While some social applications such as blogs and collaboration tools have been adopted behind the firewall in around half the organisations surveyed by IBF last year, social bookmarking or tagging would not appear to have found as much favour: just one in ten organisations said they were already using social booking on their intranets. This is puzzling because the potential applications for social bookmarking would appear to be broad and barriers to entry would appear to be low with a number of free and web-based solutions available. In addition, major social software suite vendors Jive and IBM already include bookmarking applications while Microsoft has added it in SharePoint 2010.

In 'The Art of Tagging' briefing paper, just published on the IBF member extranet we look at the potential for social bookmarking behind the firewall including how so-called folksonomies compare with more traditional, structured information architecture such as an enterprise taxonomy. As well as comparing these tools we look at whether the two contrasting approaches to knowledge management are mutually exclusive or whether there are opportunities for the two to work together. We also investigate whether some other applications can benefit from integration with social bookmarking including search, content management and employee directories.

In one example we look at the role social bookmarking can play in enhancing the employee directory:

The paper makes reference to several case studies and includes practical implementation tips for intranet managers considering social bookmarking in their organisation.

Are you using social bookmarking in your intranet landscape? What has been the impact in your organisation?

This is a guest post from IBF Research Associate, Andrew Marr. IBF Members can download the full briefing paper, as well as accessing our extensive research archive, on the Member extranet. You can find out more about IBF's Research Programme and download free reports on our website.

At IBF we run lots of online meetings throughout the year, and we do detailed benchmarking of individual member intranets, we share new research topics, but the face to face meetings are still special.  There’s a core group of members who have been part of the IBF community for some time, and there are always new members to welcome, this time is was IKEA who were attending their first IBF member meeting.

In a cold but sunny London we welcomed members to the sixth and penultimate IBF Member Meeting of 2009. We had the chance to browse the various zones of the meeting prior to the welcome.  In the Best Practice area we had screen shots from members demonstrating best practice in this meeting’s theme – ‘Metrics and Performance’.

Our Homepage Gallery gave members an insight into the look and feel of other intranets across the IBF membership, whilst the Intranets Live episodes  (IBF’s online monthly media programme) played in the room over breakfast. 

They also got to see the full intranet benchmarking league tables which always provokes some competitive conversations!

This meeting's theme was around IBF’s benchmarking of ‘metrics and performance’, particularly targeting content to users and measuring the performance intranet sites for content owners.  Some great examples were shared and good debate had.

Following lunch members had the choice of two areas to focus on, Intranet Futures with IBF CEO and Founder Paul Miller and Ross Chestney, BT’s Head of Communication Services or News best practice with Nancy Goebel, IBF Director, North America.

Paul and Ross challenged members to think about where work place technologies are heading in the next three to five years, following Paul's recent article on Intranet 3.0.  The key topics discussed were:

• The Customer Service Intranet – dealing with the topic of the intranet vs business processes and breaking down the wall between what the public and the business

• Mobile devices / applications – are intranets moving into our pockets with location independence becoming key

• Intranet vs internet – consumers are now driving what they want and can see what is available.  Intranets will reuse internet technologies.

• Social Media and the Digital Divide – the digital divide in question being between those who contribute through social media, and those who don’t.  Employees need to shown the value of contributing to encourage further participation.

• The role of IT and risk – Many intranet managers continue to experience difficulties between IT security controls and encouraging increased collaboration.

As always we then had a fun packed evening out, this time watching our food being cooked by the Teppanyaki chefs at Sen Nin in Islington.

Our second day was based at the Aviva Head Office in London City.  Aviva were great hosts with an excellent agenda, an in-depth view of Aviva’s recent SharePoint roll out and lots of hands on across for IBF members, finished with lunch and a fantastic view across the London skyline!

Throughout the two days we saw great examples from BP, Unilever, Aviva, Northwestern Mutual and Maersk to name a few, highlighting items such as search, personalisation methods, demonstrations of delivering proven intranet value and a new tool to really deliver meaningful intranet metrics to content owners.

But the conversations that happened around all of these are always the best bit about meetings, with members exchanging advice, experience and knowledge and further building the IBF community. Although virtual working has come on leaps and bounds (I work from home most of the time) I really do enjoy these face to face meetings, they do so much to further build our intranet community and enable an in-depth exchange of ideas.

Roll on the next one in Houston on December 9th and 10th!