>I’ve been looking at an experiment from Google called “living stories” today and thinking — man, that’s actually more like how so-called “news” works on an intranet. Er, well, IBM’s intranet anyway.

We are very, very selective about what we put on the homepage for the entire 400,000-person workforce at IBM. Naturally, this means the stories we put there tend to be less newsy and more like feature articles. But they still pretend to be linked to a moment in time, which presents some problems in navigational, content-freshness, search-results etc etc. Basically, we end up trying to cram topic-index pages into the news well on the homepage because the news well is what we’ve got. I think the idea of intranet news has long-ago broken down and the Living Stories project could be an interesting approach.

In seeing the way Living Stories works on the internet, I could see creating a similar model for an intranet news portal…that is to say, thematic think-pieces/aggregation points organized by subject. It doesn’t matter necessarily if Google’s Living Stories back end is fully automated or populated by content-management elves because on an intranet it would be curated by communications staff and augmented with socially-derived data such as the most-clicked intranet search results for related terms etc. Perhaps there could be a community angle too — as in, interested people self-proclaiming and contributing content, volunteering to contacted etc.

Yes, we do actually have breaking news stories, but typically they are relevant only to subsets of the entire employee audience. And so we publish those to our profiles-driven, personalized intranet homepage only for those selected employees (e.g. new benefits information for Brazilian employees only appears on the homepage for Brazilians etc.)

Anyway, nice move on Google’s part — I like the idea for Living Stories and could see taking a similar approach for non-news on an intranet.

>I’m trying out a new bookmarklet that makes reading on the web soooo much nicer. Check it out for yourself here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Here’s a super quick tutorial.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3445774&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Readability : An Arc90 Lab Experiment from Arc90 on Vimeo.

>I’ve been thinking a lot about intranets as a set of services rather than a destination website. This blog is an example of a service that could be set up as part of the ‘intranet’ experience. I should say that IBM has an amazing internal blogging system — literally tens of thousands of IBMers (including myself) participate there. And yet it’s all locked away behind the firewall. Sure, much of it is inside baseball and so it deserves to be just conversation among IBMers, but wouldn’t it be even more powerful if the stuff that doesn’t need that level of privacy could be externalized easily? I mean, here I am blogging outside the firewall anyway, and the benefit of it is only peripherally accruing to IBM. A company-managed external blogging system is one way to enable employees to demonstrate their expertise in ways that may actually attract more clients and build the brand image of your company. I am not even talking about an IT platform necessarily — the service could be simply orchestrating and employee-focused program to get them blogging. Show them how, provide the air-cover needed etc.

Same thing goes for tagging, social bookmarking, other kinds of content publishing etc etc.

>I just met with Alan Hodgson of the United Nations Volunteers group — he found me while looking for a good model for alumni networks. I’m flattered — IBM has a big group, but it always feels like we’re running behind. Oh, and for those of you who don’t know, in addition to being the Editor in Chief of IBM’s intranet, I m the manager of our global alumni program, which is called the Greater IBM Connection.

At any rate, he asked my advice as he starts setting up an alumni group for the UN Volunteers…we spent a half hour on the phone but it boiled down to this:

1. Make sure you have really nailed your program goals — awareness and engagement look good on paper, but don’t really mean much. What do you want this group of people to do? Donate money? Come back for more volunteer opportunities?
2. Same goes for the value to participants — don’t assume you know what all the alumni want, ask them. We were surprised when we asked former IBM alumni and they ranked connecting with peers and access to IBM intellectual capital above career advice and job opportunities.
3. Use your email list very judiciously — if people get a sense that joining your network will just fill their inbox with spam, forget it. There’s a reason God invented Tivo.
4. Don’t get hung up on establishing participants’ identity with 100% certainty. Doing so is expensive. In all likelihood most of the people who join are legit, and if they’re not, it will quickly become clear. (And you can toss them out of your platform.)
5. Have a presence on open networks (like LinkedIn and Xing) but also build a homegrown network. You can decide later where you want to apply most of your resources, but one can compliment the other — and their advantages tend to counteract eachothers’ respective disadvantages. A basic group on many open social networks costs nothing or very, very little to maintain.
6. Let negative criticism happen on your site — instead of banning it or addressing it directly, keeps lots of great content flowing into your network that emphasizes the great things your alumni are doing. That sets a positive tone on the site and will, hopefully, get the conversation flowing in a positive direction. Make sure you highlight your alumni — much more than your institution. However, when there is negative criticism about the program itself, address it directly (e.g. comments about the website etc)

So yeah, it was fun to share with Alan what I’ve been learning about running a corporate alumni program. Will be interesting to see how things shape up for him.