Webinar: Intranet ROI – 5 Approaches

Tweet Chris McGrath| January 18th, 2011 1 Comment »

This Wednesday, January 19th, at 10am Pacific, OpenRoad Senior Consultant & Analytics Lead Bryan Robertson will be presenting a webinar on a topic everyone’s fascinated in: Intranet ROI.

His presentation is a live repeat of his session from the Social Intranet Summit. Here’s the extract of the presentation:

Intranet ROI: 5 Approaches
Not sure where to start in finding Return on Investment (ROI) for your Social Intranet business case? Bryan takes a look at some of the Intranet value and ROI models in the industry and helps you categorize your organization for best fit. This review will put some structure around your thinking and give you a launch pad for having the ROI discussion with your CFO.
30 min + 15 min Q&A

Register now (use discount code I-SAW-THE-BLOG).

The Social Intranet Summit Webinar series is every third Wednesday of each month at 10:00am Pacific. See the complete 2010-2011 agenda. Registration link: http://sisw.eventbrite.com.

“Social Intranet”: I think we’re on to something

Tweet Chris McGrath| January 13th, 2011 No Comments »

In March 2009, Darren and I were planning the launch of ThoughtFarmer 3.5 and a new web site. We had previously marketed ThoughtFarmer as “intranet 2.0″, a “wiki intranet”, and as “social software”. But none of those terms felt like they captured the essence of ThoughtFarmer.

Jive had come out with their “social business” positioning. We were looking at their web site, when one of us cried (I can’t remember who), “Social Intranet! That’s what we are!” And in May 2009, we launched our new web site proclaiming ThoughtFarmer as Social Intranet Software.

That’s the first use of the term I had seen. But I’ve been stoked over the last few months to see the term co-opted by many intranet consultants and competitors:

On Google Insights, we see that “social intranet” only began appearing on the radar in 2010 (the spike at “A” is the Social Intranet Summit):

Similarly, our Google Analytics report on visits to thoughtfarmer.com from the term “social intranet” shows steady growth through 2010:

Additionally, our SEO consulting firm Outcome3 tells me that “social intranet” gets about 10% as many searches on Google as “intranet software”. For a new term, that’s impressive.

And finally, ThoughtFarmer, the original social intranet software solution, saw 86% revenue growth in 2010.

All this is a long way to say: I believe social intranets are poised for phenomenal growth in 2011. Indeed, with few exceptions, every new inquiry we get is from an organization looking for a social intranet, whether or not they refer to it as such. I’m glad we had a part in creating this wave; I intend to ride it.

ThoughtFarmer at Dachis Social Business Summit

Tweet Chris McGrath| March 11th, 2010 1 Comment »

We’ve sent Gord to Austin, Texas to participate in Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit.

An all-day, single-track, invite-only summit, the SBS is bringing together a great list of speakers on social business design to discuss trends and topics facing businesses rolling out Enterprise 2.0 type systems and trying to transform their companies to be more communicative and collaborative. Take a look at the agenda for the event.

ThoughtFarmer is there because we’re a Dachis Group partner firm.

If you’re in Austin and would like to meet up with Gord, please send a tweet to @gordonr.

This is Gord. If he understands guerrilla marketing, he will be wearing a ThoughtFarmer t-shirt at the Social Business Summit, and not a tuxedo.

Why iGoogle Is a Stupid Model for the Intranet Home Page

Tweet Chris McGrath| January 18th, 2010 10 Comments »

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.

Time for a PR Firm?

Tweet Chris McGrath| November 11th, 2009 1 Comment »

For a couple of years we’ve been wondering whether we should get a PR firm.

Our first and only working experience with a PR firm was with Capulet Communications. They’re not a PR firm, really — they’re a social media marketing firm. About a year-and-a-half ago they ran a fantastic blogger relations campaign for us which tripled our site traffic, got us written up on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch and became a case study in their new book, Friends With Benefits.

ThoughtFarmer’s Tubetastic campaign is featured in Capulet Communication’s new book, “Friends With Benefits”

We’ve tried to work with Capulet again, but they’ve become very busy and you have to book them 4 months in advance, which is an eternity in internet time.

Last year we had great conversations with two other PR firms who seemed like a perfect fit, but apparently were big on ideas, not execution. When it came time to deliver a proposal, they promised it for “next week”. Then the next week, they said, “Next week.” We prodded several times and reiterated our interest, but eventually gave up on both of them. If you can’t deliver a proposal promptly, I sure wouldn’t want to have you on retainer.

So we’ve plodded along doing our own marketing. It’s not extensive. We blog, we tweet, we show up at conferences in our t-shirts. We send a newsletter a few times a year. But as we rack up more and more clients, we realize that ThoughtFarmer has tremendous untapped potential.

We’re back searching for a PR firm again. We received a great proposal from Young & Associates last week, which looks promising. As I mentioned, I’m pretty impressed when people can not only talk big but can actually deliver a proposal! Then this morning, our friends over at Dachis Group recommended Josh Dilworth. I pinged him, and he responded in 15 minutes with this:

…As for more about us, we kind of fall into the “spaghetti on the the wall”, risk tolerant bucket — we’re not precious and we like to experiment and push boundaries — we’re very untraditional, we’re smarter and more geeky than other PR people, and we do a lot more than just “PR” as well — but I can of course explain more later. We think we’re building the agency of the future….

…which is laser-focused on a specific business opportunity and market segment, one in which it can be truly expert. We think that the agency of the future chooses clients very carefully, based on ethical factors as much as financial ones. We think that the agency of the future is data-driven, and analytical to the core.

We think that the agency of the future is also noticeably absent the jargon and posturing you’ve come to expect from marketing-kind — it is also far more show than tell. It is relationship-based and people-driven. And the agency of the future is definitely not scalable…

I have no idea whether we’ll wind up working with this guy or not, but man, we’re off to a good start here. This is the kind of authentic talk that gets me excited. And I guess that’s why I’m blogging about it. To be authentic and transparent. ThoughtFarmer is on the cusp of something very, very big. I can’t wait to see what’s next. And maybe the right PR firm can help get us there.