Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Rethinking Intranet

Historically, an intranet was defined as an employee-only web-based network for communication, collaboration, self-service, knowledge management, and business decision-making. Most intranets were never designed to allow or encourage social influence, even though they’re the ideal platforms for furthering collaboration and knowledge sharing within your company.

Many of the intranets were originally top-down (management-controlled), rigid, inflexible, and uninviting experiences that served the needs of the Corporate Communications and Human Resources departments but not anyone else. They were used to communicate messages from CEOs and senior management, distribute company announcements, and provide human resources and finance self-service forms to employees.

Intranets slowly evolved to include basic collaboration features and the ability to create and manage department-level pages; they also grew to include key performance indicator dashboards for senior executives. But still for the most part, these intranets were static, top-down, rigid tools that by their very nature discouraged collaboration and social influencing.

For your intranet to go social and truly encourage collaboration and social influence to take place, you must adapt it to enable clear communication, collaboration, navigation, search, accessibility, and more. We give you some tips on optimizing your intranet in the sections that follow.

Getting rid of the buzzwords

When you design your intranet, ...