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How to make news, not noise (hint…have a plan)

March 1st, 2013 by Mimi

 

I want to start blogging.

We must have a presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

I want to advertise on Google, on the radio, in newspapers, in direct mail.

Let’s hold events.

 

We hear requests like these every week from clients. When we ask “why” they seem confused and wonder if we really understand new media and communications. In this age of instant information they ask why they should bother to take the time to set communication goals and write annual plans.

1. Set Goals that Set the Stage

Media are tools, not a strategy. Goals are the overall thing you want to change or affect, not the activity itself. They must tie in to the overall company strategy and the specific objectives of your organization. Make them clear, concise and concrete. Not: “Increase participation of the employee annual survey” but “Increase the annual employee survey participation by 50% and create and execute action plans by all organizations to address any issues that rank at 2 or below by May 30 with the overall goal of reducing turnover by 7% in 2013.”

Goals have to be shared, refined and, yes, communicated, to all interested parties. If your stakeholders’ ideas have been respectfully considered, they’ll be much more likely to support your progress and help when roadblocks happen. Collaboration at the initial planning stage means more creativity and ultimately more success.

2. Be Proactive Not Reactive

Sure, from time to time you’ll want to second good ideas or topics by retweeting or “liking” but to stand out from the noise you’ll want to be the one with the original ideas and stories. “Leading from behind” can be a great concept for management but not for communications. A proactive approach is necessary. Do the research, find the captivating stories, understand the data, create compelling and sustainable, targeted messages and then successfully execute the plan. Announcing an event date is fine but explaining what you’ll learn and why it’s a “must attend” for your audience is considerably better. Having a plan in place for crisis communications can save your reputation and your bottom line.

3. Choose Metrics That Matter

The number of tweets or retweets or dissecting Google Analytics is not a measurement in itself (although it can be useful to see activity and track trends). What’s important is to have your marketing or social media efforts move the needle in relation to your overall goals. Increasing the number of followers is nice but selling more products or services, growing membership, or increasing donations for your non-profit shows tangible results. Think conversions not conversation.

4. Turn Ideas into Action

A six-slide PowerPoint deck is not a communications plan. A detailed plan thinks through every aspect of the communications strategy to discover opportunities as well as barriers. An implementation plan explores audience needs and interests, understands the competitive landscape, creates targeted messaging, establishes timelines, determines communication vehicles and activities, works within financial guidelines, establishes benchmarks and metrics, and outlines the staffing plan with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. As Mark Twain said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, then starting on the first one.”

5. Consider an Annual Theme

Just as companies create memorable slogans that endure and resonate with their audiences, communication plans should do the same. When I worked at WebEx, the theme for that year was “Radical Collaborator” not “Web Conferencing Solutions”. We created quarterly internal and external presentations surrounded by social media that introduced, and then enhanced, the theme using compelling, real life stories supported by proven data. This approach resulted in numerous impressions and increased the awareness of the company’s products, as well as the personal brand of the top executive. Every event was tweeted (pre-event, during the event and post-event), blogged about, re-presented on YouTube and re-messaged for new audiences.

For a non-profit client, we focused on telling how they were making a positive difference for women in high conflict areas. Each week a short “good news” story was told on various social media channels. People knew Friday was the day they could look forward to being inspired. People were engaged, stories were shared, followers greatly enhanced and, most important, and donations doubled.

6. Don’t "File and Forget"

An effective communications plan is reviewed and refined weekly. Use it to start every weekly department meeting. Have only one version and have it accessible by everyone who is responsible for implementation on a shared drive or in the cloud. As new events, products or services occur, add to the plan and determine new approaches and strategies. A flexible plan with a strong annual theme can absorb these additions and remain effective. Measure what works and what doesn’t and next year’s plan will be half written already. Planning means you’ll be in a much better position to be part of the news instead of part of the noise.

 

Mimi Garrity Denman, Account Director

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Building Social Media Value through Tuning In, Connecting and Contributing

October 2nd, 2012 by Steve Nelson

I attended a Chase Business Insight Seminar yesterday on the topic of "How to Win Business Using Social Media: Three Simple Steps to Success." It was presented by author Tim Sanders, former Chief Strategy Officer for Yahoo! and now an author and speaker.

The three steps are:

  1. Tune In
  2. Connect
  3. Contribute

These were offered with context on the current state of social media, and good case studies.

The advice reflects what I tell people who are just starting in social media, but aren't sure the first step. For instance, after you sign up for Twitter, just watch, don't tweet. Do searches for things that interest you, and start following the threads. Who is saying what? Who do they follow, and who follows them? Who has made lists out of those people? After a while you'll see bigger patterns, and you'll see where you fit in, and at that point, you can't help but jump in and tweet.

Sanders refined this advice with some case studies. Tune in - that's the watching part. Connect - that's finding the people to follow. This is as simple as clicking "Follow" in Twitter, or "Subscribe" in Facebook, adding them to your circles in Google+, grab a feed to their blog posts.

Starting to contribute is the key. Don't start contributing about you. Once you've found influential people to connect with, add value to the connection from their point of view. See what they are tweeting about, and retweet them, with your own comments. Add comments to their blogs or their posts. After a while, they'll recognize you as a supportive and important part of their social ecosystem, and your point of view will emerge.

Then, when you finally get around to connecting that point of view, and social value, to your own business or your own interests, feel free to contribute that connection. If it's relevant and valuable, the social credits you've earned by your own contributions will pay off.

It is best to be genuine and not manipulative as you establish your social value and credibility, but it is worth the effort.

[Get a good start on social media marketing. Download AP42's free Social Media Workbook.]

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Beyond Social Media – A Panel of Experts

September 17th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

Steve Nelson moderates Beyond Social Media at CoreNet Northern CaliforniaPreview

I recently had the opportunity to moderate a panel at the CoreNet Global Northern California monthly meeting held on the campus of NetApp in Sunnyvale. The panel was hosted by Jay Sholl of CBRE Global Corporate Services.  The topic of “Beyond Social Media” was chosen to move the discussion beyond the basics of social media participation and marketing, and look at some of the significant trends and trajectories.

Prior to introducing the panel, I introduced the topic:

Whatever degree you actively participate in social platforms, everyone is increasingly influenced by the people who do, from the news you are presented, to the advertising you see, to the results of every internet search you do.

In 2012, social platforms have become part of the internet’s infrastructure, and our panel focused on some of the implications of that evolution, as social media moves beyond destination sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and becomes part of the fabric of business operations.

Now, social networks are not new, they’ve just become accelerated and amplified with the internet.

But going back in time, you can pick almost any era and see that webs of social influence have always shaped our society:

In 1948 and for the next 50 years, in Framingham, Massachusetts, every resident’s health history was tracked based on their network of family, friends and associations, demonstrating the influence of the network on health conditions and choices.

Google "social network" for any century:

17th & 18th century: The “Republic of Letters”, a transatlantic intellectual social network based on ongoing and forwarded correspondence, influenced the Enlightenment.

12th century: a structure of portraits of Angkor Wat in Cambodia documented a very Facebook-like network showing who was connected to whom.

Even prehistoric social networks have been discovered and documented.

We’re in the midst of a series of phases, with some accelerating trends, that show that social networks are continuing to evolve.

The web itself, emerged in the 1990's as the linking of information to information. Information is linked to information am searching for.

The social web, emerging in the past decade, creates a graph not just of information but of people. The social graph shows how that information is consumed, shared, influenced.  Information is linked to information linked to someone who is linked to me.

And finally, we’re moving toward what some call the “internet of things”, where the graph contains not just information and people, but many of the “things” in our lives, from buildings to cars to appliances. Information is linked to information linked to someone who is linked to me who is linked to the door I just walked through.

Three trends are especially propelling these phases:

You are always on: via the high speed internet that you are connected to without even thinking about it.

Your data is everywhere: data you contribute, data that is taken from you

Your data has meaning: advanced algorithms that scan this graph of information, people, and things and derives real meaning from it.

These are the big trends, this is where things are moving beyond social media, and I was pleased to introduce the panel who would be exploring these trends:

Christy McNabb Dunlap, Brian Bailard, Terence Craig, Dr. Arnold Lund

Christy McNabb Dunlap, Sr Director, Business Technology and Enterprise Intranet, Robert Half International, speaking on “Social Media in Business"

Brian Bailard, VP of Global Strategic Accounts, HootSuite, asking “Should You Care about Social Media?”

Terence Craig, Founder, CEO & CTO, PatternBuilders on "Social Media and Big Data", and

Dr. Arnold Lund, UX Industrial Innovation Lab Manager, Software and Analytics Center of Excellence, GE Global Research on “Social Networking in an Industrial World”

[Get a good start on social media marketing. Download AP42's free Social Media Workbook.]

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Subtle differences: beer, branding and a bogus resumé

May 17th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

One of my favorite ads was for Rolling Rock beer, ca 1996: "Here's to subtle differences." Rolling Rock uses slightly more malt for a little more body, a little more bite, and they're encouraging you to appreciate that the next time you imbibe. There were several versions in the campaign, but the one I found most effective was "the look":

Rolling Rock beer ad ca 1996.

You see what I mean.

The power of subtle difference came to mind in the recent scandal that lead to the resignation of Scott Thompson at Yahoo!, centering around a slightly fudged resumé.

If you ask me (and you didn't, but here you are): something subtle turned me off of the brand of Scott Thompson when I saw the picture from his Yahoo! bio page that accompanied many of the recent news stories. It was a subtle difference that affected me, as a consumer of news, as a consumer of the services and therefore the brand of Yahoo! Here it is:

Scott Thompson, former CEO of Yahoo!

If I had seen more of the official photo on the left, I might have been less unsympathetic (subtly different from "more sympathetic") to Thompson and his plight. However, I saw much more of the official photo on the right, on his Yahoo! bio page and in many of the news stories about his deceit. Do you see the difference? I do. A slight upward tilt of the head, shot from a slightly lower angle, in a classic pose of superiority, arrogance, perhaps looking down his nose at you. It's there, and in that 50 milliseconds it takes to determine a level of trust in a brand, that subtle difference made a difference to me.

This plays out every day at every touchpoint of your brand. We've done both subjective and ultra-objective testing of the many factors leading to successful web design, and it is often the most subtle differences that make or break the day.

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Your interest in Pinterest: remember to be social

May 8th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

AP42 on PinterestI'm becoming a fan of Pinterest, as are many marketers, judging from the proliferation of posts, articles, white papers, etc., on how to market via this social platform. One post that resonated with me was Jordan Kasteler's "Why Pinterest Is NOT Your SEO Miracle Worker" on Search Engine Land. Kasteler gets to the essence of using any social platform for marketing, which is that you must participate in a social way, engaging and contributing to the social community, to make the most of the platform. Old school marketers merely see another channel to broadcast their message to a waiting audience. That simply won't work.

Key takeaway advice from an early Facebook F8 developer conference was that Facebook apps should at their core, be social. It makes sense, though a lot of people were developing apps that were merely showing up on the Facebook platform, but not engaging the social graph at the heart of Facebook. It's the people-to-people-to-information connection that makes a social platform so compelling.

Enter Pinterest, which among the many startups in the social space, hit that all-important critical mass by providing value, experience and a user base that has crossed that tipping point dictated by Metcalfe's Law. And with social startups that succeed to the next level, people and companies get to start the experiments all over again, innovating, being creative, learning. And most of all, succeeding by being social.

We created AP42's Pinterest page with community in mind, starting with our first three boards. The first board is AP42 Clients. As a service agency, we are part of a community that includes our clients and their customers, and offering a social nexus where we can all get together makes sense to us. It also shows that you can step outside of your website and use a community platform to share information that has traditionally been limited to your site's architecture.

The second board, our most recent, is the AP42 Reading List. It's just been started, so follow it and keep checking back on some of the ideas that inspire us here at AP42.

Finally, we've created the 42 Reasons board that follows that most interesting of numbers that keeps popping up (especially after you start looking for it!). We took the inspiration of Douglas Adams's answer to the "ultimate question of life, the universe and everything" as we moved from Alejandrino Partners to AP42. So, in a small way, it's about us, but curating this set of fun facts about the number 42 gives back to a community of likewise strangely fascinated numerologists!

And a final note on SEO and Pinterest - pinned sites don't follow through for search engine link credits, but you can embed links in the descriptions that do count. We're using them to link through to our site's page about the number 42, our website's clients page, and any blog post related to our reading list.

[Get a good start on social media marketing. Download AP42's free Social Media Workbook.]

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Replacing blogs with social media? Not so fast.

April 20th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

Blog With Authenticity Without Getting Fired - Search Engine People Blog Flickr Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)A recent article in USA Today reported a trend of companies moving away from blogging and relying solely on social media platforms. The article is interesting as, paragraph by paragraph, some truths are revealed about the ongoing importance of blogging, and the realities of doing it well.

This trend is not fueled by some knowledge that a social-only strategy is a more evolved or superior presence, but is a trend fueled by the difficulty of blogging despite the advantages it brings to the communications mix.

The blog is an important transition base in your online mix. Your website is your branded home, where you clearly articulate who you are, and to the degree possible these days, control and manage every byte, every pixel. Your company's ideal self. And though social platforms appear to belong to the crowds, remember, the crowd is the product and not the customer of these platforms. The platforms belong to their creators first, their advertisers second, the crowds third, and finally to companies that establish their presence there. These platforms are good for getting into the flow of content and connections, but they don't belong to you.

The blog, however, moves you from your primary company presence and story into a hybrid of top-down brand definition and bottom up social engagement. You have the opportunity of being immediate, current, and relevant. You have the opportunity to break down the fourth wall of brand theatre and expose your thinking, your personality, your evolution, your vulnerability. With a blog, you can be people. With a blog, you can create valuable content that is a strong tangent to your company's mission, but that doesn't fit into (or interfere with) the well-planned engagement around the core products and services presented by your website proper. You can give answers that people are searching for (remember, if you don't show up in the search results, you don't exist.) A well-written, well-indexed, well-structured blog will, at best, lead people back to your website, and at worst, will enhance your relevance in the world in which your company exists.

It's worth reading the easily digestible article (remember, USA Today was the first newspaper you could watch instead of read) - but also read the primary source research. Most of the paragraphs in the USA Today article either show the continued value of blogs, or offer factors in the decline that relate more to the difficulty of blogging as opposed to the lack of returned value.

So before you back off of blogging, first find ways of addressing the difficulties. Time commitment? Back off the pressure to blog every day, and promote the expectation in your audience that your posts will be less frequent but no less compelling. Lack of quality writers? Back off the pressure to write a New York Times essay every time you blog, and find someone in your company who can speak clearly and succinctly, knows your company and your customers. Find interesting content on the web, point to it, and explain in a few sentences why it's interesting to you. Find topics where you know there is a thirst for data, information, knowledge or wisdom that you have, and share it. Fear of regulation? As my friend Keith Carsten says, "Live by your convictions, not by your fears." No, that doesn't mean don't be afraid of getting convicted. Many regulated industries have clear guidelines for blogging. Get to know them and live well within them.

And don't generalize every trend article you read as permission to follow the crowd. Sometimes trends are leading indicators of giving up.

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Measuring Social Media ROI

March 27th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

A spike in traffic - must be social media ROI!
I went to a lunch 'n learn last week sponsored by Molly Crawley at Med Ad Agency. Molly had asked me to think about the topic of social media return on investment (ROI). My first thought was there is not a one-size-fits-all model for considering social media ROI, and it would be unwise to oversimplify. When I hear clients balk at participating in social media platforms until or unless they can apply a highly accurate ROI model, I feel that they are missing an important consideration.

15 years ago or so some clients questioned whether they needed a website, or could justify the ROI. But the internet has become such a part of the operational and communications infrastructure of any company that the consideration is different. For most companies, if you don’t have a website, you don’t exist.

Social media is becoming an integral part of that infrastructure.

Infrastucture ROI models are different from calculating the return on a marketing campaign. Asking the ROI on an customer event you might plan at your headquarters is one thing. But you need a different model that covers having a headquarters in the first place, where it is located, what color it is painted, what the phone system is, who is in the mail room.  Have you calculated the ROI on your phone system lately?

It’s well and good to come up with plausable, testable and refinable models such as ROI. Develop a model, a hypothesis, and go from there. But you need to make sure that you are looking at all the different levels of necessity and return that can be covered by that model. Developing an infrastructure ROI model for social media can be instructive, but should not be the deciding factor for participation.

First of all, assume that social presence is required now to be included in the online space. Minimally this includes profile information that can be indexed, found, referenced and shared. Search engines are increasingly factoring this presence into their search results. For many consumers, if you aren’t in the search results you don’t exist. Beyond this, as I pointed out in my post on the Zero Moment of Truth, validation of your presence in the social space may also make or break the attraction of your customers. A survey I did for a client seven years ago showed that the existence of an independent blog community for their products and company increased the trust in that company and its own communications. Accelerate to today, and that community:trust ratio is even more critical.

Of course, you can still measure ROI on social media marketing campaigns, but this is a much different consideration from the initial choice to participate. As lunch 'n learn guest speaker Colin Cook of Thimble River Analytics pointed out, old-school linear conversion funnels have become much more convoluted with the feedback loops of social media. You can still use simple measurements such as click-throughs to desired conversion events with links that are carried through the social media. But you also want to develop models of how these links and the messages that carry them are uniquely spread and validated through networks of influence and the platforms that enable them.

How do you do that? First, you develop your model of how this influence might plausibly work, within and across online and social platforms. Once you have a model, you can use the platform-specific measurement systems, such as Facebook Insights; or general purpose measurement systems, such as Google Analytics, Webtrends or Adobe's Omniture; or you can look at the data requirements of your specific social proliferation model, and find many vendors that offer specialized measurement systems.

So embrace the infrastructure of social media as a given, model your general presence, model your social campaigns, and find the right tools to test and learn from your models.

Download the free Social Media Workbook from AP42

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One Question Every Creative Brief Should Have

March 8th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

AP42 creative brief

My colleague John Faville once offered, "A brief should be."  I thought of that as I was reading WOW Branding's "Logo Savvy",  where they suggest replacing the traditional creative brief in favor of ten evocative words. That is brief, and I think I'll give it a try. Hey, I'm a scientist at heart.

Until then, here's a question I suggest gets added to every creative brief template.

For existing products/services/brands/companies:

"What is the best example from your firsthand experience, from a customer you've actually talked to, that exemplifies the highest potential of your product or service in actual use." 

For new products/services/brands/companies:

"Give me the best example from your firsthand experience, from a customer you've actually talked to, of their articulated need for which your product or service is the perfect solution."

Picking the ultimate example, either of how your product has actually been used, or of an expressed need that your new product is meant to solve is important. It places the high-water mark for success, at least in your known universe. (If the gods favor you, your product will be used in even more ways than you can currently imagine!). I don't want a typical example - there are plenty of those. I want the best.

And I don't want a theoretical or hypothetical example: "It's for the busy executive getting off a plane and grabbing breakfast in one hand with their iPhone in the other, and they've now run out of hands." No, tell me about a customer you talked to, who actually used your product (if you have one) or relayed a real experience that would lead her to your product or service (if you're developing or just rolling it out.)

This keeps it real. When I was directing a group of product marketers, I was always challenging them to move away from the abstract and get concrete. No talk of "the dealers' shelves" would last very long before we'd get in the car and go find a real dealer and real shelves.  The same consideration should go into your brief. Not to design the whole campaign or product around n=1, but to know, for now, the apex of your current reality.

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Zero Moment of Truth – ZMOT – A New Mental Model of Marketing

January 30th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

All too often I get around to something that has been in my "must-read" pile for far too long and ask myself why on earth I haven't read it before. Google's "Winning the Zero Moment of Truth - ZMOT" has been hanging around on my Kindle since last September, and when I read it last week, I kicked myself for not sailing through it earlier.

You can read it too, for free, in about an hour, and you really should. It's free because it is an extended white paper for search engine marketing the Google way, but it really is more than that. It speaks to the changing model of behavior among all purchasers that has led to Google's success, and by extension, anyone who factors that model into how they go to market.

The basic premise is builds on a traditional path to purchase, modeled as Stimulus + Shelf + Experience. Stimulus is where you are first aware of a product, through advertising or identification of your need. Shelf is where you first evaluate the product, sometimes by literally picking it off the shelf and examining it. Experience is where you have bought the product and evaluate it post purchase as fulfilling your needs and expectations. The shelf encounter has been referred to as the "first moment of truth", where your examination leads you to choose yes or now, purchase or not. The actual product experience is the "second moment of truth" where your use of the product leads you to judge whether it fulfilled its promise or not.

Google's Jim Lecinski posits a "zero moment of truth" that now influences most buying decisions. Before even hitting the shelf, people hit the Internet (Google, they hope) to apply a first filter to decide which path to take. Marketers who feel they can make their case at the "first moment of truth" may be left emptyhanded.

The book does a good job laying out the model for those who haven't figured it out already, and gives some good exercises and practical steps to apply to your own product or brand. Lecinski also highlights the shift from messaging to modeling as the holy grail of marketers. I still hear too many marketers base first principles around the messages they want to convey to the marketplace, ignoring the complexity of the connected consumer and the network of influence that is often impervious to top-down messaging efforts.

I love to see new models well articulated, even if they are thinly disguised promotions of the most successful player of the model, and this is a good source for any marketer who needs a refresher course on how things have changed, and how quickly they continue to change.

Interesting contrasts

While ZMOT's primary contrast with older models of marketing is of great value, I noted a couple of contrasts with some recent ideas that are worth exploring.

Serendipity

There's a tension between highly effective search models and consumer-directed targeting on the one hand, and the rewards of serendipity on the other hand. Chapter 4 of ZMOT goes into the effect of rankings and ratings on peoples ZMOT choices. Yet people making more and more decisions based on ZMOT rankings, whether they're Yelp stars or Google's PageRank telling you what pages to see, will miss out on the discovery of the outliers, or products where the one good review out of 20 is from someone who has the same quirky taste as you. Salon explores this phenomenon in more detail in the article "How Yelp destroyed the thrill of exploring".

Though this runs counter to Google's hyperefficient market model, I think algorithms can factor serendipity in balance with relevance and user goals - (like the BananaSlug search engine's "long tail search" algorithm.)

Yes or not yes?

Lecinski isn't just a pitchman for Google, he's also an enthusiast for change, innovation and progress. From ZMOT:

"How can marketers keep up? 'Say yes.' That's one of Lorraine Twohill's favorite sayings, and I love it. It's always easy to be cautious and say 'no.' But ideas come from everywhere now. Embrace that! Say yes as often as possible. Be nimble. Take risks, try new things, learn and be surprised."

This is in contrast with another philosophy I've embraced from another great little book that you can read too, in about an hour, and you really should. Derek Sivers's "Anything You Want" isn't free, but it's a fresh breeze on entrepreneurial success. In it, Sivers says,

"If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about something, say 'no.'
When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than 'Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!' -- then say 'no.'
When you say 'no' to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say 'HELL YEAH!'
Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about it, say 'no.'
We're all busy. We've all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out."

Yes or no? Who is right? Maybe the answer is that Sivers's "HELL YEAH!" vs "no" is a ZMOT moment for us all.

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Intranets 2012: Trends and Predictions

November 9th, 2011 by Steve Nelson

Intranets 2012
I took a dip last week into the world of intranets for a client who was bringing together their content and community managers from around the world. I offered my take on trends and predictions the digital workplace: where things are in 2011, where things are headed in 2012 and beyond.

I drew from recent experience: having helped this client re-architect their internet presence I knew about their organization, customers, and platform; from my work with Sun Microsystems prior to their acquisition by Oracle, where I was part of the team to turn their intranet from a top down, centralized system to a more decentralized and social system; and from my work with Linden Lab, the creators of the virtual world Second Life, where I brought the collaborative tools of the intranet into the virtual company workplace we built for them inside of Second Life.

I also drew from a variety of resources, such as the Nielsen-Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual 2011 of the top ten intranets - always an informative document.

One helpful model that provides perspective relative to these trends is the Gartner Hype Cycle. A number of features of new and trending intranets fall all over the graph, and it helps to look at their take on areas such as enterprise information management and content management when considering how real or out there intranet trends are. For instance, “Virtual Worlds”, which was certainly an intranet trend 4 years ago (when Gartner themselves predicted that by now, 80% of users would be visiting the internet with their avatar), is now at the bottom of the Trough of Disillusionment.

“Trends” were things I observed or discovered during my dive into source material. “Predictions” were things I made up as I went along. You'll see that these trends aren’t isolated silos, many of them interrelate with each other, and so it isn’t really a linear list. But in a linear blog post, I have to start somewhere.

Platform

Although intranet platforms have specific features that are certainly part of other trends: customizable, mobile, the most significant platform trend is the adoption of platforms and versions that include these features. Enough time has passed between the introduction of Web 2.0-influenced features and their planning, rollout, testing and deployment in real intranets. These feature are no longer just predicted or in pilot, but they are real. Besides specific features, the platforms have evolved in their ease of management, maintainability, extendability. This has had an effect on the teams assigned to intranet activities and their assignments.

People

Several factors are influencing the people who build, maintain and use the intranet. As I mentioned, the deployment of new platform versions has shifted assignments away from migration, deployment or more difficult wrangling of the platform into submission. According to Nielsen-Norman, three areas that have benefited from this are:

  • Usability testing and feedback into design
  • Tuning - especially in areas such as search effectiveness
  • Content - curating and culling.

Management teams are becoming more aware of the intranet and its importance to the company. Intranets that are well instrumented for specific key performance indicators are able to make more-than-anecdotal cases for their returns on investment, which brings the intranet positive attention at higher levels.  We are also seeing corporate buy-in as executives become social content creators with executive blogs and the like.

Intranet platforms also allow for more decentralization of management and governance. This decentralization was often accomplished by having many separate intranets, but now platforms can allow for this decentralization within a common framework.

But the most important constituents are the thousands of employees who integrate the intranet into their working experience. New intranet architectures aren’t just rolling out corporate data and functionality down to the employees, but emerge from the use of the intranet by the employees. With trends of the social and mobile intranets this comes to the fore.

One more thing to note relative to the people who use the intranet, especially when combined with some of the other trends such as mobile computing, is enhanced 24/7/52 connectivity to the company. This is a two-edged sword with many implications, and it warrants not just technical but management attention.

Parallel Tracks

You’ll also see the trend of the parallel path, based on the factors of platform and people. By parallel paths, I mean what’s going on in the intranet relative to what’s going on with the internet at large. There’s a high degree of overlap, and then there are the things that make each domain unique.

For instance, in the internet, multiple platforms and technologies are emerging, competing, evolving all the time, but for any given intranet, platform decisions are more locked into specific choices. External technology may be advancing with new solutions and platforms but for a company that has picked a specific version of a specific platform, they may not get those advances for some time.

On the other hand, the intranet may be able to do some specific things that aren’t available in the internet at large because certain assumptions can be factored in such as officially blessed software and hardware. Or things that would not be acceptable from a privacy standpoint can operate on the intranet. For instance, some intranets include with search results the names of other employees that were searching for the same thing. Because an internal resource has rules and expectations of usage and privacy, they might be able to get away with this, but imagine if every Google search told you exactly who else was looking for the same… remedies.

The key effect, though, of parallel paths is when people jump the track to the other side. When features available on the Internet at large are absent from the intranet, people have a tendency to make use of them for business purposes. When you ban certain websites from internal access, people use their phones to get to them. When an intranet is not sufficiently social, people move their business conversations to outside venues. This happened at Sun. More people used the private Sun employee group on Facebook than were actively using their intranet. These venues may still be private relative to the internet at large, but they are still beyond the governance or measurement of the intranet. They are telling in the kinds of features for future intranet development, and they will happen anyway, but this needs to be factored in.

You also see track-jumping in the other direction: as intranets become more social, people may begin using them for workplace-inappropriate socialization, picking up where they left off on Facebook in their own hours.

Social

Speaking of social, this is certainly a trend, and one with a number of related trends. At Sun we spoke of turning the intranet upside down, and rather than reflect a centralized-org-chart-mirroring view of the organization, we architected the new SunWeb to reflect how people do (and can) collaborate out of emerging social connections.

When I say social, I mean several things: architectural components of the underlying data, the interfaces offered to employees, and the adoption and use of the platform.

Architecturally, we see that rich individual profiles and connections are at the heart of a social platform. The connection graph of how people are connected to each other and to information is the key data structure.  Such a graph can certainly contain a representation of the top-down org-chart view of the organization, and its departments and groups and management. And it can contain the corporate eye-view of information, organized along department lines. But the graph can grow in other ways, based on people explicitly making connections and groups of interest, or having these connections recommended or realized based on how the network is actually used.  An explicit group might be formed as a Mac user interest group, or groups can be formed spontaneously by the system recognizing all Mac users. And search results can be factored by these social data.

Social ultimately means enhancing the ways people already work together, and integrating it into the platform.

Social participation and support begins with individuals, and in addition to having rich profiles as part of the social entry point for individuals, systems are being developed that provide social ratings or scores for individuals. Peter Reiser, now at Oracle, has devised a “community equity” score that factors in participation, contribution, influence and expertise.

As I mentioned in the "parallel tracks" trend, people now have an expectation of having systems support the state of connectedness with each other and with information.

Realtime

Another trend that follows user experience and expectation is the trend of the realtime intranet.  You see this in several ways. One of the ways is in the proliferation of Twitter or Facebook like status updates in the intranet. Once you have the social connectivity, seeing the activities of those people and groups you are connected with is natural. This capability is available to augment Intranets in products such as Yammer, but will be seen more in the platforms themselves.

Realtime access to information is also enabled via dashboards and mashups.

Realtime also incorporates the ability to establish intranet connections using variations of VoIP: Voice, Video and Virtual over IP.

Related to realtime is another time-factored collaboration mode, which is pop-up collaboration. This is where collaborative spaces that have a limited-time or special-purpose duration can quickly be established and used for the purpose.

Crowdsourcing

A byproduct of the social intranet is the ability to tap into the “wisdom of the crowds”. There are several trends to consider here.

First is the rich source of metadata available, both explicitly and implicitly generated, that follows the use of the intranet. Explicit metadata includes user commenting on or rating content, explicitly following or subscribing to other people, tagging information, and so on. Implicit metadata accumulates as people interact with the network. Similar to how Google tracks for what you are searching for, what you are clicking, what you are doing, tracking your actions helps promote valuable content based on what people are actually paying attention to or using.

Group creation and management of content includes the ability of individuals to create content, but also to collectively create and maintain content through systems such as wikis.

Question and answer systems such as Quora provide infrastructure for tapping into expertise in an explicit way.

Finally, incentive based idea factories are finding their way into the intranet though systems such as Spigit, where ideas can be proposed and promoted, voted on, and systems of employee incentives can be factored in to motivate employee innovation.

Semantic

Some of the trends I’ve alluded to, especially those that tie rich metadata to people, information, and actions, are at the heart of semantic web technologies that are finding their way into the intranet. This means that there is meaning defined or derived associated with data, so that searching for information, or the connections among people and information, can be automated and continually improved.

Semantic technologies allow different kinds of information to have a structural layering that captures information about the information that can be used to make searches or other interactions more accurate and efficient. Semantic data will also be critical in the natural language processing that follows speech recognition technologies. One of the amazing things about the new Siri capability of the iPhone 4s is not that it can recognize your speech, but that it can make so much sense out of it relative to the information it knows about.

Mobile

Mobile access to the intranet is a big driver of change and capabilities, and is interrelated with other trends as well.

Mobile access entails a number of issues. Mobile devices need to be supported, but mobility applies to the worker and her environment, not just the device. Mobile security needs to be ensured. Mobile worker policy, more of a management and governance issue than an intranet issue, will both be enforced and enabled via the intranet.

Twice as many of the winning sites in the 2011 Nielsen Norman annual had versions for  mobile devices compared to 2010. One trend is for mobile versions of an intranet to focus mobile specific features, and not be a mobile version of whole intranet . Mobile device support can also have some degree of control and specification when designed for a company-issued device. And there is a proliferation of location-aware apps, not just on mobile devices but on all platforms, that can both feed location-relevant information into the intranet, but serve up more relevant information to the end user.

There’s an App for That

One trend in computing that started with the proliferation of apps on the iPhone, moving on to the iPad, and now even to the desktop. It’s been an interesting dynamic change as what were once standalone applications such as word processors became browser-based applications, and what were once information sources such as websites became mobile apps. I think this is still shaking out, but with common development platforms afforded by technologies such as HTML5, where a common source base can be accessible via a browser or wrapped up in an app, I think you’ll still see both, depending on context. Even standalone apps that take advantage of reference or linking revert to a browser to fulfill the links.

The role of the app will be to encapsulate specific functions or content for easy access and interaction. Intranet apps will start to be more common, and not just on mobile devices.

In the Cloud

Lots of babies named “Cloud” were born this year, and not just because they’re 3rd generation flower children.  But to me “Cloud” is more than just storing a file somewhere outside of your own computer or server, and more than just serving up software from a server. The notion of cloud is access to information from wherever you are without having to think of how to address the information by location or even filename or URL. The cloud experience gets you to your information wherever it is.

Custom

Customization and personalization is not just cosmetic - it adapts the intranet to how individuals actually work and think. There may need to be common elements presented to all employees so that they can have a shared base of knowledge and experience.  Customization also presents challenges to support desks who don’t know exactly what an employee may be looking at when faced with a problem.  However, customization (as with other features) can happen explicitly and implicitly. Implicitly as usage patterns are observed, much like Facebook or Google customize views based on what it calculates as relevant to you. Customized collections of information sources or feeds make it easier for employees to have the information they need or use most where it is most conveniently accessed.  Finally, many platforms now have an ability to support user-selectable widgets and plug-ins.

Programmable

Programmability of an intranet can include lower-level APIs to the data or interface so that modifications or mashups can be created by people with both access credentials and technical capabilities or resources.

Data feeds can also be made available through RSS or other machine-consumable formats.

Finally, mashup toolkits like Zembly Yahoo Pipes make it easier for individuals to construct apps or widgets that incorporate multiple data sources.

Emergent Intelligence

The intranet is getting smarter through more capable, semantic and social software in the platform, through the experience and knowledge that accumulates through its operation, and in the experience of the groups who create, manage, maintain and use the intranet.  This results in the emergence of new collaborative capabilities in any company. There will be a real trend toward serendipitous, unexpected ideas and innovations enabled by these new smart intranets.  That’s my final prediction.

Summary

It’s easy to see in retrospect how these trends all interrelate. The challenge is to work in any of these areas while being aware of consequences and opportunities in all of them.

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