Building Social Intranets

Intranet Portals are often sooooo boring. They start out as dry static places with official snippet of words from the CEO or a vision statement, and a few stale articles and links scattered in mega menus. Ultimately users turn to search or simply click on their links that they hope don’t move around too much.

Social Networks are these fresh places where employees engage with each other. They are the new IM and Chat conversations and those that adopt them can’t live without them, but others see it as a waste of time… What work is being done? What good can come of it? The conversation is COMPLETELY unstructured.

Team sites are silos, no one is in charge of making sure the site looks good, and the data is scattered. What’s new, who has done what? The great part is work gets done. The information and heart of the company is in these small sites that contain the documents and information that the business lives off, but no one knows which of the thousands of sites to use, and where is that one source of truth everyone talks about?

Combine these concepts and you end up with a Social Intranet… the Enterprise water cooler and hub where engagement, hard business process, and unstructured work gets done. Sites and workspaces need to exist, but not in a vacuum. In this session, we talk through the building this new experience of taking the best of what we learn from twitter, facebook, and linkedIn and take it to the enterprise to build experiences in your Intranet portals that start to make sense.

Here are just a few of the experiences we talk through:

• Notifications
• Subscriptions & Personalization
• Enterprise Social Sharing
• Making people the focus and the pivot
• Enterprise Microblogging
• Dynamic Content Relevance

I’ll share my personal experiences as I transform a SharePoint 2010 portal into a Social Intranet. (Obviously my awesome designers and developers do the hard work. I just get to showcase it.)

Here’s my deck: Social Intranets which I’m delivering in for Sharing the Point in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo Uruguay; Santiago, Chile and in Antarctica! Follow the crew! @sharingthepoint #STPSA

http://www.slideshare.net/joeloleson/building-social-intranets