How do you get people to use your intranet? While it’s an easy question to ask, there’s no easy answer. An article from Petr Passinger on CMSWire offers some good ideas, but it all boils down to this: A team of people typically takes care of and updates websites and customer experience sites. The same usually isn’t true with an intranet. And therein lies the problem.
The intranet can’t be looked at as static. It must be dynamically generated with interesting and useful content that can be pulled programmatically but still involves the human touch. Whether they’re community managers or collaboration advocates, individuals need to be involved in keeping the intranet up to date, modern and interesting. That’s what’s most important in determining whether an intranet will be successful.
With that in mind, here are six ideas from Passinger on how improve the intranet experience.
- Segmentation and personalization: The most common reason an intranet fails is from poor user adoption, but providing a personalized experience can encourage users to stick around. This could include offering content specific to a user’s office or department, or offering content based on professional interests.
- Testing: A common practice for public-facing sites, A/B and multivariate testing can identify what’s working and what could be improved — or eliminated.
- Analytics: Webmasters worth their salt use an analytics platform — or often multiple platforms — to see which pages are performing well, who’s visiting them, how long they’re staying and how they found the pages. The same tactics can benefit an intranet. For example, you might discover that the most popular page has the lunch menu, Passinger notes. Now you know on which page to put really important company information to reach the most people.
- Gamification: This can include awarding points for user activity such as posting comments, completing surveys or creating new blog posts. Leaderboards and reward badges recognize user contributions.
- Email: Internal email marketing for intranet content can help users discover content they might not have otherwise, and click-thru data can help identify what types of content users are really interested in.
- Automation: One way to use marketing automation to get the most out of your intranet is with training and certification. For example, quizzes could be automatically given after users complete certain portions of training, or a reminder email could be automatically sent to those who have fallen behind.
This, of course, isn’t an exhaustive list. For example, social enterprise elements and integration with other parts of your company’s collaboration platform could also improve the user experience and boost user adoption. The key is to focus on satisfying the needs that are most important to your users.
Source: CMSWire, November 2013
