Integration of social media on intranet was the trend of 2010. But despite much experimentation, no major breakthroughs were reported. In fact, 2011 was the year of stagnation. This year, many organizations want to invest in internal social media applications. What is the best thing for them to do? This article discusses the state of affairs of the social intranet in 2012, part 4 in the series 'Intranet developments & success factors 2012'.
What has happened in recent years in the field of social intranet?
Social media integration was the intranet trend of 2010, according to experts such as Toby Ward , Jane McConnell and Jakob Nielsen . Since then, many organizations have started experimenting. But we have not really gotten any further. Lack of (new) leadership and attention to cultural change, behavior and attitude of employees turned out to be the biggest obstacles. Yet there is hope: according to the trend reports of Nielsen and McConnell, most organizations will invest in internal social media applications this year.
2011: year of standstill
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“2012 is the beginning of a new era of going beyond social tools, building collaborative cultures, and, more importantly, integrating social features into daily business processes”, says intranet expert Jane McConnell in her latest research report 'Digital Workplace Trends 2012 ', in which she maps the status of intranet worldwide. A beautiful vision, but if you take a closer look at the results of the research, you can only come to one conclusion: for many organizations, this is still a pipe dream.
Only 8% of organizations fully implement social collaboration
More and more organizations are experimenting with social tools: the percentage that 'does something with social media' in one way or another increased by 10%. But the percentage of organizations that, convinced by the experimentation, introduce social collaboration organization-wide, remained the same: only 8% of the organizations in the study. And it is precisely this organization-wide, and above all integrated use of social functions that determines the success of a social intranet.
But before I delve further into the reason why social collaboration is lagging behind, here is an overview of the different types of social features and tools that are being deployed — separately or integrated:
Content creation and knowledge sharing Blogs, podcasting, video sharing, social algeria phone number list bookmarking, tagging, commenting on content, rating content. More and more organizations are using these tools.
Network and discussion
Forums, microblogs and status updates, social network functions ('become friends', 'link'), extended ('rich media') profiles.
Except for forums, these functionalities are still used to a limited extent.
Real-time communication
Presence/absence status, chat (IRC) and instant messaging, desktop and room-based videoconferencing, and real-time collaboration on documents. While videoconferencing and chat have been used by most organizations for years, working on a document simultaneously is still relatively new.
Collective intelligence
Online idea boxes, crowdsourcing and wikis. This category of functionalities is used the least. There is a logical explanation for this: successful use of these tools touches the heart of the organisation (culture): they intervene more than other tools in the way our organisations are set up and managed.
LivePerson CEO sets a good example with a video blog (source: Intranet Design Annual 2012, Nielsen Norman Group).
The management part of the intranet, which allows content to be published, is often complex. At NCR Corporation, they pay extra attention to this and the employee is guided through the publishing process in a step-by-step plan (source: Intranet Design Annual 2012, Nielsen Norman Group).