 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Snap – Internal Communications Solutions.
Hot Tips for Internal Communicators
Design for your culture
Does your Intranet brand walk your company’s talk?
Are you, your staff, and your organisation happy with the way information is presented, and the way
your Intranet works? Do the tools and technology suit your organisation?
There is nothing like walking the talk to cement your company branding and to get staff on board with it.
The look and feel of the Intranet, the way it works, and the content should reflect your company’s
values. An inefficient, old-school Intranet with out-of-date content is not a good look for a company that
wants fresh ideas and positive attitudes.
However, it is important to recognise your culture. Do you have a young, tech-savvy workforce in an
organisation with a flat structure, or is the structure hierarchical with predominantly older workers who
may feel uncomfortable with new technology? Most likely it is somewhere in between. Adopt technology
solutions and practices that will appeal to your employee demographic and fit with your company culture.
Jakob Nielsen, commenting on Intranet design winners, noted that social networking technologies were
being used in ‘restrained ways’ to highlight important information.
Even the most low tech staff can find value in social media technologies given time and appropriate
encouragement. For example, many staff may want to be able to tap into social networking tools to do
things like organise car pooling or to get other employees involved in a staff sports team. Once they are
familiar with these tools, they can and will use them for more business related applications; for example,
for individual departments to help the rest of the company understand their role and achievements, or for
sales staff to share the substance of customer interactions.
Try these Snap Tools
Your company culture and demographic may mean that tools like blogs and forums are simply not
appropriate or acceptable to senior managers. There may be fears around loss of control or the
impact of disengaged staff. Under these circumstances, why not consider a tool like Snap Mag?
Snap Mag enables you to distribute ‘safe discussion’ directly to the employee’s computer screen.
Snap Mag is a medium that supports ‘user generated’ content but in a more controlled way than
either a blog or a forum. Any member of staff can click to submit articles or comments into the
‘magazine’. An editor simply reviews and approves articles prior to publication. Snap Mag provides a
means to involve and engage staff with greater editorial control.
If your company culture does suit the use of social media tools consider Snap Blog or Snap Forum.
These are fully managed, secure, hosted applications which are quick and cost effective to
implement. The level of IT involvement required to set these tools up is minimal. This permits you to
quickly and easily try concepts out, test uptake and evolve the use of such tools without the need for
‘big project’ budget or resource.
Snap Blog and Snap Forum are also user friendly. Automatic user authentication via the Snap client
means that the network is fully secure and does not require the use of user names and passwords.
Administrators can quickly and easily set up new forums or blogs and specify which employee groups
have posting, commenting, and view rights.