Promoting Intranet Use

So far you've managed to learn a good bit about the first two phases involved in the successful marketing of your intranet to your employees or co-workers. We've talked about a number of ideas that should help you to lay the foundation for an effective intranet launch even while your new intranet hasn't moved much beyond the confines of the drawing board, and we've also knocked around a few concepts about how to handle the launch itself.

But what happens after your intranet is up and running? What's left for the marketing folks to do after your intranet becomes part and parcel of your daily business experience, once all those logo-embossed intranet stress-balls and custom T-shirts are simply a fond, yet distant, memory?

Promoting intranet use over the longer term depends less on any particularly revolutionary marketing strategy than it does on a comprehensive and omnipresent adherence to what I like to call "housekeeping" marketing initiatives. The idea behind housekeeping marketing tasks is pretty simple: they're essentially like regular housecleaning chores in the real world, tasks that you may need to be shown how to accomplish once by someone in-the-know, but then are able to be performed by rote time and again, usually by subordinates.

As applied to our intranet, housekeeping marketing efforts are really ongoing mini-initiatives that require just a wee bit of creative thinking either in the very early planning phases, or perhaps infrequently from time to time just to ensure that our messaging and bigger-picture marketing efforts remain synchronized. And, of course, our HM efforts can be successfully handed off to lower-level employees for daily operational management. We'll now take a look at some good ideas for ongoing marketing attention.

Ensuring Project Sponsorship

One important task that the marketing team can focus on following the launch of the intranet is ensuring that project sponsors - senior managers and other influential stakeholders - remain enthusiastic, supportive, and committed to the continued success of the intranet.

The FactSheet

One of the most successful ways to accomplish this is to establish a monthly, single-page FactSheet that can present carefully chosen qualitative and quantitative data to selected managers and other VIPs. Content to feature should include a combination of:

• Basic metrics - total page views, unique user sessions, popular sections of the site, etc.

• Qualitative data - some of the more touchy-feely data, including your thoughts on why certain tools or content may be popular, updates on progress in deploying new content and functionality, positive or constructive quotes pulled from user feedback, and so on.

It is crucial that you limit this executive briefing to no more than one sheet of paper, perhaps going so far as to use both sides of the page. While I have encountered successful implementations of such briefings that have been as long as four single-sided pages overall, in my estimation successes in such circumstances are few and far between. The longer and meatier your briefing, the less, well, "brief" it becomes, and you run the risk of losing your target audience's interest. Remember, as you target an audience that is higher up the management food chain, the less time they'll likely have to read and digest the important pieces of data that you've made available. Make the most of the limited attention they're able to devote to your briefing, and concentrate on data elements that will most effectively capture their attention and promote their continued support.

FutureScape Briefings

Beyond the FactSheet, which helps to convince managers of the power and utility of the intranet based on where we've been, FutureScape Briefings provide a regularly scheduled, face-to-face opportunity in which to introduce executives to the future potential of the intranet, as made possible by new technologies, business plans, feedback from users, or other developments.

A typical FutureScape Briefing might include:

• a demonstration of how a Bluetooth-enabled PDA can surf the intranet wirelessly when paired with a Bluetooth cellphone (or other Bluetooth access point).

• A primer on XML, and how such a standard can benefit specific segments of your company in terms of overall productivity, cost-savings, etc.

• Highlights of users' intranet wish-lists, along with a brief vision of how such wish-list items might be successfully developed to the benefit of both the corporation and the employee.

Not only will you have an opportunity to press for your agenda with the full attention of your corporate executives, you'll also be able to solicit their input, field their questions, and make them feel more at ease not only with the technology itself but also with the ongoing role of the intranet within the overall business environment.

Include the Intranet in Staff Orientation

Another housekeeping task will be to ensure that your intranet is featured prominently and effectively throughout all staff orientation and continuing education materials. It's perfectly wonderful that you brought your existing employees into the intranet fold when you first launched it 11 months ago, but it's incumbent on the marketing staff to work in conjunction with human resources and other appropriate groups to "get the word" out even for new recruits, keeping in mind that the intranet is a living, changing creature - you'll need to revisit the orientation and related materials occasionally to ensure that they're complete and up to date.

Letterhead, Business Cards, and More

It's long been a well-accepted business practice to give special executive perks to certain managers, including custom-printed letterhead, notepads, etc. With the rise of the Internet as a core business and branding channel, many of these items have been further customized to include company logos, URLs, unique department taglines, and so on.

Once again, we'll fall back on our position that your intranet doesn't strictly need its own branding, so we'd recommend avoiding the added expense and complexity that go hand in hand with such custom printing. If your intranet has a particularly long or convoluted URL, perhaps it's reasonable to include the intranet address on some HR material, or the intranet team's business cards. However, a much better idea is mandating that your intranet simply be accessible from any web browser (password-protected at least, though you can also use more advanced SecureKEY technologies to reinforce your intranet's security - see Chapter 10 for more information on intranet security) at http://intranet.yourcompany.com - which will make life much, much easier for everyone involved.

Setting the Default Browser Homepage

Another tactic you can use to promote knowledge and ongoing use of your corporate intranet is to set the default homepage in your employees' browsers to the intranet's URL. You can reach out to your information technology or desktop support group - the folks who are in charge of installing and supporting your desktop computers. They can easily change a few settings to ensure that your intranet is the first thing a user encounters when they start their browser application for the first time. A great companion idea is to add shortcuts to your users' desktop or quick-launch toolbar that will take them directly to the intranet. These are just as useful and are more likely to survive in the long term than their browser's default page settings.

Note

While it's OK to set the default browser page to your corporate intranet, you shouldn't force users to keep the intranet as their default page, (Companies will often do this by making special changes to Internet Explorer/Netscape or Windows settings to disable a user's ability to edit their start page.) This can really anger your user base. So unless your intranet is the coolest, most exciting, most wonderful web property ever, I'd recommend setting the browser to your intranet initially, but giving your employees wide latitude to change their settings at their convenience.

Maximizing the Value of the Homepage

An area that deserves your attention - but that can prove somewhat tricky - is maximizing both the perceived and actual value of your intranet's homepage. This virtual real estate holds great rewards - and potential perils - for the ongoing utilization of your intranet, and it requires a careful balancing act to bring all the various pieces together in an effective manner.

Part of the difficulty lies in the simple fact that making your homepage valuable bridges a number of disciplines, including usability, editorial, and marketing, to name but a few. So the chances are that, as the marketing rep (or as the tech guy who's been hijacked into being the de facto marketing expert for the intranet), you won't have the freedom or the authority to act unilaterally in selecting the content to promote on the front page.

However, what you can do is two-fold. First, you should strive to work closely with the editorial, usability, and other representatives who "own" various parts of the front screen - allies are usually a good thing, and their additional support can often help achieve your nefarious - and not so nefarious - intranet goals.

Second, you should advocate the establishment of a special, marketing-controlled area of the main intranet page, as well as a marketing-controlled content silo (also sometimes called a "vertical") through which you can communicate directly with employees, encountering as few procedural roadblocks as possible in your own corner of the intranet universe. In this way you can ensure that at least part of the content on both the intranet's main page as well as in a deeper section is up to date, compelling to your users, and provides ample motivation for users to frequently make use of the intranet.