Getting good content for your intranet was never easy. Very often, it requires countless interactions with whoever want to listen to you in order to squize from them a few ideas that can become publishable content.

Yet, I would argue that there is a better way, that delivers valuable content, with strong business impact and with a lot less effort.

First, I would like to start with the word “content” itself. If you start thinking about it, the word content is used mainly in connection with a website.

It is used by IT to describe what needs to be managed by a website (also known as a content management system). It is also used by marketing and communications people to describe the very outcome of their work.

It is not about “content”

Yet the word “content” is seldom used by businesspeople. It is very unlikely that you will hear it when you will be talking to any customer facing role in a bank or in most central support functions. Bussinespeople vocabulary is very different and if you want your work to have a positive impact in their life you will have to learn their challenges and how a good intranet will help them achieve their goals.

To to achieve their operational objectives, the “content” that businesspeople use has one of the following forms:

• Forms, procedures, work instructions, FAQs
• Operational changes, challenges, and achievements
• Best practices, motivational resources
• Learning resources, Learning beans, lessons learned

Helping businesspeople enhance and structure these types of content, making them easy to consume by their intended audience will help them improve their operations.

Not all businesspeople are equal when it comes to operational communication

For a long time, I chased anyone who wanted to listen to me.

After a while I realized that for the people too high in the orgchart, these day-to-day aspects were not really not showing up on their radar.

Going randomly at low level on the orgchart can be also a problem as you must align the challenges you can solve with the job objectives of the employee you are speaking with.

The people you might want to engage are the process owners that have distributed audiences. The way to help them is to make them understand that if the intranet becomes the delivery support system for their processes, their life and the life of their internal customers will become much better.

Because the process owners are directly interested in maintaining a good communication with their internal customers, getting them to produce “content” is not really a problem, because will be more or less the same content that otherwise is getting email or communicated over the phone.   

There are a few other key aspects the process owners will be very interested to optimize with the help of the intranet: reduce support costs, increase compliance, or facilitate change management. This is an area where your contribution is also invaluable.

So, I would say that by approaching the right kind of people within the organization with the right kind of approach, delivering the right kind

Publicat de Cristian SALANTI pe Linkedin

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/missing-great-content-your-intranet-start-asking-else-salanti/  

 #intranet #digitalworkplace #content #businessprocesses