Are You Ready To Make Your Intranet Social?

By Alan Lepofsky | February 1, 2011, 9:00 am | 0 Comments

During yesterday’s Making Your Intranet Social webinar , Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee asked attendees to submit their ideas for the “Top 10 Reasons You Know You Need To Update Your Intranet.” We received more than 100, fantastic submissions, and the winner (see below) will receive an Apple iPad and the two runner-ups Socialtext t-shirts. The ideas included references to Star Trek, Facebook, Post-It-Notes, Liquid Paper, blinking text, the water cooler, even Dionne Warwick and the Psychic Friends Network!

After a long review, I present you with the top ten as voted on by my fellow Socialtexters:

Top 10 Reasons You Know You Need To Update Your Intranet:
10. The most common question about it is “What Intranet?”
9. Today employees just look for the cafeteria lunch menu
8. The CEO was given upgrade suggestions from their 5th grader
7. The employee directory still lists job titles from 6 years ago
6. You want to level the playing field between the introverts and extroverts
5. Your organization has more silos than on all of the farms in the state of Vermont
4. There are more servers under employees’ desks running wikis and blogs than in the server room
3. When you click on the link to open it, you hear “No, I’m sorry, Dave. I cannot do that …”
2. The CFO thought microblogging was cheaper than blogging
1. You’re not popular on Facebook but maybe you could be a corporate collaboration hero

Think you have a better one? Then share it with us in the comments section below.

We asked the same question internally and here are some of our own ideas:

To change anything you need to launch DreamWeaver
A common search result is “Your guess is as good as mine”
The amount of “forgot password” requests exceeds actual log-ins
Your still searching for the right person via org charts
There is a logo that says “Download Internet Explorer 4.0 now!”
Profile pictures are in ASCII art
PROFS is one of the menu options
404 page says “Powered by Apache 0.8. Copyright 1998. All Rights Reserved”

While this was all in good fun, the fact is that many organizations are in serious need of an intranet upgrade. Some of yesterday’s participants shared with us the real reasons they are looking to update their intranet:

Because taxonomies don’t solve problems, people do
So that we can work and communicate more effectively
An intranet without social is like a phone without a dial tone… missing its true potential
We are going social to get out of our silos, collaborate, find info faster, connect with experts
We need our intranet to be more social so that we can leverage our global capabilities and reach our full collective potential
To help new employees who may not know something like how to book projectors or where to find specialists – they could quickly ask a colleague rather than sitting at their desks feeling despondent
A more dynamic intranet with help us turn the “light bulb” into a spot light

For more information, a recorded playback of yesterday’s webinar is available. Are you ready to have Socialtext turn your intranet into a compelling and strategic corporate tool?