By Jill Purse, May 22, 2013

ThoughtFarmer 6.5 Avocado is coming soon! Here’s a sneak peak of a key change: enhanced liking.

Thumbs up for the “Like” button

What do we “like” best about Avocado? We’re introducing Like button enhancements to help you spread positivity around your organization.

Screenshot - Like intranet news items directly from the home page

Like posts directly from the home page

What’s changing?

ThoughtFarmer has had the familiar “thumbs up” button for years, allowing users to signal when they like a page. Based on client feedback, we’re now extending this capability to comments as well as newsfeed items. Additionally, users can now click on the Like count to see which particular users have liked a page, comment, or newsfeed item.

[Screenshot] See a list of who liked each item

See who liked it

How does this benefit your organization?

We’re all familiar with liking on social sites like Facebook. But how does it affect an internal system where the audience is employees?

Increased Newsfeed engagement: Users can now see from the homepage which news articles and blog posts have more Likes. This creates more incentive to view highly-liked articles, especially when they can see that their peers have already liked an article.
Improved author feedback: Like count gives authors of both pages and individual comments an additional level of immediate feedback and positive reinforcement.
Better search results: Just like Google, our search looks at social signals to gauge importance of content. Posts with more likes appear higher in search results.

Like an individual comment

From our own experience testing the improved Like feature, we’ve seen quick adoption, especially in the newsfeed. Based on users’ experience with Facebook, the feature feels like second nature.

In: Events

See Live Tours of ThoughtFarmer intranets on Digital Workplace 24

By Chris McGrath, May 13, 2013

Screenshot of Sparky, ThoughtFarmer's own intranet

What’s a ThoughtFarmer intranet like in real life? Find out tomorrow when two ThoughtFarmer intranets are featured on Digital Workplace 24. DW24 is a 24-hour live online event that showcases some of the world’s most interesting intranets and digital workplaces. Best of all, it’s free! See ThoughtFarmer at the following times:

Tour 1: Sparky, ThoughtFarmer’s Own Intranet

When: Tuesday, May 14th, 9am Pacific / 12 noon Eastern / 1700 UK
Who: Gordon Ross, VP & Partner, ThoughtFarmer
What: Sparky is the collaboration engine at ThoughtFarmer. It’s a mission-critical intranet with very heavy use: an average of 47 actions per employee, per day.
More info: Screenshots of Sparky

Tour 2: Connect, URC-CHS’s Intranet

When: Tuesday, May 14th, 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 2200 UK
Who: Claire Coleman, Web Manager, University Research Co.
What: URC-CHS tackles problems like malaria and HIV. ThoughtFarmer helps their 800 people in 40 countries find the right information at the right time.
More info: Case study on URC-CHS’s ThoughtFarmer

Register now for Digital Workplace 24 >>

In: Webinars

Best Intranet Examples Client Webinar – ThoughtFarmer’s Most Impressive Intranets

By Jill Purse, May 1, 2013

Who’s growing the best intranets out there? Need some inspiration and some ideas to transform your intranet?

We recently hosted the annual ThoughtFarmer best intranet competition. We received a number of gorgeous, innovative, and collaborative social intranet entries, and we wanted to share the results with you!

If you entered the competition, please make sure you attend — we’ll be doing a live draw for the iPad winner. All entries are eligible.

Our co-founder and VP of Sales & Marketing, Chris McGrath, will share the latest and greatest from ThoughtFarmer intranets around the world.

Industries that we’ll look at include:

Financial services
Not for profit
Legal services
Engineering
Design & consulting services.
And more…

Categories that we’ll look at include:

Best-looking
Most Innovative
Best collaboration

You can see the results from our 2012 Best Intranet competition here. If you can’t make it, we’ll also be sharing a recording after the webinar. Hope to see you there.

Webinar details:

Date: Wednesday, May 8th, 2013
Time: 8:30AM Pacific / 11:30AM Eastern / 16:30 UK / 17:30 CET
Format: 30 minute presentation followed by a 15 minute discussion period.
Audience: Clients. However, if you are an analyst, an intranet nerd, or you are just interested in seeing more of what ThoughtFarmer has to offer, feel free to join us.

Register Now

In: Stories & case studies

Intranet Example – Tour of ThoughtFarmer’s Own Intranet

By Jill Purse, April 9, 2013

Ready to experience ThoughtFarmer social intranet? Get in touch for a personalized demo and free trial!

Here at ThoughtFarmer, we take the “eat your own dog food” approach to software development (how this icky-sounding metaphor became an industry standard, I’m not sure. I much prefer “drink your own champagne”). This means our company uses our social intranet in every aspect of our work — not just software testing. As early social enterprise adopters, our own intranet, “Sparky”, was recently featured as an intranet example in the Nielsen Norman Group’s (NN/group) report on Intranet Social Features. We thought this would be a good opportunity for you to “take a peak under the hood” and see how the people who design, build, sell, and support ThoughtFarmer actually use their own intranet.

The hompage of ThoughtFarmer's intranet, including newsfeeds, activity feeds, and IA

ThoughtFarmer”s social intranet “Sparky” – View of the homepage

Taking a look into Sparky, we find ourselves in a unique position. Gordon Ross, VP of ThoughtFarmer explained in the NN/group report. “We usability test our new features, both recognizing that while we are the authors of it, we’re not perhaps ideally the target users. We have a few clients our size (small) and in our general industry (creative/design oriented). But for the most part, we sell to larger organizations and testing is important to get out of the self-referential developer-oriented ‘works for me’ way of building software.”

Based on being a small-ish company, NN/group was curious just how much content we had created since the intranet’s inception in 2006. As it turns out, quite a lot. In the past seven years, our staff of 30 have made over 10,000 pages, 10,000 documents, and 11,000 comments.

In: Concept & theory

Intranet Strategy: Understanding the Impacts of Networks, Power, and Politics

By Gordon Ross, March 28, 2013

Power has been an underdeveloped concept in the rhetoric surrounding the use of social intranets. Expressions like “liberation” and “enhanced collaboration” and “empowerment” are common in marketing, but is this really the case? How does power really work in the social intranet? Who is in control? What are the opportunities of this new model? What are the risks?

Using ideas developed by communications scholar Manuel Castells and his work Communication Power, this post introduces how we can understand network power inside of organizations and contemplate its effects.

Watch the webinar recording (55 minutes long) or read the blog post (6000 words):

This blog post is divided into six sections:

I. The Way We Work
II. Politics
III. Power
IV. Networks
V. Communication Power
VI. Power & The Social Intranet

I. The Way We Work

As the description of my blog post and its title implies, I’m interested in exploring the topic of power and its relation to social intranets.

It was a few months ago that, in the midst of a particularly intense professional services engagement for one of my clients, sitting jet lagged and exhausted in a nondescript hotel room with a colleague, that I became increasingly interested and compelled to investigate the topic of power.

In looking at my notebook from that engagement, I found the following end of day notes:

fear of change
control
culture
power
the dark side of intranet deployment

I had just run an intranet strategy workshop with middle management stakeholders about the future direction of their intranet project.

In: Intranets

4 Planning and Design Patterns from Credit Union and Bank Intranet Projects

By Ephraim Freed, March 20, 2013

Not all banks are the same. But it turns out that many bank and credit union intranets fit similar patterns.

Bank Intranet Example - Assiniboine Credit Union

Assiniboine Credit Union and ThoughtFarmer worked together closely to develop a user-friendly, fit-for-purpose intranet navigation.

Over the years we’ve worked with many financial institutions. We’ve engaged with these clients in Professional Services projects of varying sizes, from speedy three-week get-’em-done’s to twelve-month behemoth efforts.

While every company needs a unique intranet tailored to its employees’ needs and the company’s culture, some very noticeable patterns have emerged.

1. Focus on customer-facing employees

There is one particularly direct way to gain social intranet adoption and deliver business value with your new intranet: Make it easy for customer-facing employees to find the information they need.

Customer-facing employees fit into several common roles:

Bank teller
Call center operator
Loan officer
Mortgage officer
Business banking officer
Branch manager

These employees are often the face of your bank and their efficacy can shape customers’ experiences.

The information these employees need spans all types of bank products and services:

Details about different account types (fees, interest rates, etc.)
Up-to-date interest rate sheets
Instructions for cancelling checks
Trouble shooting tips for using online banking
Account closure guides
Affidavit instructions for reporting unauthorized charges

By helping these employees quickly find information and do their jobs more easily you can increase their and customers’ satisfaction, which can directly impact the bottom line (see the Harvard Business Review article Beating the Market with Customer Satisfaction).

Providing this information can also drive intranet adoption and help you make the case for investing in the intranet. But how exactly do you implement this on your intranet?

In: Webinars

Free Webinar: Networks, Power, and Politics – What’s really going on inside of our social intranet?

By Jill Purse, March 15, 2013

For years now, the intranet software world has been a buzz with the potential that social intranet features provide — the potential for an empowered, collaborative, and open organization. These organizations are much bigger than just the social intranet, however. They are complex organisms of norms, values, politics, and culture. In order to fully realize this potential, we must better understand how communication works within this larger system.

Gordon Ross, VP of ThoughtFarmer, recently discussed this concept of “Networks, Power, and Politics” in a keynote talk at IntraTeam 2013. As head of our Professional Services team, he has worked on the front lines of numerous organizational changes and understands that implementing a social intranet is much more than just clicking ‘install now’.

Gordon Ross presenting at IntraTeam 2013

He believes that we, as intranet professionals of all sorts, need to develop a literacy, an understanding of power, of culture, and in particular of how they work in the context of networks if we are going to seek to have any kind of influence or chance of succeeding with our aspirations and visions of a more responsive, humanistic, resilient organization.

You’re invited to explore this topic in our one hour, free webinar: Networks, Power, and Politics – What’s really going on inside of our social intranet?

Date: Wednesday, Mar 27th, 2013
Time: 8:30AM Pacific / 11:30AM Eastern / 15:30 UK / 16:30 EU
Format: 40 minute presentation followed by a 20 minute discussion period.

Who should attend? This webinar is intended for intranet managers, communications professionals, HR employees, and IT staff who want to better understand the invisible interpersonal networks that constitute the social relations of our workplace and govern our intranet relationships.

In: In the news

ThoughtFarmer featured in Nielsen Norman Group’s Report on Enterprise Intranets and Social Features

By Jill Purse, March 13, 2013

In their latest report, Intranet Social Features, Nielsen Norman Group (NN/group) found that companies who invested in social enterprise tools early on are now yielding major benefits.

The 22 companies interviewed explain how social enterprise features have made an impact in their organization. We’re proud to tell you that our very own ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet, “Sparky”, was one of the featured social intranets. The NN/group rounded up trends across all analyzed intranets and compared them to previous intranet studies, providing interesting insight into the past, present, and future of social enterprise software. Here’s a brief recap of some of their most interesting findings.

NN/group found that “social tool infractions remain rare.” We’ve heard concerns about employees inappropriately using social tools, and we’ve even hosted a webinar on Overcoming Executive Fear of Social Intranets. Despite the fear that employees will unleash secrets, dissent in public, or share unprofessional personal info, NN/group found that “as long as attribution is built in and required, communities police themselves.” Trust in social enterprise tools seems to be increasing, and NN/group also noted a “major increase in management support of social features.”

The NN/group confirmed that “community management is vital in social environments.” We’re happy to see growing awareness around the value that intranet managers provide. The fundamental truth about good intranets is that they result from good intranet managers. From engagement to governance to technical problems, this individual or team creates the foundation to social enterprise interaction. If you are an intranet manager, or are looking to hire one, we have a handy e-book on the subject.

In: Events

IntraTeam 2013 Copenhagen – a Great Intranet Conference

By Gordon Ross, March 9, 2013

Having helped organize and sponsor a conference for a couple of years, and having attended and spoken at a few myself, I think I can confidently say that IntraTeam 2013 in Copenhagen was one of the most well organized, informative, and delightful conferences I’ve ever been to.

A panorama the audience during my talk at IntraTeam.

Kurt Kragh Sørensen and his event organizers crafted three days of education, hands-on activities, and most importantly, great conversation. As a group that facilitates intranet communities of practice in Denmark and Sweden, Kurt and IntraTeam clearly have some practice at this. But the feeling of being at an event with such a great community basis sets it aside from other conference experiences. “Some of you might think you’ve walked into a family party, so many of us know each other,” said Kurt in his Thursday morning conference opening remarks. And it’s true – the conviviality, the camaraderie, and the general civility of the whole thing was really quite lovely.

I ran a workshop on using archetypes and personas in intranet design and change management on Wednesday and had 10 brave attendees who stuck with me for the better part of the entire day, running through a narrative and sense making exercise, which derived five archetypes.

Workshop on Intranet Personas

I then delivered a rather theoretical and formal presentation on Thursday, covering the topic of Communication Power and the Social Intranet; investigating the ideas of Manuel Castells, power, networks, and their relationship to the new forms of organizational and interpersonal communication afforded by technologies like social intranets.

In: In the news

Credit Union Journal Features ThoughtFarmer Intranet Case Study

By Chris McGrath, February 25, 2013

Our client Assiniboine Credit Union (ACU) was featured in last week’s issue of Credit Union Journal.

The article explains how ACU approached needs analysis and vendor selection. It also highlights how the credit union’s new social intranet has improved knowledge exchange.

ThoughtFarmer is a mission-critical business tool at ACU. The article explains:

78% of Assiniboine CU’s staff uses the intranet at least once per hour. On average, all employees login in the morning, check various feeds such as member service, employee communications or news about the teams and groups to which they’ve been assigned. They keep the site open in a browser tab and refer back to it throughout the day.

Read the full article here (registration required).

Contributors

Darren Gibbons

President & Co-creator
Chris McGrath

Co-creator
Gordon Ross

Vice President
Bryan Robertson

Senior Analyst
Ephraim Freed

Marketing & Professional Services
Jill Purse

Sales & Marketing Coordinator

Twitter

Twitter: thoughtfarmer

Indeed! Filters help. RT @socmedsean: Social Intranet Best Practices – Provide Users With An Advanced Search Option http://t.co/GxUo2tFtVV about 5 hours ago
RT @felmundo: Digital Workplace and Intranet : the 2013 trends http://t.co/4qfFDKQ5VV Blue collars get it & Social and structure can be tog… about 5 hours ago
You'll "Like" the New Features in ThoughtFarmer 6.5 Avocado - Introducing an enhanced like button: http://t.co/837Q4TS4vy #socbiz about 8 hours ago