dave Wallace – both of whom I’ve worked with before in presenting workshops that address internal communication and social media. While I haven’t read the report itself, if Euan and Dave are involved with it then that elevates its credibility to a high level in my eyes.

The report costs 255/$395/370. Is it pricey? Depends on how you look at it. If it gives you the knowledge that helps you make some smart decisions on what you can do with your intranet – the long list of blue-chip companies as case studies is impressive, too – then it would be a worthwhile investment.

(Disclosure: I have a relationship with Melcrum through presenting workshops for them. That relationship has zero influence on what I say in this post.)

Related posts:

• Social media drives greater employee engagement
• A promising future for intranets and social media

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

The first one in this series was in Manchester last week.

That workshop was very interesting indeed. I’m expecting the one on Thursday to be equally so. A post likely on both next week.

Speaking of events, Blogging 4 Business took place in London yesterday. I was due to participate as a presenter but, early last week, I had to make the uncomfortable decision to withdraw (conflicting commitments, couldn’t be in two places at once: a real collision) and let co-organizer Matthew Yeomans know. From reading the conference blog and seeing the Flickr pics, it looks like it was a pretty good event.

Two great news items to leave you with:

Amazon in the US has started a podcast. Amazon Wire is a podcast about books, music, movies, and those who create them. The first edition has just come out. (Via Todd Cochrane.)

Three UK travel agents have started blogs and one of them is also podcasting. Via Niall Cook: “Lastminute, Thomson and Cheapflights are all making pre-emptive strikes in the battle against bloggers by establishing their own staff-written blogs and encouraging customer feedback.” Thomson is the one with the podcasts, with 10 travel guides (think of Virgin Atlantic’s guides).

Light blogging until the weekend.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

You can talk about the likes of Sun, Microsoft, and IBM all day long, but the reaction from execs will be the same: “We’re not a high-tech organization.” But holding up McDonald’s-a fast-food company-as an example of corporations turning to internal blogging as a communication channel has the potential to make some executives sit up and take notice.

I noted Steve Crescenzo’s post on McDonald’s blogging earlier this week, but now we get a detailed report from ClickZ Networks, reporting at New York’s BlogOn conference where Steve Wilson, the burger company’s senior director of web communications, addressed the crowd:

“If your task is to move the culture of a company, you’re not going to move it by the flip of a switch,” Wilson said. “You have to show that an open dialogue can occur, and create an ongoing dialogue to move from point A to point B.”

The company has no plans yet for external blogs, Wilson said, but went into considerable detail about the planning and execution of internal blogs, which are written by executives and departments. It’ll be interesting to see, now that a major, non-high-tech mainstream corporation has launched intranet blogs-pilot program though it may be-how many others will be willing to give it a shot.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

The Web is a network and the most important law of networking is to be connected. A large website is not necessarily a strength, and may in fact be a weakness, because people waste time there.

The number of links (connections) you have is nearly always a positive thing. This applies to both internal links and links to your website from third-party websites. (The only type of links you should avoid are links out of your website. Only link out where you have a compelling reason.)

Getting linked from third-party websites is crucial to success. The more links you are getting the more credible you become. (Links from quality websites enhance credibility far more than links from low quality websites.)

If you have multiple websites then each website has to build up its own set of links. Links to website A are not shared by websites B and C. Links to website C are not shared by websites A and B.

Multiple websites weaken the potential power of the overall organization on the Web. Each new website dissipates that power, as the Web sees a range of websites, each with a relatively small set of links. If the organization behaved as a single website (as, for example, Microsoft and Apple generally do), then all incoming links would converge under a single website address, thus making the organization more powerful, visible and credible.

Someone once said that “you get the intranet you deserve.” Certainly, the intranet says a lot about the organization. Many organizations have multiple intranets with little or no consistency of design or links between these disparate websites. This says that the organization is not a very cohesive entity, that it is in fact a loose collection of disparate entities.

Organizations that are more cohesive and coherent tend to be more effective in the long term. Organizations that encourage collaboration tend to be better able to respond and adapt to constant change. Collaboration depends much more on culture than on technology. If the organization has multiple websites with multiple different designs, it may reflect a culture that doesn’t want to collaborate. It may also, however, reflect poor management. I know of one organization that went from 600 intranets to a single intranet, and received a 90 percent staff satisfaction rating as a result.

A single website architecture is more cost effective and easier to manage. A lot of money is spent on creating new designs and re-doing old ones. This money could be better invested in creating quality content, and in ensuring that the website is well maintained. A website with a single architecture is easier to measure, and this is an important point. Many websites have primitive and unreliable metrics, and this makes management all the more difficult.

There are times when you will need to create distinctively different websites. If your organization does radically different things, then there is less benefit in having a consistent design and architecture. However, most organizations would benefit from a single website approach.

For your web content management solution, contact Gerry McGovern http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

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