Keeping People Interested

We're closing in on some of the final issues that we need to discuss about internal intranet marketing and how it can help to support the acceptance and ongoing success of your intranet. But there are still a handful of additional items that are worth covering, so bear with me for just a few more minutes.

We take for granted that many of the business practices and marketing theories that we've discussed have come straight from Western cultures - mostly from the UK and the US, arguably the central pillars of Internet, intranet, and extranet development across the globe.

One of the best non-Western business philosophies that is especially relevant to our discussion of intranet marketing and how it can be utilized to continually improve your intranet (and your business as a whole) comes from the Japanese: kaizen. As it was first described in Masaaki Imai's book "KAIZEN, the Key to Japan's Competitive Success" (I'll keep the school lesson short, I promise!), kaizen was described as follows:

KAIZEN means improvement. Moreover, KAIZEN means continuing improvement in personal life, home life, social life, and working life. When applied to the workplace KAIZEN means continuing improvement involving everyone - managers and workers alike.

Over the years, the concept of kaizen has evolved into something beyond a simple theory and has become, arguably, a holistic way of life that guides the Japanese in their approach to business systems, procedures, and challenges. Kaizen helps to focus the efforts of Japanese corporations and to unite both management and general workers alike in their quest to achieve a higher goal: eliminating all wasteful or superfluous excess within the business environment and in striving to attain the highest possible levels of quality, efficiency, and profitability.

Now, I certainly don't expect that you'll be running out to start a kaizen support group in your office, or that you'll even go out of your way to read up on kaizen after you turn the page. HOWEVER, what you should take away from my little cultural expose is that there are a variety of different approaches that you can take to keep your intranet - or any business system, for that matter - fresh, relevant, and useful to your business. You simply need to keep an open mind and be receptive to new ideas as they cross your path.

Building Brand Identity

If you poke around on the Internet, you'll likely find lots of "experts" who talk about building a strong brand for your intranet. As we've discussed, that's patently dumb.

What you probably won't find lots of talk about is using your intranet to continually convey to your employees - or to refine your employees' understanding of - the brand identity, values, and macro-level goals espoused by your corporation. The better informed your employees are about every aspect of your operation, the better empowered they'll be in working to achieve your corporation's goals.

From time to time, take the opportunity to make available brand identity documents, host discussions of your company's mission, goals, and beliefs, and highlight other aspects of your organization's business practices as appropriate, including new lines of business, products in development, potential clients that you're targeting, etc. This can help to expand your employees' understanding and appreciation of the fundamental attributes of your corporation, and will unquestionably result in their being able to be more effective while working on your behalf.

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An added bonus is that - by leveraging the intranet's ability to act as a two-way conduit for near real-time communication and collaboration, you'll not only be able to talk to your employees about your brand identity, you'll also be able to hear from them, giving employees a sense of buy-in while simultaneously tapping their knowledge and expertise to help keep your corporate identity fresh, relevant, and powerful.

Keeping the Intranet Fresh

Another critical item to keep at the tip of your brain is that you must ensure that the content on your intranet is both current and comprehensive. If your information is out-of-date, it's essentially useless to your employees. They'll figure it out pretty fast, too, and will find other avenues to obtain the information they need. It's important to establish an editorial calendar - a set schedule upon which certain areas of content will be developed, edited, and posted to the intranet - and to stick to it. It's less important whether this schedule involves daily, weekly, or even bi-weekly updates, so long as it meets the needs of both your corporation and your employees. As long as you embrace the concept of anticipatory marketing - namely the practice of providing marketing and other creative content at regularly defined intervals known by your audience - you'll be able to maintain a less-than-daily refresh schedule without an excessive risk of alienating your users.

Similarly, if you only post half of your HR policies and procedures, or don't quite include all the forms needed to accomplish a certain goal, say booking a trip to an industry conference, there will be a natural reticence that develops among your users that will hinder the adoption of your intranet. It's less important to provide some information on every topic within your company, and more important that what you do provide is comprehensive, useful, and functional for your employees. Even if your resources are limited, focus on small, bite-sized tasks - and do them well - and your intranet will enjoy far greater success.

Relaunching the Intranet

Every now and then your intranet will undergo some major growing pains, with your typical small, incremental updates morphing into a quarterly (or annual, etc.) re-envisioning of the user interface, information architecture, or significant portions of your intranet's content and functionality. How do you prepare your users for the shock - and potential usage nightmares - associated with deploying major changes to a well-established, familiar intranet? A relaunch.

Realistically, a relaunch doesn't require any more tactics than we've discussed, but it's an often-overlooked opportunity that gets intranet teams in hot water. In fact, preparing users for the relaunch of an intranet is oft-times even easier than preparing them for an initial intranet deployment, as your intranet is a new and powerful communications channel that can be used to spread the word. What's more, you can feature online tutorials, or old versus new comparisons to illustrate how old processes and procedures (how to search the intranet, complete a form, reserve a conference room) are completed.

Not to mention that a relaunch gives the intranet team a proverbial second bite at the apple. Features and functionality that didn't fare well in the initial version of the intranet can be enhanced and tailored to more closely address the wants and needs of the user group, and can be upsold aggressively as part of the relaunch, as the more popular intranet components don't necessarily compete for attention.

Regular Usability Testing

Depending on how duties are segmented in your company, you - in your capacity as marketing lead - may or may not be responsible for providing initial or ongoing usability testing for your intranet. This is a valuable resource not only in terms of how functional the current site is, but also as a means for soliciting real-time, task-oriented feedback from users concerning both current and future content and functionality requests.

To ensure that your usability testing yields the most useful results, make sure to fill your testing pool with victims ...I mean, users, from across the corporate spectrum, in terms of seniority, job discipline, and technical savvy.

Intranet as the First Point of Contact

As your efforts to provide timely and comprehensive intranet content and functionality are successful, employees will soon view the intranet as their primary point-of-contact, or source, for solving the problems they encounter each workday. Whether it's finding a particular form for an upcoming employee evaluation, looking up the phone number for the in-house courier service, or in booking a hotel room through the corporate travel agent, users will consciously begin to view opening a web browser and surfing the intranet as a more efficient and preferable course of action than the more expensive and less efficient manner of using the telephone.

Integrating into Daily Usage

Another significant avenue to explore in your efforts to foster the integration of the intranet into your employees' daily routine is to constantly highlight a small set of basic functionality that users would traditionally have accomplished multiple times each day via offline resources. This might include such tasks as locating phone numbers in the corporate directory, submitting timesheet data, reserving an overhead projector, or other common "workflow" tasks such as document trafficking, approval of expense reports, etc. By focusing your marketing efforts on some of the more pedestrian, but high-volume, activities that can be accomplished more efficiently via the intranet, you'll find that your users very quickly integrate the intranet into their daily usage patterns.

Budget for Incremental Development

Just because you've built and successfully launched your intranet doesn't mean the work is finished. Far from it! And the work of the marketing expert (also known as, you) is just beginning. One of the many additional ways that you can provide value to your employers is by intermittently sponsoring (or simply performing) a cost-savings or a time-value-of-money analysis, which can help to illustrate to management how the intranet saves the corporation money, not necessarily in direct cost savings (for example, less staples purchased - although those metrics are there, too) but also through the sheer savings in time cycles: invoices are processed 30% faster, we save 22 hours a month (multiplied by someone's salary and benefits) in tabulating payroll, etc.

As you work to calculate the return that your corporation's intranet investment will generate, be sure to attempt to capture at least a portion of the overall cost savings that can be channeled toward ongoing, or incremental, development. Whether it's 10% or a flat dollar amount, one of the best ways to secure added funding is to strike a deal with your managers: for every dollar we save the company via the intranet, you'll allocate x percent of such savings toward the next year's research and development projects.

Feedback Mechanisms

As the final thought for the chapter, it's paramount that you constantly provide avenues of communication - whether via e-mail, sticky notes, vmail, or through a Q&A period at the weekly staff meeting - that can capture a user's questions, comments, and concerns on an ongoing basis. Not only will this help to keep your users happy by providing them with a means through which to sound off, but it will also serve as a leading indicator of what sections of content or particular areas of functionality are becoming tired and dated, requiring either removal or a creative update, resulting in an intranet that constantly evolves to stay fresh, relevant, and valuable to the organization it serves.