Yesterday I gave the keynote presentations at Intranätdagarna (Intranet Days) 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden. A friendly crowd, and some great presentations from the other speakers.

The talk shared in this post looked at social tools within organisations, a hot topic for many. My key points:

• There are many different types of “social tools”, under the one umbrella, all working in different ways.
• You can’t change the culture of the organisation using social tools.
• Social tools are only interesting when they help the business, meeting a need or solving a problem.
• Business value is delivered in the way tools are used, rather than from the tools themselves.
• When it comes to business benefits, focus on concrete outcomes (eg customer service, product development), rather than “soft” goals (such as improving communications or knowledge sharing).
• Get out into the organisation, understand operational needs, and deliver great solutions.

The video from British Airways I played was a great hit, as was the $8million of savings from AEP.

There was also palpable enthusiasm for social tools amongst participants at the Intranätdagarna (Intranet Days) conference in Stockholm today. This is feeling like the “topic of the moment” for intranet and comms teams.

There’s no doubt that social tools provide a powerful new way of connecting people with people in organisations. These tools are increasingly effective, easy to use, cheap and transformative. But there’s some serious over-enthusiasm and naïvety about the impact of these tools.

When asked about why social tools are such a focus, comms and intranet teams say:

“We want to help people connect with other people.”

“We want to break through silos to connect the organisation together.”

“We want to enable two-way communication with staff.”

“We want to create a collaborative, knowledge-sharing culture.”

“We want to reshape the way the organisation works together, from the bottom up.”

These are all interesting goals, but in response I have to say:

You can’t change corporate culture using social tools.

Simply rolling out new tools, particularly as part of a pilot, will not magically change the organisation and its culture. There are also growing concerns that collaboration tools will simply reinforce existing silos, rather than break through them.

While there is a clear need and opportunity for social tools, we must:

• set clear, business-focused, objectives for social tools
• recognise where social tools will, and won’t, work
• use tools to support, rather than drive, culture change
• focus on gaining adoption
• be realistic about the cultural impact of social tools

If you have an organisation where business areas don’t work with each other, don’t think that this will be solved by deploying social tools. If there is a business goal of transforming the organisation, by all means support this with the deployment (and adoption) of social tools.

But let’s never forget that connecting people is about people, not the tools we deploy.

Social media has evolved from distracting fun to hype to significant mainstream adoption over the last 18 months or so. Will the intranet remain unaffected by this? Or are there any emerging signs from intranets in social businesses that could provide some clues to what the future is likely to bring?

While the post makes some valuable points, I don’t agree that intranets become the “legacy” application once social media tools have been deployed. This is the fallacy seen for years in the ECM and information management space: deploy a new tool, and it replaces everything that came before. Instead, reality shows that new tools sit alongside existing investments, and ultimately merge together.

Still, I agree that intranets are changing (and should!). We live in interesting times…

Where every organization should include specifics for social media use, if your organization does not have a separate, superfluous social media policy (that’s right, a social media policy is largely superfluous if you have proper governance and content / editorial policies in place. Someone will make a point of arguing this with me and I will wipe the floor with them), are specific rules in the Terms of Use that spell out the dos and don’ts for contributing content. Additionally, these rules should also be covered, if not already, in your Employee Handbook or Employee Conduct Manual, that all employees agree to at the time of employment (if your organization is responsible enough to have one).

At each one, collaboration and social media was very much at the forefront – and the importance of securing a place at the top table for change to be approved. And there appeared to be a recognition that the old intranet just being used as an electronic notice board should experience not just an evolution but, in many cases, a revolution. There is widespread acceptance that the intranet, and a range of technologies now available in the digital workplace generally, should support collaboration and interaction across the workforce.

Twitter has popularised the use of #hashtags as a way to aggregate relevant tweets together. #hashtag is a special kind of tag because people learn about them before using them. For example, if I want to apply a hashtag for information architecture, I will lookup the hastags.org directory to see if I should be using “information_architecture”, “information-architecture”, “#ia” or some other hashtags, based on the original intention of the hashtag, the popularity of the hashtag, the quality of information represented by the hashtag and the type of people I want to reach. This is unlike tags, which is a typical summary of content using keywords that mean something to the originator. #hastags have this powerful self-organising ability. It is this inherent ability of #hashtags that allows us to build communities organically. This is nothing new, it was the intention of #hashtags in Twitter.

These are all intended to be out-of-the-box intranet solutions for medium-sized organisations, and they provide rich social functionality. This includes:

• team spaces
• wikis
• blogs
• social updates (eg Facebook/Twitter)
• rich personal profiles
• home-page “latest updates” displays

These solutions are clean and polished. There’s plenty of activity when you first log on, and a real sense that “something’s happening”. So far, so good.

Call me old-fashioned, but they do seem to be missing some very basic intranet capabilities. For example:

• Where do I find HR information, such as the leave policy?
• What about the leave form?
• Can I fill out forms online?
• Is there any “corporate” information at all, or is everything organised by teams?
• Where are the links to my key tools?
• From a corporate perspective, how do I manage what’s displayed on the homepage?

It seems to me that the pendulum has swung too far the other way with some of these tools. I agree completely with those who criticise “typical” intranets as being flat, boring and lacking any recognition of the human element.

That being said, abandoning all corporate information, tools, forms and processes seems like foolishness. Sure, it’s not exciting, but can we really replace these with nothing but team-level social interaction?

Am I missing something here?

I have run into the connotation of social as a term that has associative connotations to the hippy movement (the slide image Andrew uses with his presentations), socialist (non-capatalist or anti-capitalist tendencies), redundant term to use with business, and more. While most of the people who I engage with inside organizations do not have the negative connotations of social, there is normally a senior manager with ability to veto a project or put it under great scrutiny who has such connotations. I hear many people say that it may be easier to get these individuals to change their definition, but that is as naive as saying they can get a Boston Red Sox fan to believe the New York Yankees are a lovable baseball team. This transformation is rarely possible, thanks to the Cold War, 60s anti-establishment, and years of reinforcing the associations of the term social to strongly negative connotations.

I have been interested in the field of expertise location for over a decade, from back when knowledge managers were building ‘corporate yellow pages’ and other tools to find the best expertise in the organization.

Unless a large organization can bring the most relevant expertise within the firm to bear on the problems and issues at hand, it really has no reason to exist. A smaller more nimble organization could do as good a job with lower costs.

Social Media Governance recently released a list of 106 social media policies that can be drawn on, including nearly thirty from government (including the APSC’s Circular 2008/8: Interim protocols for online media participation).

I found one part of their new intranet to be very interesting…

UNHCR has a big presence on social media platforms, such as Facebook. This has sparked some early exploration of how similar platforms could be established within the organisation.

More immediately, a “Communities” page has been created on the intranet, that desbribes all the official UNHCR presences on sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Very simple, but it sends a clear message internally that these spaces are valuable and useful.

I think many organisation should have an intranet page like this. What do you think?

Social media holds great advantages, whether for improving internal collaboration, communication and social learning, or for building and enhancing trust through more responsive communications with key stakeholders and clients. Unfortunately, some organisations still hold onto a number of fears that hold them back from utilising these tools:

Below you’ll find Jeff’s 28 reasons arranged on a single page, ready to be downloaded and used as Social Media Bingo. If your organisation is still avoiding engagement with social media, see how many of Jeff’s reasons apply – and let me know how many you managed to cross off!

As people embrace social media in their private lives, they naturally expect to use similar tools within the enterprise. This is especially true for younger workers who use these tools in everyday life. Open communication, collaboration, and content generation are as much a part of their standard toolkit as using a computer or mobile phone.

So, how should companies deal with the increasing expectation that Web 2.0 will drive Enterprise 2.0?

(This is from a few weeks back, but I’ve been on holidays so thus the late posting. When even Jakob Nielsen writes about this, you know it must be going mainstream…)

An intranet manager asked me recently how to prioritise ideas about social media for the intranet. They are a global organization and are currently attempting to bring all the local intranets under the same umbrella.

They ran a workshop, and lots of ideas were proposed. People gave lots of examples and even ROI figures in many cases. (I need to say “alleged ROI figures” because some of them were familiar examples currently flung about on the internet with little or no detailed information.)

Their question to me: So now what do we do?