Day 1 at IntraTeam Event Copenhagen

This three-day, laser-focused intranet conference kicked off with an outstanding ensemble of speakers

With two rooms, I didn’t get to attend every talk, but let me tell you who I heard today, and how we focused on good communications, intranet strategy and podcasting.

Straight away William Amurgis said hello to me, and I hope to see him and his wife again this evening. William’s intranet at AEP is award winning, and in an unrelated manner, William often judges intranets in the annual awards. I don’t think he’s written a book yet, but I always read any blog he’s contributed to.

Then I met Bert from EA, and his SharePoint theme design is a case study in Microsoft.com, so it was great talking to him too.

First talk for me was from Jim Ylisela (who chooses not to pronounce his name in the authentic Swedish manner) from Read and Rewrite, and Jim spoke about good writing and writing specifically for the medium of choice and also about writing across mediums.

Jim sees fewer companies doing monthly print newsletters, but sees one-off or quarterly print productions being of a higher quality now that we all understand that print is for ‘depth’ and context, not news. Print can drive people to the intranet for the latest news and further updates.

Jim strongly believes that PDF newsletters should not be dumped on the intranet. The intranet needs to be more like a website and less like a document storage service when it comes to employee focused content.

Jim challenges the notion of short news stories. Here’s me with my ‘450 word limit unless it’s a feature story’ and Jim comes along and blasts that away with his ‘five minute read’ suggestion.

Most people ask me to shorten intranet articles, so I need to ask Jim if he means that all stories can be as long as a five minute read, because that’s loads more than 450 words!

Then we had Martin White talk about gaining support from management for intranet enhancements. Boy, I know how to get this wrong!

Martin dramatically explains that we cannot justify investment in the intranet based on:
Return in investment
Collaboration
Productivity

As we don’t and can’t measure those things anyway! Yet ROI and productivity are exactly what my stakeholders have asked me to demonstrate in the past, so more on this hot topic in the days to come.

After lunch I listened to Shel Holz talk about the basics of how to podcast and also what it’s for and why we should do it internally, inside the firewall. I do mean to ask him how people are supposed to consume audio files in an open-plan office, but he did address creation and distribution nicely.

Then I met Christie Season, yay, whose intranet for Scana is award winning.

The last seminar for me was the second part of Sam Marshall’s intranet strategy workshop. Sam discussed centralised, hybrid and federated intranet models, and the governance and Steering Groups necessary to support the intranet. Oh how those Steering Groups get convoluted! And just what is a ‘Sponsor’ of the intranet?

I will have to write all of this up in a better way next week, right now I’m just trying to keep up. My audioBoo is online: it’s a mini podcast and you can subscribe at audioBoo.fm or in iTunes.

Plus you should check out my tweet stream for insights from the speakers at IntraTeam Event and use the #IEC11 hashtag on Twitter.

Gotta go for dinner now, so until Day 2, good night!

[Wedge]

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1 comment
  1. Thanks for the ‘shout out’! :) Great insights on today. I’m looking forward to tomorrow – see you then!

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