IBF paper on managing news on your intranet

IBF (intranet benchmarking forum) has released a paper on how to manage the news on your intranet.

“Driven in large part by their experience on the Web, employees want up-to-the-minute information delivered in a lively, innovative and credible fashion. Employees want useful information, and they want it now. What’s more, they want to be able to debate the issues of the day and drive the whole news agenda.

In particular, IBF sets out eight good practices, including:
1. Leveraging employees to enhance the value of your internal news
2. Making content real, relevant and fresh
3. Making way for the digital C-Suite (CEO, CIO, CFO; aka the C-suite – read a great forbes article on C suite here)
4. Expanding your definition of news
5. Making news easy to access anytime, anywhere
6. Engaging employees in conversation; communication is a team sport
7. Teaching employees how to fish
8. Creating a continuous feedback loop

Personally I would suggest to ‘divide to conquer’: categorize the general news (geographical / departemental / personal interests) so only the important stuff gets through to your users, and work with separate news channels. This will allow the users to only see the news that is important for them, and not the rest.

In my job, I get emails all the time on what the top level management is doing and when a certain system is going to be down..That information is not always really ment for me.Working this way would mean a lot lesser “digital news landfill” and I would begin to read this news, as now I am just throwing it away..

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.