Getting the Word Out

So, let's pretend that you've followed our advice so far and have been communicating with your employees on a regular basis concerning your budding intranet project. Once the intranet is nearing completion, however, you'll suddenly find yourself facing a whole new set of questions. How do we handle the launch - is it a big affair, or something more reserved? Does the intranet need a name? If so, how do we come up with one? Should there be a launch party? The list of questions is potentially limitless!

Now, it's completely true that throughout much of the 1990s, the launch of intranets (heck, even the launch of a new time-reporting system) often triggered a mad rush to plan triumphant parties, with free food, booze, commemorative plaques, and so on. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the bravado and unchecked spending that accompanied projects in the earlier days of intranet development have gone the way of the dodo, replaced instead by much more reserved management practices. This doesn't mean, however, that you enjoy no wiggle room whatsoever in shaping a slate of activities surrounding the launch of your intranet. What it does mean, however, is that, unlike in recent years, you do have to be responsible and not go to any particular extreme in structuring your launch - spend money where it's needed, but try to remember that this is a business, after all.

Loud or Quiet Launch?

Whether you choose to introduce your intranet through a loud or quiet launch is mostly up to the personal preferences of you and your management, based on your corporate tastes, budget, etc. However, louder generally translates into more expensive, and given the realities of the current business economy, might not be the best direction in which to focus your activities. That's not even mentioning that there is really little evidence to support that parties or custom hats and mousepads contribute in any significant fashion to a successful intranet launch.

It is possible, though, to have a boisterous set of events surrounding the launch of your intranet without having it break the bank, so to speak. Well-timed messages from your CEO, still distributed via traditional marketing channels, can christen the intranet, and can be coupled with updates from individual departments (introducing new intranet resources or describing how a traditionally-offline process will be handled via the intranet). What's more, enthusiastic quotes can be selected from your beta-test group of employees and can be used as part of the promotional messaging. And if your budget and timeline allows, you can even create online demos that can assist in not only spreading the word but also in training your users, simply by presenting how typical tasks or scenarios are handled, all while illustrating how each "improved" process saves the company money, and saves the employee time and frustration.

Of course, it's still perfectly reasonable to opt for a quiet launch instead. This gives the intranet development team a little extra time to work on the overall implementation and quality-assurance testing of the intranet, with more eyes and keyboards poking and prodding the system. If things break in the first few weeks, so much the better that the launch was quiet - there's plenty of time to fix problems as they arise without taking a huge PR hit. Plus, as individual users begin to discover the advantages of using the intranet (remember, you'll still be sending out updates to entice users via traditional channels like e-mail or through an offline newsletter, at least for a short time), you'll begin to see a grassroots recruiting effort emerge as your first users become intranet ambassadors of sorts, bringing their colleagues into the fold.

Note

Keep in mind that you don't have to wait until after your launch to recruit intranet ambassadors. As we mentioned earlier, if you recruit small groups of users and bring them into the fold early in the project's life for user testing, focus groups, sneak previews, etc., you can proactively create intranet ambassadors that can be your "street team" for convincing other employees en masse of the value and excitement surrounding your intranet project.

Naming the Intranet

You'll have to excuse me here for a minute, because the naming of intranets is one of my pet peeves. Seriously. I've dealt with so many clients over the years who have gone to great pains - including such insanity as hiring high-priced branding and naming consultants - to craft catchy or serious-sounding names for their intranets: WheeNet, GWIS (an acronym that ends up being pronounced 'gee-whiz'), and so on. Names that make little sense, have no meaning, and serve no significant purpose - and certainly not providing any tangible business benefits to the company. Just be sure that your employees can fire up their web browsers and access the intranet by typing intranet in the address bar, and you'll have taken care of all the intranet naming tasks you need to worry about.

To be fair, it's probably not the silliest, most wasteful thing I've ever seen. But it's certainly in the top three.

I won't even begin to dignify this topic with a discussion of the point of developing a brand. But let's consider this: when was the last time your boss told you to check with, say, HR, to see whether the new tax forms were available? Were you confused by the lack of snazzy branding or logos associated with your human resources group? Did you become confused and call the company two-doors down, or maybe even your key competitor, and ask their HR department where those new tax forms were? Of course not.

It's exactly the same with your intranet - there's pretty much ZERO opportunity for your employees to confuse your intranet with, well...anything else. The bottom line? Save the money and effort of developing a cute name for your intranet and channel those resources either into the development of the intranet, or perhaps into bonuses for your employees.

Note

Look, I'm not completely against the idea of having a cool, classy name for your intranet. It's just that, almost without fail, companies manage to brand their intranets with names more appropriate for a six year-old's toy ray gun, which can put a serious ding in the credibility of your intranet. I like branding - I've been doing it for nearly a decade. But this is one area where branding is not only somewhat tricky, but also (generally) pointless. So, if you do manage to come up with a great brand name for your intranet, then by all means, please use it with my blessing. (And do let me know about it!) But don't kill yourselves and waste valuable resources if you don't have a good one at the ready, since the corporate intranet is as sufficient a brand as you'll likely ever need.

Offline Marketing, E-mail Messaging, and SWAG

As we've discussed, while your intranet is still under construction you'll still need to rely on some of your more traditional offline marketing channels for communicating with your employees concerning the development of your intranet. This holds true right up to - and even for a little while following - the public launch of the intranet, because even once launched, you're going to still need to target the employees lagging behind the early adopters.

The offline and e-mail marketing opportunities are limited only by your creativity, budget, and good business sense - that is, no more shaving your company logo into the side of a goat that gets paraded around your office. Strategically-placed posters, flyers, and brochures - all generated from in-house printers for cost-effectiveness - can all be useful in hammering home that there's an intranet on the way, and that it will bring a bevy of benefits along with it. What's more, updates from the intranet team, management sponsors, or department heads during staff meetings or retreats can also help to enforce your intranet messaging.

You can even (I can't believe I'm encouraging this) look into generating custom-designed trinkets, like T-shirts, mousepads, yo-yos, and the like. But here's the only way I'll let you get away with it: find a sponsor outside your company who is willing to underwrite the cost of whatever doodads you want to create.

It's not as hard as you might think - there are tons of companies, everyone from Dell to some of your business partners, to random mousepad companies in Taiwan - who'd be willing to provide free, customized SWAG in exchange for a little bit of co-branding space on whatever particular item you have in mind. So if you're really into giving away freebies, just break out the Internet yellow pages and start sending e-mail messages and making phone calls. Who knows? Maybe you'll get lucky!

Holding a Launch Party and User Training

So, given what we've talked about relative to launching and naming your intranet, can you guess what I'm going to have to say about launch parties? I've been to lots of launch parties ever since I got into this business. And while the extravagance has been quite impressive, I'd be lying if I said that my closet wasn't currently filled with a few thousand dollars worth of trinkets and baubles celebrating projects and companies that have since been acquired, shuttered, or otherwise withered away.

These days the reality is that such extravagance is somewhat repugnant. And given how tight some corporate budgets are as of late, high-end launch parties can mean the difference between keeping a lower-paid staff member employed at the end of the budget cycle or having to give them a pink slip.

But - and I'm going to repeat this because I feel a little bad for raining on your parade - I'm not a killjoy. Launch parties were great, and I'm sorry that they're almost a thing of the past. So, perhaps we can find a way to combine a launch party of sorts with some other important tasks relating to the intranet in order to kill two birds with one stone, and maybe find an excuse to slip in some free food for good measure?

A launch party for the sake of a launch party is something I'd try to avoid. But, since you can never have enough user training (and you'll inevitably need a good bit of it even if your pre-launch marketing efforts have been superb), why not double-up your launch party with a user-training session? Then (can you see where I'm headed?) schedule the launch/training around lunch time, and bring in some food and soda for your staff members. In one fell swoop, you'll have:

• Managed to provide an exciting launch for the intranet along with an overview of all the key areas of content and functionality

• Empowered your employees to use the intranet via hands-on training, either through web tutorials, mini-conference style events run by a professional instructor, or through periodic user group meetings

• Boosted morale thanks to the free lunch!

• Made the employees first encounter with the intranet a memorable one.

Not all that bad for an honest day's work! (Not to mention that it's worlds easier to convince your boss to fund a training session than it is to get a party authorized!)