Spice Up Your Social Internet Online Course.
Social media is pretty much everywhere in our society. Most internet users are on at least one social site, and more people are signing up for these networks daily. Greater portions of our lives are being tied into social sites, particularly as Facebook and Twitter have been becoming further integrated with many sites and applications on the internet and on many mobile devices as well.
Enterprise is getting more social as well, and a social intranet is being adapted by more and more businesses and companies of all types around the globe. These can help to keep information fresh and to further engage employees, but there are things you can do to make them better. The following tips serve as a quick online course that can help you spice up your social intranet.
Table of Contents
Engage users
The best thing you can do to spice up your social intranet is to engage your users. There are many methods that can work for you, and depending on the characteristics of your firm and the preferences of your staff, some may work better than others. You probably will want to employ several different strategies in order to land on one that works.
Involving key staff members in evaluating the intranet and asking employees for feedback is one way. Not only will this let you know what the staff would like to see, but it makes these team members feel like the social intranet is theirs in some way, and this will definitely make them more engaged.
Make sure your intranet is truly social
For a legitimate social intranet, you need two things. The first is the ability for anyone to create the content there. The second would be the ability to know who has created the content and allowing users some way to connect with these folks.
If your social intranet isn’t truly social, it is time to work on that. All staff members should be able to write content, and all of that content should be connected to an actual person. This forges connections among your staff and makes the pages more human. Again, if this doesn’t sound like your intranet, you should consider using software to help you spice things up and make it truly social.
Add further functionality
To truly spice up your social intranet, it should be made to be about more than just content and connections based on the content. Your social intranet can be something more.
Further functionality could include a way to expose your staff to who their colleagues are and what they want to work on and what they are thinking about. You could then group like-minded employees in networks, or give them the option to group themselves, so the content they share will automatically be seen by others in the group, sparking creativity and upping productivity.
Include search
Simple search functionality can do a lot to spice up your social intranet; be sure to include it. By giving your intranet a search tool, even the most basic, it would allow your staff to discover more. It would allow people access to more content, helping them to tap into the collective knowledge of their colleagues even quicker and easier.
And more…
A social intranet is very beneficial, and you want to be sure that you optimize your intranet to get the most benefit from it. This quick online course describes some pointers you should try, but there is much more to it. From consultants to software makers, there are many social intranet solutions available that can bring you the things listed here and more. However you choose to do it, you should definitely take steps to spice up your social intranet; the benefits in creativity and productivity will be well worth it.
