Volume 8, March 27, 2000

Intranet Marketing 101
by Scott Kirsner, CIO Web Business, Section 2, December 1, 1999, p. 40

"Building an intranet is one thing. Getting people to use it is another." (p. 36) "The remedy for this disappointment has three main elements:"

• "Intranets must be relevant and useful. Most companies design their intranets around what they want employees to know rather than what employees are interested in." (p. 36)
• "Intranets must be updated at lightning speed. Employees should get news there first." (p. 36)
• "Company intranets need to be backed by strong internal communication programs." (p. 36)

Advice on making the intranet an indispensable resource:

• "The best thing to do is work backward from your customer." (p. 36) Invite input from the students.
• "Some processes exist only on the Web." (p. 38)
• "Intranet developers stress that fresh information is vital." (p. 38) "We change the home page every day." (p. 38)
• Move toward decentralized publishing. PricewaterhouseCoopers has "25 people work full time on the intranet and as many as 500 people contribute to it." (p. 38)
• "Intranet developers who have high-level sponsorship report much higher adoption rates." (p. 38)
• "Signs and posters can also help introduce employees to a new intranet (or simply new features)." (p. 38)
• "Ketchums’ Kessling has held contests to get employees to use certain parts of the intranet; earlier this year, if you updated your personal and contact information, you were entered in a raffle." (p. 38)
• "It’s important that all the promotion and communication not come from a single source." (p. 38)

"We want to know what’s being used, what’s not being used. If it’s not being used, we expire it and see what else we can do." (p. 38)