More advance steps to a good intranet wiki/blog

I covered in my last post 5 simple steps to a good intranet wiki or blog using BT’s experience.  We have NOT publicised our blog or wiki and have allowed it to grow organically concentrating on the quality rather than quantity of user generated content.

Now I wanted to cover more advanced steps BT has taken so our wiki and blogs are now an integral part of our intranet.

Governance

In BT anyone can start a blog or create a wiki article internally about their views and opinions and can contribute to other blogs or wiki articles if they wish to.  To get started all you need to do is email the administrator and sign up to the terms of use – nothing slanderous; illegal; breaks BT’s policies – that are basic common sense rules.  We treat people as adults in BT and they have responded by behaving responsibly.

Standards

Our wiki and blogs are template driven.  BT provides all the navigation, features that meet standards; different colour global navigation bar; tagging options to make it as easy for someone to publish while making it the best user experience possible at the same time.  Soon wiki and blog content that has not been updated after a period of several months will be flagged as likely to be removed if no longer needed by any users.  If no one responds then it will automatically be removed.

Anonymity

This links back to the culture step in my last post.  In BT there are NO anonymous postings.  If someone has a point to make on a blog or wiki then they can say whatever it is BUT you must give your name so anyone can challenge what you say.  I can honestly say I am not aware of any ‘career threatening’ comments being posted, removed and person disciplined scenario happening in BT.  We have a healthy culture and want to learn how we can improve further by listening to people and acting on their feedback.

Findability

We have moved a long way from beta testing our wiki and blog platforms with a few users.  Users can now search all types of content – formal, crowd and personal – when a standard search query is made.  It searches social media content and presents them as part of one prioritised list of results with either ‘intranet’ or ‘user generated content’ by each result (we could have better titles I think here) to help users see the difference between authoritative content and a view/opinion which may change quickly.

Visibility

We don’t keep our wiki and blogs hidden in a dark corner of our intranet!  They are highly visible on our corporate intranet homepage where the three most recent posts and articles are shown.  Since we did this the frequency of updates has increased, quantity of articles and blogs has increased and views to these has also increased.

We believe all these has helped BT to collaborate in virtual teams to solve business problems and create business solutions much quicker.  Wikis and blogs are part of the mainstream of intranet activity and use now.