Step 1: Enable comments and give users the power to collaborate, ask questions, and post observations

Step 2: Use site wide tagging to quickly find someone based on language, leadership skills, and business groups

Step 3: Encourage employee work/life balance with custom message boxes that share anniversaries, birthdays, and baby news

Step 4: Get your CEO Blogging to promote employee adoption and engagement on your intranet

Step 5: Build a Community Page to highlight initiatives that support your corporate culture

To learn more about how you can make the most of social tools on your intranet, add your name to a webinar waitlist today!

What social tools have been the most successful on your intranet?

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The survey results are in and it shows that businesses are starting to make their intranets more social by offering tools like blogs, forums, social networking and online chat on their intranets. However, it will take some time for them to become true social intranets.

In the below infographic Toby highlights the three main components of a social intranet:

Toby Ward is a thought-leader for intranets and to follow him on twitter and subscribe to Prescient’s blog

Take a look at Prescient Digital Media’s Social Intranet Study and tell us what you think. Does your company already have a social intranet or is your organization considering the addition of more social media tools on your intranet?

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A big thank you to Desaign: Explaining ideas through animation for helping us with our vision.

What do you think about using animation as an interesting and unique way to educate and learn?

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First we’ll start with how social tools including our new Facebook-like message walls empower employees and benefits the intranet and your company:

1)      Social tools gives employees easy to use and familiar tools that allows them to participate, contribute and connect  with each other – and they need to be on the intranet to do so

2)      You can expand the collective knowledge and intelligence of your company by offering tools that promote the concept of people helping people

There is a third benefit that lends power and influence in adopting social tools on your intranet:

3)      Employee’s ability to raise the profile and significance of intranet content by sharing links to documents, training courses, KB articles, blog posts, e-forms, and other intranet content on their walls

Next up is one idea for how social tools on your intranet can impact your decision makers. Imagine that the CEO has a top inner circle of executives and that is who they impart their message to. That inner circle communicates directives down to their own inner circle and the fountain of knowledge trickles its way throughout the company and employees – with 100 different ways for that message to be filtered.

The above scenario will still prevail. Social tools are not going to replace this but what if the CEO could cut to the chase and post select information onto their intranet message wall, effectively giving voice directly to the employees. And then receive feedback in the same manner.

Now envision how that messaging could impact the employees and the culture of your company, not to mention the visibility of your intranet. Someone untouchable, the CEO of the company, is now approachable and can connect and mentor at the level of each employee.

Simple but powerful.

Check out the article on CMSWire featuring our Intranet Connections Social Directory and Message Walls

Try our new Social Directory and Message Walls with the Intranet Connections Free 30 day Trial or take a tour

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Rich Social Profiles

Rich social profiles make finding contact information and connecting with colleagues simple. Employees can connect and engage with each other through message walls; follow colleagues to get quick information about coworkers; update their status to show their whereabouts; and set subscriptions to receive automatic alerts. Customizable widgets and bookmarks allow you to select which content you want to receive to keep you informed about information that caters to you. Personalize your “workspace” with skills and tags that add value to your role within the organization.

Message Walls

Similar to Facebook, posting and sharing on our employee walls is easy. You can embed video, quick links to documents, news, events, community pages or other intranet content; give kudos to a team member, or post a challenge that you need advice on. Message walls foster communication between employees and your executives by allowing them to publicly share knowledge and gather feedback from the organization.

Follow Colleagues

Follow colleagues to help you organize who you connect with. The colleague activity feed allows you to monitor a feed of wall posts and conversations from your colleagues. Follow colleagues that you work closely with for better collaboration or connect with your peer in a different office. Ask questions and tap the knowledge of your peers to better serve customers. The ability to follow colleague’s means that you can keep up-to-date on contributions they make to wall conversations.

Status Updates

Now you can keep everyone in the know with Status Updates.  Status updates tell everyone, at a glance, what projects people are working on, if they are in a meeting, at a conference, working from home, or on vacation. You have the flexibility to update your status as often as you like to keep everyone in the know about your whereabouts.

Online Chat

Does your company rely heavily on email? Online chat provides a quick way to ask questions in a private one-on–one conversation with a colleague or team member to reduce back and forth emails. You can easily find out the status of a project or organize a last minute meeting with online chat.

Employee Tagging

In the Social Employee Directory you can choose to tag information about people, which then groups them based on the tag.  For example, you may choose to tag employees “Toastmasters” who are skilled in public speaking. Or you could tag employees involved mentoring, training or have specific technical knowledge. Employee tagging is available site wide so that you can quickly search someone’s profile or use the “TAGS” filter to categorize what you are looking for.

A social intranet is a tool for people to help each other. To learn how you can leverage our new social intranet tools to work for your organization, take a tour or watch our recorded webinar.

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The CEO has the power to be social and share social things. Put a face to a name and make an executive presence on your intranet. Open yourself up to questions and comments from employees. They are the ones working for you, after all. An executive can use the intranet to announce new clients and mergers, share information about product releases and expand on important internal updates from various departments.

Here are 5 ways an executive can promote employee adoption and engagement on your intranet:

1. Empower your employees on the social intranet; have your CEO encourage the use of social tools like message walls, status updates and personalized work spaces
2. Get your CEO blogging
3. Have your CEO respond to discussions and posts
4. Start a bi-weekly CEO chat session
5. Link company wide emails from the CEO back to the intranet

Get your CEO connected with social tools on your intranet so they can use it as a platform to portray their vision of what the company is working towards.

Takeaway: Remind employees about the goals of your organization using your intranet. Build trust within workplace communities on your intranet and share the information with the social tools available to you.

How are your executives involved in encouraging the use of your intranet?

Register for a live Intranet Connections Webinar today!

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KidStart encourages young people to develop their own interests, support learning & skill-building and open doors for them to participate in community life. In the program, volunteers are brought on board to develop a positive relationship with the youth and engage in activities that promote success and achievement.  KidStart is a wonderful organization, and they need volunteers! If you would like to inquire about volunteering at KidStart, please visit their volunteer page.

How have you used your intranet to promote local volunteering opportunities? Please share your answers in the comments section below.

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I am a member of a variety of groups, some of the groups that I belong to are related to marketing but I also enjoy reading the incredibly influential posts on the TED and Harvard Business Review group pages.  When it comes to the world of intranets there is an abundance of quality LinkedIn groups like the Worldwide Intranet Challenge, Ragan.com, and IntraTeam (to name a few).

I tend to devote Friday’s to connecting and sharing online. This way I can spend some time starting discussions and asking questions that people will be inspired to respond to.  I felt very motivated by responses to three LinkedIn discussion posts that I recently started, and I wanted to share it with our blog readers to encourage people to give their feedback on sites like LinkedIn.

At Intranet Connections, we love to hear how people use their intranet to find out what inspires their employees. I reached out to the members of the Internal Communications group to find out how they do this and here’s their feedback:

As the holiday season is upon us, I wanted to find out what the Worldwide Intranet Challenge members were doing with their intranets during the holidays, so I asked them: How do you use your intranet to reflect the holiday season? Do you change the theme, share stories about giving back, and advertise local charity drives? Please share!

For additional ideas on how you can use your intranet this holiday season, read about what our Intranet Connections customers have done with charity drives on their intranet sites.

People love to share stories about one another, so I asked the members of the Intranet Professionals discussion group: How are you using your intranet for STORYTELLING?

Thanks to all of the LinkedIn members that responded to my discussion posts over the past few months. Your feedback is greatly appreciated as it will encourage intranet managers to use their intranets for employee inspiration, storytelling and spreading holiday cheer.

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18 months ago Macfarlane went from a static intranet created through Dreamweaver, to a new intranet designed for better communication and resource sharing. Their navigation is fairly traditional and options are based on departmental structure. An “Add Content” menu drop down was a neat idea, with areas of contribution based on permissions.

John Wooden from Fredrickson Communications, a certified usability professional, weighed in on Macfarlane’s intranet home page, bringing up recent online discussions debating how much news to provide from the entry point on the intranet. He said that Macfarlane’s news area was in good proportion to the other content provided. Screen snaps from the IBF Live tours are not permitted but I would guess the news area was approximately 10% of the home page real estate. John agreed that too much precedent is given to news on an intranet home page, and that news is secondary, sometimes tertiary, to the primary reason employees visit the intranet: to find specific information, resources, and to conduct tasks such as filling out a form or requisition.

Funny how basic the needs are of many employees, simple really, as I view these intranet tours. Current trends tend to get all of the attention however never really show up as the top reasons employees go to an intranet. With the wave of social, and our own introduction of employee message walls and social profiles, it will be interesting to see if social tools do start to permeate the adoption rate of our intranet sites. The curve of adoption is slow in the enterprise, and based on the tours I have seen this past year through IBF Live, we have a way to go before our intranets become a social networking platform first and an informational / resource portal second.

Next up in the broadcast was Mark Morrell, Intranet Pioneer at Mark Morrell Ltd and a Benchmarker with IBF (Intranet Benchmarking Forum). Mark’s topic was “Intranet Love Affairs” and he had some good points about how far our intranets have come, thanks to the people behind them. Two key points:

• Intranet Managers work with financial restrictions and often without much support from executives, but thank goodness that is changing. The profile of an intranet within the organization is increasing, as is the acknowledgement of the hard work and patience required in delivering a successful intranet

• The people behind successful intranets have a lot of passion for them. This statement is close to my heart because I lived it with my first intranet site back in 1996 and of course for our intranet software, Intranet Connections. There is something about being an intranet manager, where you feel like it’s your baby. The commitment, care, blood, sweat and tears that Intranet Managers put into their sites is an inspiration despite low budgets, little support and little thanks.

“Behind every great intranet you will often find one person whose courage, power and in the end love for their work,  has produced stunning results” IBF wants to hear from you Intranet Managers! Tell them your Intranet Love Affair It’s quick and easy >> and you get to see the great quotes from other intranet managers

For more information about IBF’s Intranet Love Affair campaign visit their intranet blog 

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City of Richmond- Colleen Smith

Charity: Cancer Agency for breast cancer research and treatment

In the early days City employees learned to use the Bulletin Board and the Calendar and we provided a phone directory that was very popular. But in the last couple of years there has been a boom of new content as employees are making the Intranet their own. We have Wellness section created by the Corporate Wellness Team using multiple department page types and HTML pages. A group in our Leadership Program has developed an employee services section that covers everything from how to get your Photo ID Badge to Pay and Benefits, and Union Contracts.

Engineering and Public Works has really embraced the Department Page. They have created a friendly and informative center for their employees. Today there are 41 Movember mustaches on display for charity.

Our Co-op and Auxiliary staff got in the act big time when they found an innovative way to deliver Intranet content to outside workers. They pulled selected data from the site and displayed in on a large flat screen at the City Works Yard so employees could see things in What’s New and other things like training and employment opportunities.

We are still exploring new ideas in Richmond and we appreciate the many benefits of having our Intranet.

The Lewis Group- Susan Whitfield

Charity: Support Our Soldiers (UK)

I was asked to provide some shoe boxes to send some bits to soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

Because I felt this was a good cause I put a plea on the intranet to see if anyone else wanted to donate boxes or items to send. I also organised a raffle and cake sale to raise funds for items to send, I put notice of this on the intranet. From the fundraising and donations, I raised £312.50, we are still organizing boxes to send and so far have already sent about 20. I do believe the intranet has helped as so many more people will have been aware of this cause than if I had used word of month.

Rio Rancho Public Schools- Peter Barron

Charity: Rahel’s Challenge

I don’t have a huge story, but it’s potentially huge in the lives of children in our community.  Rio Rancho is a mid-sized school district in New Mexico with close to 17,000 students, and one of our ongoing issues is defeating bullying in our schools.  We have recently been sponsoring the “Rachel’s Challenge” (http://www.rachelschallenge.org/) presentations to staff and students to raise awareness about bullying and its consequences. Rachel Scott was the first student to be shot at Columbine High School in 1999.  These presentations challenged us to “start a chain reaction” using everyday acts of kindness and bravery, supporting students who might be targets of bullying, and supporting those who would bully to change their behaviors.

We posted a blog on our intranet (affectionately called “RioNet”) for staff across the district to weigh in on the Rachel’s challenge and open a door for conversation.  The blog has had numerous posts, and so I just wanted to let you know that, because of the ease with which we’ve been able to leverage our intranet as a tool for communication and sharing, the very lives of our children may have been saved.  It is powerful and moving to see how, because of our ability to share and connect, “chain reactions” are occurring in our district.  You know the Helen Keller quote, “When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or the life of another.”… this is what I think of when I realize that the comments and opinions our staff share via this and other blogs on our intranet have ripple effects that spread right into the lives of our children.  It is a powerful use of the technology that Intranet Connections designers and engineers probably never envisioned when they did their beautiful work.

Greater Iowa Credit Union- Peggy Wurster

Charity: Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals- University of Iowa Children’s Hospital

Greater Iowa Credit Union encourages work/life balance on the intranet by allowing employees access to add special events that they want to share with others.  Peggy Wurster shared that one of Greater Iowa’s tellers is involved in a comedy group and uses the intranet to invite everyone to his shows.  Many of the staff have gone in support of him and put messages out there to encourage others to join as well. Read more

York Central Hospital- Nelson Cardoso

Charity: York Central Hospital Foundation

The main objective of York Central’s intranet is to provide a central location for healthcare workers on the go to access valuable company information. To do so, they use their intranet home page to announce their CEO’s message, hospital highlights, healthcare news, media coverage and press releases. Read more

The Lewis Group- Andy Boot

Charity: The Beatson Institute for Cancer Research

Lewis Group used a variety of innovative promotions to get users excited about their new intranet with ideas like an employee profile contest and CEO Blogging. Their CEO, Dave Berry, encourages employees to use the intranet by emailing his monthly newsletter called “Berry’s briefing” to employees, which links to the intranet. Read more

Bonnier Corporation- Amanda Chu

Charity: The American Red Cross

Bonnier recently launched their new social intranet to provide improved navigation and design features to better suit the organizations entrepreneurial mindset. Bonnier promotes corporate culture with their entrepreneurial vision and provides a company overview section that talks about how the company started, the company vision and its core values. Read more

We are very grateful to have received these intranet success stories from our customers.  We appreciate that they shared how their intranet has impacted the people in their organization.

The Intranet Connections team is giving back this December by assembling food hampers for KidStart, a local organization that offers mentoring to vulnerable children and youth. We look forward to fulfilling the lives of youths and their families this holiday season.

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