When it comes to corporate intranet portals, getting one up and running is only half the battle.
It's been a few years now since internal-communications executives began compiling intranet portals to bolster their in-reach efforts. Many now find themselves victims of their
own success: There is so much material on their internal Web sites, employees actually are reluctant to come and visit.
Thus a new round of revisions has begun at many corporations, as communications professionals labor to make their portals easier to navigate and to find new ways to drive
employee traffic to these sites.
Driving Traffic
Mark Scott, PR director for HomeBanc Mortgage Corp., one of the top 10 online lenders in the country, used to put out a four-color glossy internal newsletter each month. Two
years ago, the company replaced that with HomeNet, an internal portal offering a mix of tools and company news - items such as current interest rates, product information and
departmental reports.
Trouble was, no one knew how often to surf the site, or where to look for updates once they got there.
"It's a great vehicle for things that people need every day and know to look for. A loan officer for instance will go there every single day to check rates. But once they are
done with that, they are not going to surf around looking for our latest community affairs news or the latest news from human resources," says Scott.
"One way we tried to solve that problem was, whenever we put something new on there, we would send an email with a link to that piece of information. That would either come
from my shop or from the department that was pushing the information out there," he says. But employees were already swamped with email, and that idea fell flat.
Now Scott is back to using (believe it or not) a newsletter.
He attaches a single-sheet monthly newsletter to employees' paychecks, informing them of new additions to the intranet site. "We want them to be informed, but we also want them
to be working," he says. "We can't say to people that we want them to spend half an hour a day at HomeNet. That is absurd."
At software firm VMware, Inc., Marketing Relations Manager Giovanni Rodriguez ran into a similar problem when he implemented an intranet to reach out to the firm's 180
employees. People simply weren't using the site.
"For stuff like forms and information relating to benefits, it is fantastic to have all that stuff on an intranet. It is a good self-service tool," he says. "But as a tool for
delivering important information, it is lacking in efficiency."
When big news breaks, "a [brief], nicely written email is still a great way of communicating," he says. "If there is something that is newsworthy and it needs to reach
employees quickly, email is really a far better tool than the intranet."
Clean It Up
Why are employees reluctant to get their daily dose from the corporate intranet? More often than not, the problem starts with the organization of the site.
Neal Linkon saw it happen when he handled the employee communications elements of the intranet for the controls division of Johnson Controls. "Anybody could put anything they
wanted to in their area. There were no standards," says Linkon, who now serves as communications director at SpectraCom. "Each section looked like a distinct Web site, and each
time you went to a new place it would take you a while to figure out where the heck they had put everything."
Linkon conducted some employee focus groups and used that input to write up policy guidelines to harmonize navigation protocols and editorial content. He then revamped the
site, grouping information by subject area on the front page of the portal.
Cleaning up can be a complex chore, though, especially for large organizations with vast intranets.
Take for instance Unisys Corp., where a five-year-old portal reaches some 37,000 people worldwide in over 100 countries. Each department supplies its own content to the site,
and then it's up to the PR shop to ensure that users can make sense of it all.
"We want to make sure the navigation is easy, that the key sites are there, that they service the general population and that the news portion is refreshed once a day," says
Denise Baron, director, corporate internal communications.
Each department has relatively free rein over the content in its own section of the site. The PR team then imposes some order by categorizing the main subject areas and
grouping departmental information under those various headings.
To make this happen, Unisys has created a "news bureau," comprised of subject-matter experts in the various departments who feed a steady flow of information into the PR shop.
"The news bureau has increased the collegiality of our communications [staffers] around the world, while also helping us to balance the Web site by presenting a more global
picture of what is happening throughout Unisys," explains VP of Communications and Public Affairs Shirley Robinson.
Bottom Line: Content
You can make the intranet portal clean. You can send email alerts to drive traffic to the site. But at the end of the day, no one is going to care unless you post some
substantial content.
"We have to give them news they can use," says John Clemons, VP of internal communication at Nextel Inc. and chair of the International Association of Business Communicators
(IABC). "You have to establish a situation where they know that if they don't go to the intranet, they will not get this information."
For that to happen, he says, PR must mingle with the masses. At Nextel, for instance, department representatives "do come to us when they have news, but we also meet with them
periodically to ask about the ways the site is being used and what they would like to see," says Clemons. "We expect them - and we really need them - to be full partners in the
effective management of the site."
(Contacts: Giovanni Rodriguez, 650/475-5322, [email protected]; Neal Linkon, 414/272-7742, [email protected]; Mark Scott, 404/459-7452, [email protected]; John Clemons,
703/433-4598, [email protected]; Kristine Grow, 215/ 986-5497, [email protected]; Denise Baron, 215/986-3650, [email protected]; Shirley
Robinson, 215/986-4440, [email protected])
How To Make The Intranet Work?
Organize: Create logical subject headers on the front page. Group information in logical layers underneath that page.
Customize: Talk to department chiefs to find out what their people want and need to see in their section of the portal, then deliver unique content to meet those needs.
Advertise: Employ-ees won't always think to check the intranet for the latest corporate information. You'll need to drive them there, whether by bulk email announcements of
breaking news, or a print newsletter directing them to various locations on the Web site whenever updates are posted.
Analyze: How to know if the intranet is doing what you had hoped? Firms such as WebTrends offer analysis products that can track intranet usage trends, showing in graphic
detail which areas of the site are getting read, and which are gathering dust.