Interesting elsewhere: social strategy, intranet content and digital working

The four Intranetizens like to read articles, books and blog posts on a variety of topics.

Despite one of us becoming a dad (again) and one of us being in Egypt, we still managed to publish three (yes – three! plus this one!) posts this week, as well as find time to read all of these great articles.

This weeks Interesting Elsewhere features posts from Intranet practitioners in Canada, Sweden, Australia, France and Great Britain (but none from the US!)

Here’s what caught our attention this week:

• A definitive guide to social intranet strategy: Carolyn Douglas cites Toby Ward  in a definitive guide to social intranet strategy that emphasises – its not about the technology.
• A new take on Intranet news: Jesper Bylund from City of Malmö, Sweden shares how he took a user focused approach to changing news from being an Intranet dead end, to being the start of a conversation.
• What’s filling your pie?: Kelly Freeman –  Internal Comms Manager for Superdrug draws on similarities between Intranet design and making the perfect pie to show why all the dainty aesthetic flourishes you like won’t compensate for a lack of quality content.  We think she’s been watching too much Great British bake off (so have we), but it’s all good advice and contains some great tips for ensuring you focus on the right things.
• Has work changed since the London 2012 Olympics: Mark ‘Intranet Pioneer’ Morrell reflects on the legacy of the London Olympics and asks if working practices have changed. Something we talked about in July and predicted at the start of the year.
• Intranet card sorting: Ephraim Freed over at Thought Farmer gives us a guide to card sorting that talks through the basics and touches on some of the unique issues of card sorting for intranets.
• Best practices for SharePoint intranets: Step Two release a new report, “Best Practices for SharePoint Intranets” which features a couple quotes from Intranetizens own Jonathan Phillips.  While a few chapters are very focused on SharePoint, much of the advice applies equally to any platform.
• IBF call for responses to a survey asking about how you manage content.  Everyone who takes part gets a copy of the report, so if you have a few minutes fill it out.  But not before you have taken part in JMC’s Digital Workplace Trends survey which we talked about earlier this week.
• Free benefits of Digital Working report: IBF’s sister company, the Digital Workplace Forum has also been busy this week and has published a free report that details the benefits of digital working.

What made us chuckle…

Google have ruined the favorite game of lonely movie nerds everywhere by taking all of the fun out of “Degrees of Kevin Bacon” and building a Bacon Number calculator into search.