Hands-On Intranet Marketing, Down Dirty

Hands-On Intranet Marketing, Down & Dirty

Of course, just because your intranet (fortunately) hasn't fallen victim to one or more of the "big three" challenges that we've just covered, it's not quite time to rest easy: you're not in the clear just yet. In order to successfully position your intranet for its initial launch and (eventual) acceptance by your colleagues, you'll have to anticipate and deal with a variety of other hurdles.

The specific tactics that you'll use to address each of these hurdles will vary from company to company, and will depend in large part on the amount of management support you receive, your available budget, the size of your organization, etc. And it's important to remember that not every red-flag issue has a direct solution - a particular problem might not have a quick fix, but might instead simply require time, patience, and continued upselling across a variety of communications channels to dispel any myths, preconceived notions, and other institutional or procedural prejudices concerning your intranet that are present in your workplace.

What Intranet?

The first (and most obvious) issue to tackle is "Intranet? What intranet?" This is a problem that every company faces when they first deploy an intranet within their organization: employees often don't even know what an intranet is, let alone understand how an intranet might impact their daily work lives. As such, it's important to address employees' questions as quickly, thoroughly, and as proactively as possible.

Note

Educating your employees about intranets right before launch can often be a painful and frustrating experience. A better strategy - if practicable - is to ensure that at least some of your employees are intimately involved with the development and launch of your intranet from the earliest stages possible. That way you'll not only gain additional insight and suggestions that may improve the intranet, but you'll also have a well-trained team of intranet ambassadors who are ready to hit the ground running and can enhance your efforts to integrate the intranet into the workforce. This, of course, is a strategy that works in tandem with the other ideas we'll talk about shortly, such as using more traditional marketing channels (newsletters, e-mail, etc.) to keep the general employee audience in the loop concerning the intranet's development, and purpose.

Culturally, intranets (or any new technology that impacts the workplace, for that matter) tend to be less of a problem for younger employees, who often have attained at least a minimal comfort level with using the Internet, are conversant in the lingo, and so forth. However, for some of the more senior employees within an organization, the transition to a more technology-dependent business process can sometimes be quite challenging, even to the point of being unsettling and disruptive to their performance. For both the junior and senior employees alike, it's exceedingly helpful to follow a few simple steps to prepare the staff for the intranet:

• As early as is practicable, start educating your employees about your intranet, and give them "teasers" or other sneak-peeks into both the design process and scope of the nascent intranet in order to whet their appetites for what's to come. (If your marketing team is involved early enough, you can always turn to focus groups, individual or group interviews, questionnaires, etc., to both educate your target audience and capture feedback that can be used to channel the direction of the intranet's development.)

• Using your current communications channels - employee newsletters, the CEO's speech at the company picnic, periodic e-mail updates, canned demos at department meetings - seize as many opportunities as possible in order to define intranets in general, as well as to lay out your top-line vision for how your company's intranet will eventually provide tremendous advantages, efficiency, and cost savings.

• As your planning continues to evolve, so too will the breadth and depth of the information that you'll be able to share. For example, let your employees know that they'll eventually be submitting their weekly timesheets, expense reports, and leave requests online, perhaps even offering focused storyboards or other procedural walk-throughs to both set expectations, and to begin to retrain your employees to think of the intranet as their first-line resource for solving problems and accomplishing tasks.

I can't stress enough that it's important for you to communicate early and often. It's not sufficient to send out an e-mail a few days before launch and expect employees to eagerly stampede the gates in order to make use of the intranet, or to mention the coming intranet offhandedly in a speech 13 months before the intranet is due to arrive. For maximum impact, there must be a concerted effort over a number of weeks (or, better yet, months) designed to gradually educate employees and prepare them with the knowledge and skills required to effectively use the intranet in their daily efforts on behalf of the enterprise.

Co-Opt Your Employees

Beyond simply telegraphing to your employees that an intranet is on the way, you'll also need to focus on securing their buy-in, or acceptance, of the intranet. One of the best ways to co-opt your employees and to transform them into champions of your intranet initiative is to make them feel as though they've had a hand in the creative process leading up to the launch of the intranet.

It's critical to understand that as smart and as experienced as your management and intranet teams may be, there's another source of significant knowledge, expertise, and ideas within your company that MUST be tapped in order to provide a solid foundation for the success of your intranet: employees. (Remember those stakeholder interviews we talked about back in Chapter 3? No? Then take a break and go back for a quick refresher.)

As part of your communications strategy, provide ways (an e-mail address, or even simply an anonymous drop-box somewhere in the office) for employees to voice concerns, ask questions, and make suggestions. Not only will this be a significant boost for morale, it may also prove useful in identifying opportunities for intranet features or functionality (also known as, potential increases in cost savings, efficiency, and profitability) that your team hadn't initially considered. Remember that it never hurts to solicit input and feedback from your employees, even if you don't get a chance to make use of more than a little of it. However, it's important that you emphasize your appreciation for their input, acknowledge their effort, and encourage their continued contributions. And as you implement iterative revisions to the features and functionality of the site, you're then able to circulate the newly updated components to your captive audience to gain your endusers' thoughts on your "improvements".

"Never underestimate the innovations and insight that can be captured from the collective experience of your employees"

What's more, as your intranet teams work to develop solutions for specific intranet components (time reporting, expense and leave requests, scheduling conference rooms, and so on) you can also make use of your traditional communications processes to ask your employees for their help in creating powerful and creative solutions tailored specifically to the needs of your workforce. A sometimes more successful technique in some circumstances can be to bring in employees for hands-on testing of certain components, either as part of a final beta-test stage (extra eyeballs never hurt) or in earlier alpha-test stages, when features and functionality are still somewhat mallable. Involving your employees in the development cycle in this manner can make them feel like "insiders" of sorts and can often prompt them to feel a sense of responsibility to contribute forcefully to the eventual success of the project.

The bottom line is that you should never underestimate the innovations and insight that can be captured from the collective experience of your employees, as this knowledge can translate into significant cost savings, efficiencies, and competitive advantage for your company - especially when you consider that your users will decide whether your intranet is, in the final analysis, a success or a failure.

The Intranet as Fluff

Another problem that you might have to deal with is that your employees may view the intranet as a superfluous make-work project that is irrelevant to their role in the workplace, and as such, not worthy of their time or attention. This is especially the case when intranets are designed to showcase technology for technology's sake (the gee-whiz factor - things like showing the local weather or the webcam view from the office roof), when they include functionality that disproportionately focuses the intranet on social topics (chat rooms for employees to discuss hobbies), or when a core goal of the intranet is ever determined to be "to make the intranet fun for our users".

The honest truth is that business, by and large, has never been intended to be a primary source of fun - and neither should the intranet. The intranet, just like business as a whole, should be focused on enabling productivity, increasing cost savings, and enhancing profitability. As a manager, it shouldn't be your goal to get your employees excited about the intranet as they would about a new movie, or to convince them that using the intranet is as thrilling as a roller coaster ride.

It should be your goal, however, to design a focused, well-envisioned intranet that accomplishes these three business goals as quickly and with as little distraction as possible, and to tell a compelling story via your internal marketing efforts that helps to underscore for your employees:

• WHAT the intranet is

• WHY the intranet's content and functionality support the company's mission

• HOW - in terms of real-world examples - the intranet will benefit the workers on a daily basis

This will greatly reinforce to your employees that your intranet initiative is not only of significant value to the overall organization, but has particular relevance and potentially many benefits to themselves, as well.

Fortunately, you'll find that throughout the balance of this book there are presented a host of ideas, strategies, and real-world examples of how intranet developers, managers, and other corporate stakeholders have managed to successfully work in concert to negate these (and other) pitfalls that can frustrate the adoption and acceptance of a corporate intranet