Until I started revisiting the tool recently.

I started by creating a secret group for a collection of individuals and colleagues I’m looking forward to brainstorming with in the next few months. I started to learn more about Groups. And more about the capabilities and potential it had for brands.

One use that jumped out at me for smaller organizations: Using Facebook Groups as an organizational intranet.

Let me explain.

Smaller organizations (non-profits even) don’t typically have the resources necessary to buy an off-the-shelf intranet product. And, they certainly don’t have the staff resources to manage a more complex intranet that would include programming, content creation and editing and community management.

No, these organizations are short on staff and budget in most cases.

Enter Facebook Groups.

Why does Facebook Groups make sense as an intranet option for these smaller organizations?

* Critical mass. With 550 million users and counting, chances are your staff is already using Facebook recreationally. So, there shouldn’t be many gaps or folks saying “I’m not on Facebook” anymore.

* Familiarity. Since so many people use the tool on a regular basis, you shouldn’t have to train folks on features and functionality. They’re already there.

* Just enough functionality. In most cases, these small organizations don’t need a full-feature intranet. They just need the basics. And, in some instances, they need a way for staff to collaborate and work together from geographically disperse environments.

So, how would staff use Facebook Groups as an intranet? I think there are a few key pieces of functionality that would prove extremely useful:

* Real-time collaboration. Don’t just chat one-on-one–chat in a group setting with all members of the group that are online at any given time using the Facebook chat feature. This one has serious implications. Potential uses: Virtual group meetings, scheduled 10-minute team brainstorming sessions and a great back-channel during group conference calls.

* Seamless photo sharing. Again, familiarity wins here. Chances are your employees have already uploaded pics to the largest photo sharing site on the Web. So, we know they know how to do it, which is usually half the battle with intranet-type products.

* Group write/edit docs on the fly. Sure, it’s no Google Docs–not by a long shot–but it does have basic document sharing and editing functionality. Again, it’s enough for most smaller organizations. This would be perfect for team projects. And, would free up email for more important notes and discussions–instead of sending documents back and forth with changes and edits.

What do you think? Is Facebook Groups a viable intranet option for smaller organizations? I’d love your two cents.

Originally published at ArikHanson.com

Among the findings are that the most common communication vehicles organizations use to engage employees and foster productivity are email and intranets, 83% and 75% respectively. In addition, half of employers are communicating through Facebook, IM, and Twitter.

"This year’s respondents reported slight increases in use of social media tools, and more of them say they have established internal and external policies for appropriate workplace use of social media," said Robin McCasland, past chair, IABC Research Foundation. "When managed effectively, social media can be a great addition to an existing employee engagement strategy. Employees and job candidates alike can read employer news and anecdotes that reinforce a strong, positive culture."

"Listening to employees is essential to employee engagement and retention. Yet surprisingly, 32 percent of survey respondents indicate that their organizations rarely or never conduct employee listening activities," said Bruce Spiegel, principal at Buck Consultants. "This is a huge opportunity for organizations to mitigate their risk of employee turnover and diminished performance."

The survey was given to about 900 communication professionals. It did find that most top executives do not participate in internal or external social media.

Ok, perhaps it is a bit of an exaggeration to assume that this is going to completely put web designers out of work. Website templates have been around for years. It’s just that the potential of Google Apps to infiltrate more and more offices may lead to more widespread use of Google Sites.

Google has just launched a new template gallery for Google Sites, and it is public. Anyone can contribute templates by simply following these steps:

1. Open up the site you want to add to the gallery (the site must be published and you must be an owner to submit the site).

2. Select ‘More actions’, ‘Manage site,’ ‘General’, and chose ‘Publish this site as a template.’

3. Choose a template name, a category, enter a description and click ‘Submit template.’

While anyone can browse the gallery, businesses using Google Apps each have a private area where employees can share site templates with coworkers. Site templates can be used not only to build business websites, but intranets and more.

"The rate that businesses are adopting Google Sites has surpassed our expectations, and templates will make Sites even more useful by dramatically reducing the time it takes to set up collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages," says Google Sites product manager Scott Johnston. "Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page layouts, navigation links, theming and more."

Given that anyone can contribute templates to the gallery, it stands to reason that it will grow quickly and greatly. One knock against site templates has always been that they don’t make for a unique design. These days the chances of having a truly unique design are getting slimmer and slimmer as the web becomes more flooded with content. However, the more templates that are available, the less chances you have of actually coming across different sites that use the same one. Given that this is a Google product, it’s almost certain that it will get many contributions.

Do you think designers should worry about Google Sites? Share your thoughts here.

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> Google Exec: Docs Can Supplant Office In One Year

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> Google Launches New Features for Sites

The study found that many of the most successful social media initiatives on company intranets began as underground, grassroots efforts by front-line employees. They were later adopted and sanctioned by higher-level executives.

"Underground adoption of off-the-shelf Web 2.0 tools might seem out of character in the enterprise, but users see the value of these tools and are more often than executives able to translate that value to an internal use," said usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. "Social software is a trend that cannot be ignored. It is bringing about fundamental change to the way people expect to communicate with one another. Companies cannot use social tools with their customers and not also allow their employees to utilize them."

The group finds that companies are turning a blind eye to social software tools until they are proven to be valuable. At that point, they are integrated more thoroughly. Many senior managers consider social media something for teens, but young workers who already have experience with social media expect to use such tools in the workplace.

Workers tend to use their personal identities within social communities on enterprise intranets, and there is typically not much of a need for the company to police them, according to Nielsen Norman Group. That said, just as brands can’t completely control their messages in social media, the same applies internally.

"Web 2.0 has transformed the way users communicate, share and collaborate online, and while this revolution has taken place outside the enterprise, it has a direct impact inside the firewall," said Nielsen Norman Group user-experience specialist Patty Caya. "As social tools begin to shape workers’ expectations for how they get things done, it raises expectations for how they collaborate and communicate and participate in content development. The social Web has turned consumers into producers and this will impact how they work."

The group estimates that it will take three to five years for most companies to successfully adopt and integrate social technologies into their intranets. It would be interesting to know just how commonly they are being adopted at this point.

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 fast food companies start making TV commercials in which a guy considers blogging about his sandwich for his “readers” and his wife chimes in with “Your mother,” you know the dirty little secret is out-most of those millions of blogs claimed by Blogger and Moveable Type are read mainly by their creators and immediate family, rarely updated, or quickly abandoned altogether.

The evidence is still mainly anecdotal (or perhaps early adopters are too embarassed to say so) but it appears that companies that rushed to offer a blog to any employee who wanted one are finding the abandonment rate inside corporations is just about as high as it is on consumer side.

“Most of the companies that launched employee blogs forgot the two most essential ingredients for success,” says Amy Vickers, head of Enterprise Solutions at Avenue A | Razorfish, the largest interactive marketing and technology services firm. “The first is that in order to attract readers the blogger needs to have something interesting or unique to say. Not everyone does. The second factor they overlooked is that even employees with an interesting perspective on the company usually feel constrained to write about it because of the internal culture. Thus, the people who have something really important to say are the ones who are most reluctant to say it.”

The company blog perspective is one of eight “Trends That Will Change Your Intranet” that are explored by Avenue A | Razorfish analysts in its new Corporate Intranets Best Practices Report – A User-Driven Web 2.0 Perspective.
The authors view video, RSS and wikis as the current hot spots driving intranet content and Avenue A | Razorfish has built an extraordinary intranet for itself using the same, free, open-source MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia is built.

You can register and download a copy of the Corporate Intranets report here.

My personal perspective is that while you can use public-facing blogs to build community (see my own Sequenza21 contemporary music site for an example), they are not the most efficient way for business organizations to interact with their customers or even for employees to interact with each other. Basically, blogs are the same old “we talk, you listen, maybe we let you comment” model left over from the print world. Blogs are interactive, but barely. (I’m sure the nice people at Six Apart, who are busily rolling out their enterprise platforms would disagree.)

Tightly focused, content-rich social networking sites like CarnivalConnections, an interactive community for dedicated cruise enthusiasts built by Avenue A | Razorfish for Carnival Cruise Lines has already proven to be enormously successful in building loyalty and repeat business. And, wikis are quietly making their way into the mainstream as a better alternative to traditional intranets. These are much more promising avenues for enterprises.

Blogs may not be literally dead; the more popular and independent public blogs are read by millions of people and they have become an important influence in politics, technology and retailing. But, most of the biggest blogs are now written by people who do it for a living or promotion for their own services. For large business organizations, the chances of producing or having an employee produce a credible blog that would attract enough of a following to make the effort worthwhile are pretty slim. Sure, Scoble did it for Microsoft but, of course, he was really marketing himself.

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Jerry Bowles has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, marketing consultant, corporate communications director and blogger. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek.

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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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Indeed, that was the first answer to the question “Why are you here?” that my co-presenter Dave Wallace and I asked our group in London last week. Although many different answers emerged from all the participants, that first answer really does capture the essence of what everyone was looking to gain from our one-day workshop “Enhancing your Intranet with New Technology: How to Make the Most of Social Media.”

Both workshops comprised groups of communicators who work for a wide range of different organization types. Big global corporations. Non profits. Public services. Different industries, from banking to pharmaceuticals to mainstream media; from energy to telecommunications. All with a common need and desire – to learn about social media, how it relates to traditional intranets and how to enable employees to more easily find, use and share information.

Dave and I decided the approach we’d take for the workshops would be one of explaining the traditional and the new and looking at how the two can gel, specifically from the communication point of view. So Dave led the first segment – creating an effective intranet and getting the fundamentals right – while I did the second: how to make the most of social media.

In this way, we set the foundational scene concerning intranets and how they are currently deployed in many organizations, and then examined how social media can be part of an intranet strategy that would get close to the first answer to the question we asked at the start of the workshops.

In the London workshop, our starting point in asking everyone to describe one thing about their own intranet they liked and disliked produced some great answers. None really surprising:

This roughly translates into issues that are all too common in many organizations:

• The intranet is big, unmanageable and out of date
• Disconnect between content and what employees are looking for
• Technology driving the agenda
• Lack of appreciation about how the intranet fits as a strategic tool
• The intranet acts as a mirror for organizations often reflecting the political structure rather than a useful structure

When we began the larger segment on social media, it was pleasing to note that everyone had a good general awareness of blogs and podcasting. Few of them read blogs, though, and only two wrote one (personal). Few understood what RSS can do. Some listen to podcasts, although none from a business point of view (which reflects the severe lack of worthwhile business podcasting in the UK in particular).

It was also good to not hear the control word (as in “how do we control?”), unlike Niall Cook’s experience in February when he presented on social media to a group of intranet (IT) managers.

The really interesting part began when we moved along from the broad presentation and definitions of blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS and so forth, and into deeper discussion about how such tools can work inside organizations as part of a communication strategy where the intranet is the foundation.

We asked: What if you could

• Provide employees with the means to self-connect information
• Enable employees to apply conversational descriptions to information
• Connect formal taxonomies with informal folksonomies
• Give the organization the means to map trends and more effectively plan infrastructure development, based largely on employee-driven needs

This was a terrific way to introduce the concept of tagging. Given that public examples of what companies generally are doing internally in this area are so few and far between, we illustrated the concept by going online to look at del.icio.us and Digg as different but related examples of how people organize things that interest them, bookmarking and sharing that information in unstructured and informal ways. We looked at Tech Memeorandum as an example of how computers can do this rather than people.

You could see the light bulbs going on as everyone began to see how such a concept could address that first answer to our first question.

(Now there are some tremendous examples where you can see precisely what some companies are doing with social media, courtesy of Shel Holtz last week – McDonalds, Disney ABC Cable Networks Group and Siemens.)

It also set the scene nicely for a practical exercise we asked the group to do as teams, about a fictional organization who wants to redesign its intranet and invest in a new technology platform. The group’s task was to produce an outline work plan for such a redesign and how social media can be part of the plan.

In their team presentations, we saw some great thinking and ideas illustrating that the group clearly understand the facts, ideas and concepts addressed and discussed throughout the day that connect intranets and social media in order to address communication needs.

If our two workshops are any indicator, then the future is bright indeed.

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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.

Intranets, on the other hand, haven’t progressed an inch since, oh, say 2001. While the web has witnessed the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true web-based applications (like Writely and AjaxWrite), the intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago.

I know because intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see a lot of intranets, and have since…well, since before the word “intranet” was adopted. I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. And although there are plenty of fine features and functionality, there is little to suggest intranet teams are adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” web.

Sure, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us (although I have heard of two companies taking initial steps in this direction), audience ranking (along the lines of Digg and Memeorandum, social networks ( like LinkedIn, file sharing services like Flickr and YouTube or AJAXish tools like PageFlakes (which has become my default home page).

All of these utilities make perfect sense forintranets, and most of them would be simple to implement. Simple, in any case, compared to, say, getting an SAP portal up and running. Social tagging would let employees find intranet content based on bookmarks their colleagues have asigned. One cmpany, for instance, calls its mailroom “Document Delivery Services;” there is no reference to “mailroom” anywhere on the intranet. If one employee found the DDS site and tagged it “mailroom,” other employees would be able to find it by searching the bookmark site for the word that makes the most sense to them.

Digg-like ranking would let employees prioritize company news and information based on what is most important to them. (The company could continue to push news it believes is so important that every employee should see it.) Social networks that emulate the likes of LinkedIn would let employees in large organizations make contact with others who can help with a project or assignment through trusted intermediaries. And personzlied web start pages like PageFlakes and ProtoPage do exactly what web portals do (at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time it takes companies to implement portals like the ones sold by Plumtree and Oracle.

Any of these kinds of services would make intranets infinitely more valuable, compelling, and usable for employees. So why aren’t intranet teams making the slightest move to keep up with developments on the web? There are several factors at play:

• IT departments have invested too much time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and are in no hurry to move in a different direction.
• Corporate IT staffs-some of them, anyway-are utterly clueless about what’s happening on the web. They don’t know online AJAX from the kitchen cleanser.
• Communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken?
• Corporate communicators-many of them-are utterly cluelessa bout what’s happening on the web. They wouldn’t know what Digg was even if they’d been dug.
• Too much of an investment has been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for
• The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now?

Most companies are struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are antithetical to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content.

There are, I’m sure, other obstacles standing in the way of intranet evolution. There are also, I’m sure, some intranets somewhere that have undertaken efforts to adopt some of these tools. I haven’t seen them; have you? Intranet teams should start taking a hard look at their stagnant intranets and how they can be improved-to the benefit of the organization through enhanced productivity-using the many elements that make up the read-write web.

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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.

Steve asks if your marketing or PR program is Big-Bang-ready. I’m wondering more about intranets.

I have maintained for years that anything that succeeds on the web ultimately finds its way onto intranets. Companies rejected the idea of instant messaging on intranets, for example, dismissing the technology as a way for idle teens to waste time in mindless chatter. Today, more than half the companies in the US employ instant messaging for work-related purposes on their intranets.

The uptake in online video has been staggering. A number of factors have driven it, including

• Adoption of high-speed access passing the tipping point
• Easy-to-use editing software leading to thousands of consumer-created videos available online
• Services like Atom Films, Our Media, You Tube, Veoh, Google Video, and the iTunes music store providing access to videos

All of these changes don’t hold a candle to the changes about to surge through the population in terms of viewing habits. Even one of TiVo’s executives was quoted saying that TiVo is an interim step. Eventually, through whatever mechanisms emerge, consumers will download the shows they want to watch without waiting for the show’s time slow to roll around. Time-shifting will be the norm (with obvious exceptions for news and sports).

As consumers (who, by the way, also happen to be employees) come to consume online video as a matter of routine, intranets will seem quaint and old-fashioned unless the ability to download video content works somewhat the same. Town hall meetings, executive speeches, video summaries of major company events, chronicles of investor road shows, loops of new television commercials…it’s all content that employees will use if it’s available. Grabbing the latest manager meeting from the intranet should be no different than grabbing the latest episode of “Lost” from the Net.

This is different than the low-quality streams available now on some intranets. We’re talking about subscribable, downloadable content that can be transported from the computer hard drive to a video iPod, a Sony PSP, or any of the other dozen or so handheld devices out there that play video.

Sadly, it’ll take a long time for companies to embrace the idea no matter how much sense it makes. I can hear the dismissals now: “We don’t have bandwidth for that.” “We’re not in the business of providing entertainment for our employees.” “They can just read about it.”

If you work with an intranet, start exploring the potential for quality video sooner rather than later. Many of your employees probably already have devices that will play the videos, and the adoption rate is going to soar. (Apple sold 14 million iPods in the last three months of 2005 alone.)

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.