7 techniques for improving your intranet

Part webinar, part conference call, part podcast, the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s Intranets Live invited Ragan Communications CEO Mark Ragan to join in this week as one of four guests, along with SAS Internal Communications Manager Becky Graebe, Socialcast CEO Tim Young and IKEA Intranet Manager Linda Tinnert.

Graebe and Tinnert showed off their company intranets, and Young spent some time taking the webinar’s nearly 160 participants for a spin through Socialcast’s Facebook-like interface.

The 90-minute webinar offered a ton of great information about intranets and the future of internal communication, but for the sake of brevity (more on that later), here are seven useful tips for communicators:

1. Bring what’s outside in. A company’s intranet “sometimes resembles a dumpster,” Ragan said, with long articles, boring columns and hard-to-find information. Intranets should look more like the most appealing parts of the Internet, he argued. As Young demonstrated SocialCast, Intranets Live host Paul Levy remarked that it looked a lot like Facebook. Young said that was intentional, so it would be easier for employees to use without a huge learning curve. “We wanted to reduce that starting friction,” he said.