Custom Profile Fields are a great way to make Employee Profiles more interesting.
By default, ThoughtFarmer includes room for contact information and general profile text. However, many people don’t know what to put for their bio unless there are specific fields to fill out. That’s where Custom Profile Fields come in.
1. Go to the Administration Panel (you need administrator access) and click “User Profile Custom Fields”.
2. Create a grouping for your new custom fields, such as “All About Me”.
3. Add custom fields. Select from Rich Text, Textbox, Text and Dropdown field types, and specify the maximum length.
4. You’re done! Now your users can fill out the new fields, and they new information will appear on their profiles.
This is a guest blog post by Ephraim Freed. Ephraim is Intranet Project Lead at Oxfam America and a ThoughtFarmer customer since 2008.
Tag clouds aren’t all that helpful, especially on intranets. The real value of good tags is that they make content findable through search queries. Thomas Vander Wal gave me a great suggestion about tagging. He said that when teaching people how to come up with useful tags, get them to ask themselves the question: “What terms would I or someone else use to search for this page (or file)?”
Why? Because tags are most useful when they help the right material get found. Search engines index the terms in titles and text of a page. Web search works so well these days because web sites now offer text that includes all the right key words. Professional web writers have figured it out, but it’s hard to get every employee to write like a pro.
This is where tags come in: they supplement the terms in the title and text of an intranet page with more keywords that help the page to show up in relevant searches.
Good search = content keywords that match users’ search terms
Good search is not just the result of a magical search engine, but of good use of relevant words in content. Even with Google’s link-based algorithms, words are still the most important element of search. No search engine today, no matter how good, can make a page findable if it doesn’t include the terms that people would use to find it.
If you want good search you need good keywords in your content, and tags help to insert the right keywords without having to hire a web search optimization content writer.
The role of the intranet manager is shifting as intranets become more social, collaborative and interactive. While ensuring good, findable content is still an important part of managing an intranet, the nature of that work is changing. On a social intranet that allows employees to tag content freely, managing user-defined tags is important.
By fixing spelling errors in tags, adding relevant acronyms and creating multi-term tags, the intranet manager can increase content findability throughout the intranet. Ensuring that existing tags offer all the right key words means an intranet manager can have a broad effect on findability for content throughout the site.
3 tips for making killer tags that improve findability
I try to review our intranet’s entire tag list (almost 2,000 tags) once a month and I focus on these tag improvement tasks:
1. Fix spelling errors
Fixing misspelled tags can make many pages more findable with one fell swoop. If one user adds the tag “develpment” to a page, the next user who wants to add that word probably won’t notice when they start typing “devel” and the tag that comes up is just one letter off. But when someone tries to search using the term “development,” pages that have the miss-spelled word as a tag may not come up in search results.
2. Add multiple versions of a word to a tag
For a word with multiple versions, each of which could just as easily be used in a search query, the person adding tags to a page faces a dilemma: add all the different forms of the word, or just guess at the most popular one. This, however, doesn’t have to be an issue. The intranet manager can review tags and edit specific ones where multiple forms of word could easily be searched for. A perfect example: change the tag for “tag” to “tag, tags, tagging.” Now, all three forms of the word can be added to the page as keyword terms with just one tag.
3. Create reverse duplicates of acronym tags
I discovered that I could never know whether my users would add an acronym as a tag, or spell out a whole term. Would a user add “WTO” or “World Trade Organization?”
The solution: make sure there are two tags, each of which contains both terms. The first tag can have the acronym followed by the full term in parentheses, e.g. “WTO (World Trade Organization).” The second tag can have the term followed by the acronym, e.g. “World Trade Organization (WTO).” The end result will be that whether a user decides to add the acronym or the full term, she’ll end up adding both, and this will help make the page more findable.
How ThoughtFarmer makes good tagging possible
The ThoughtFarmer intranet software has a fabulous tagging system that enables all of the above tag improvement tasks.
Multi-word tags: ThoughtFarmer allows individual tags to include multiple words with spaces. You don’t have to insert underscores or periods or worry about adding a dozen separate individual words.
Capitalization in tags: Because ThoughtFarmer allows capital letters in tags, acronyms can be written properly and proper names are easy to add and recognize.
Characters such as commas in tags: Because commas (and other characters, such as ampersands) can be included in individual tags, creating easy to read multi-term tags is easy and seamless.
Type-search-ahead tag matching: When a user starts entering a tag she wants to add to the page, the tagging dialogue box will show a list of all matching tags in real time. This means that once one user adds a new tag, all other users will be able to re-apply that tag without needing to fully re-type it. This feature also helps with tag discovery – users will see additional tags in the matching field that they may not have originally thought of.
Tag admin panel for editing user-added tags: And a final element is the tag administration panel in ThoughtFarmer. This panel lists every single tag added within the site and allows the site administrators to edit tags individually. Once a tag is edited, the new version appears everywhere that the tag was used. One fixed tag spelling can make a hundred pages more findable. Administrators can also delete mistake and duplicate tags.
Icing on the cake: Tags well integrated in ThoughtFarmer
The icing on the folksonomy cake that is this blog post is that ThoughtFarmer does a great job of integrating tags into the site search. A ThoughtFarmer site can offer three distinct search buckets: All content, the People Directory, and the Group Page Directory:
And tag clouds and tag lists are seamlessly integrated into each of these search interfaces.
If you’re using ThoughtFarmer, I hope these tagging ideas help you get the most out of your social intranet site. And if you’re using any other software that includes tagging, I hope these tagging concepts help you increase the findability of all your important content.
I was interested to read Ubervu’s post last week about Traffic Quality – Twitter vs. Google. They shared metrics demonstrating that a web site referral from Twitter was much more valuable to them than a referral from Google.
We’ve found quite the opposite. Twitter does drive a lot of traffic. In the last 30 days, 7% of site traffic to www.thoughtfarmer.com came from Twitter, making it our #3 referrer after Google and direct visits. But compare the quality of visit:
Bounce Rate
Twitter Traffic: 67%
Google Traffic: 49%
Bing: 56%
Twitter visitors leave more quickly.
Time On Site
Twitter Traffic: 01:42
Google Traffic: 03:17
Bing: 00:03:45
Google visitors spend 90 seconds longer on our site than Twitter visitors. Bing visitors, even longer.
Pages Per Visitor
Twitter Traffic: 2.2
Google Traffic: 4.1
Bing: 5.2
A Google visitor views almost twice as many pages on our site as a Twitter visitor. Again, Bing visitors are even better.
Conversion Rate For Goals
Twitter Traffic: 0.49%
Google Traffic: 2.17%
Bing: 2.88%
This is the most important metric of all: what percentage of visitors complete a goal? Our goals include sending us an email or signing up for demo access. Notice that a Google visitor is 4 times more likely than a Twitter visitor to convert; a Bing visitor, almost 6 times more likely.
Clearly, for us here at ThoughtFarmer, traffic from Google is much higher quality than traffic from Twitter. Interestingly, Bing is even better than Google, though in terms of raw numbers, Bing delivers only 3% of the visitors that Google does.
Why were Ubervu’s results so different? Probably because they provide social media consulting, and people looking for social media consulting are more likely to be hanging out on Twitter.
Moral of the story: For most of us, Google search is still king. Don’t ignore Twitter, but beware the hype.
Friends don’t let friends model their intranets after iGoogle
Do you use iGoogle? I don’t. I played around with it once. I dragged a few widgets around the screen and thought, that’s kinda neat. Now, what was I searching for again?
Apparently there are some people that use iGoogle, judging by the outcry when they changed it slightly back in 2008. Maybe you use it too. But please, please, don’t use iGoogle as a model for your intranet home page. And don’t let a vendor sell you their uberpersonalizable drag-and-drop customizable widget-laden portal software. iGoogle is a stupid model for an intranet. Here’s why:
If Jakob Nielsen says users don’t customize, who are we to argue?
USERS DON’T CHANGE THE DEFAULTS.
What’s that, you say? You change defaults? Okay, let me reword that slightly.
95% OF USERS DON’T CHANGE THE DEFAULTS.
If they did, Google wouldn’t be willing to pay millions of dollars to Mozilla to be the default search engine in FireFox. Jakob Nielsen wouldn’t write articles about the power of defaults. And we wouldn’t have had to design the ThoughtFarmer Personal Home Page.
See, although people don’t change the defaults, they do have different needs, especially out of their intranet. And they have different needs even when they work at the same company. The HR manager goes to the intranet for different reasons than the accountant just down the hall, and for different reasons than an engineer in R&D or than a customer service rep in the call center.
This is where role-based personalization comes in, or audience segmentation. To deliver relevant content to each employee, the intranet manager needs to embark on a project to define the roles within the company, and then to define the content that needs delivered to each of those roles.
Our new Personal Home Page feature in ThoughtFarmer 3.6 makes implementing a role-based intranet home page a snap. And through Active Directory sync, managing the members of each role is usually a completely automated process. Watch the 69-second video demo below.
Oh, and if 95% of people don’t change defaults, why did Google come out with iGoogle? Because when you have 200 million users, that 5% is still a huge number of people. At your 1000-person company, though, invest in role-based personalization that benefits all 1000 employees, not widget-mania that serves 50.
Wow. We finally released ThoughtFarmer 3.6. 319 days, 941 tickets and 10 development sprints after we started. It was a ton of work, but we couldn’t be more pleased with the results!
Our What’s New in Version 3.6 covers all the new features nicely, so I won’t repeat that in this blog post. What I will share are two brief stories about how ThoughtFarmer 3.6 is working for real people.
Real ThoughtFarmer 3.6 Story: Mountain Equipment Co-op
Mountain Equipment Co-op operates 13 large outdoor specialty stores across Canada, employing about 1750 people. If you’re from the USA, you can think of them as the Canadian version of REI.
Mountain Equipment Co-op deployed ThoughtFarmer 3.6 Beta as their corporate intranet in October 2009. In addition to heavy head-office use, all retail workers have access via centrally-located kiosks.
How do they like ThoughtFarmer 3.6? I’ll let their CIO answer:
“At MEC we’re using ThoughtFarmer 3.6 as the engine for our corporate intranet. I think we knew the launch was going to be a success when we heard these staff responses at our roll-out training sessions: ‘Oh, it’s like Facebook. That’s easy’ and ‘No, I don’t need more training, I can figure it out.’ Our adoption stats are much better than we had anticipated, and the percentage of content contributors is higher too. I believe we have the ease and familiarity of the interface to thank for this.”
Georgette Parsons, MEC CIO
For more comments from MEC staff on specific ThoughtFarmer 3.6 features, see the sidebar on What’s New in 3.6.
Real ThoughtFarmer 3.6 Story: OpenRoad Communications
If you pay attention to small print, you’ll recognize that OpenRoad Communications is us — it’s the company behind ThoughtFarmer. There are about 30 of us, and in addition to ThoughtFarmer, we do high-end web sites and specialty web applications.
So I guess I’m totally biased in saying this, but, in all seriousness… ThoughtFarmer 3.6 has completely transformed the way we use our intranet.
We deployed 3.6 beta to our intranet in August 2009. It was rough around the edges back then, but we still saw an immediate, dramatic increase in use. What I found interesting is that I thought I already used ThoughtFarmer fully, but now I’m using it even more. Three reasons I see:
The completely redesigned Activity Stream is engaging. In an instant, I get a pulse on what’s going on with the people I work with.
Search Filters have transformed search. I never struggle anymore to find a certain page or document. Search is razor-accurate.
It’s faster. It was already fast, but every little bit counts. With the new performance optimizations, ThoughtFarmer never makes me wait.
Instant Demo Access
With the release of version 3.6, we’re introducing Instant Demo Access to ThoughtFarmer. If you want to try version 3.6, don’t wait – test drive it right now.
![[screenshot] Admin Panel: Custom Profile Fields](http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/email/clients/instructional-screenshot-admin-panel.png)
![[screenshot] Custom Profile Field Grouping](http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/email/clients/user-profile-2.png)
![[screenshot] Adding custom profile fields](http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/email/clients/all-about-me.png)
![[screenshot] Employee profile with custom fields completed](http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/email/clients/custom-profile-fields-on-profile.png)
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