12 ways to improve intranet articles

A content manager’s guide to enlivening articles submitted to the intranet

Unfortunately, the main tool of employee communications often is an assemblage of dry intranet articles that make us creative-minded content managers sigh heavily.

Many organizations’ intranets are utilized first and foremost as post boards, collections of “articles’ that more resemble press releases submitted by departments, clubs or groups, instead of resembling articles in print publications.

I am hereby challenging the receive-and-post cycle, vowing to make those articles read like actual articles while not offending the submitters, my customers.

It’s a miniature revolution, for sure. And I’m an army of one, captain of only my ingenuity, preceded in marching by a drummer boy that is really a windup, cymbal-clanging toy monkey. Nonetheless, it’s a worthwhile revolution. Intranet articles typically allow only a short amount of time to hook the reader and make him or her look forward to reading more. That’s the goal for content managers—employees treating the intranet as a place they want to go to get news, not as a place they have to go.

Enticing intranet readers is not that hard if you practice good journalism. Here’s how: