Ideas to Make Your Intranet More Interesting

In-house internet aims to recapture staff attention: Given the level of user apathy about most intranets, companies are trying to make their intranets more interesting to use. There are some interesting ideas here:

[…] people logging on to Kuoni’s Kiss (Kuoni Information Service for Staff) intranet will be greeted by rotating photos of new joiners and pictures of staff get-togethers. The site also hosts travel blogs written by overseas staff researching the company’s holiday packages.

Unsurprisingly, technology companies have some of the most diverting intranets. Microsoft lets employees upload videos and photos of meetings or events or set up community sites for company social and sports clubs like kite-surfing and football. Hewlett-Packard ran a competition to see who could write the best blog about the Cannes film festival, which the company sponsored, and IBM’s intranet hosted a contest to see who could produce the best video clip on the subject of innovation.

One reason in particular for making your intranet more interesting is a good one.

[…] young recruits to companies are comfortable with social networking sites such as Facebook and Youtube; some businesses are even looking at putting Second Life-style virtual world technology on their intranets.

I don’t know about Second Life in particular, but it’s true that new employees are much more likely to be “Web 2.0 conversant” than ever before. When a majority of your new hires have Facebook accounts, you need to offer more than just announcements and the cafeteria menu to get them interested.