Important Steps to Keeping Your Intranet Sticky

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An Intranet is only as good as the visitor traffic. Follow these simple steps to create an Intranet that is frequently visited and even more valuable for your company.

Make an Exceptional User Interface
In most cases the user interface is the last thing companies think about when deploying an Intranet. However, it should really be the first thing to consider. If you want your staff to spend part of their work day within the Intranet, the user interface has to be intuitive, easy to use, and visually appealing.

Create New Content Daily
Many Intranets only contain information that is outdated by the time it's posted. Think of your Intranet as a daily newspaper for your company, and make sure that the news is really new. Your staff will disregard the Intranet if you don't keep the information up to date.

Find out What they Want to Know
And not only does the content have to be timely, it also has to be relevant. Cover the topics that people are interested in. And how can you figure out what people are interested in? Ask them! Many intranets have survey and polling capabilities built in. Use these features to find out what people want to know about.

Decentralize Content Creation
The company web master can't possibly create and post all the data that should be in the Intranet. In many cases, this is the main reason why Intranets fail - by the time the webmaster converts the raw data into HTML and posts it to the Intranet, the information is out-dated.

You should be able to decentralize the content creation so that people throughout the organization who have information that would make interesting reading can post it themselves. Of course, you'll need some policies around this, but if you can make it work it will have the additional benefit of making the Intranet seems like everyone's tool.

For example, ask the sales manager to post recent sales figures, and selling tips, etc. Celebrate new clients and successful projects. Post information on the competition. Post production reports, case studies, and customer feedback. Put up information on new products and services. Have people tell stories of interesting experiences they have had with customers.

Build a Community Center
You may also want to have a spot for each department's gossip - birthdays, bowling team results, service awards. Introduce new hires. Have a spot to post photos, and have a monthly photo contest with a different theme each month. Best Sunset, Funniest Moment, Best Sports Photo, Biggest Fish, Flowers, Animals, Pets, Kids.

As the Intranet becomes a rich part of the daily dialog inside the company, you'll also have to think about removing old information, or archiving it, so that the system doesn't get filled up. Think about the "half-life" of the information - when it's getting stale, take it off! This will create an Intranet that is alive rather then static, one that people will be happy to use in the natural course of doing their work.

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