Your intranet is hungry for good content; but it’s awash in bad, stale content.

Feeding the intranet ‘monster’ once was a primary concern for corporate communications, but now it’s culling the dead and fallen. Old documents, unused team sites, poorly written titles, no meta tags – all symptoms of a sick intranet suffering from acute, poor content management.

Today, particularly with the advent and popularity of social media and rapidly deployed SharePoint sites, our ability to create content easily outstrips our ability to manage and retrieve it. In fact, here’s a refrain you might be familiar with: “The search engine sucks!”  Indeed, but rarely is it the intranet search engine technology. More often than not, it’s a content problem. Specifically, poor or absent content management.

When the intranet is hampered by thousands of pages of poor or dated content that is poorly labeled, with little or no meta tags, you will be saddled with poor search results. Content management is the means and methods that content is created, stored, accessed, and reused.

INTRANET CONTENT PLANNING

To ensure great content on the intranet, your organization must work from a plan. An effective Content Management Plan is an essential component in supporting strong intranet search, information architecture and effective, timely, and relevant content for employees. A Content Management Plan provides rules, details and guidelines for all authors, publishers, and contributors at all levels. It provides processes and rules, training and guidelines, and technology to help content creators deliver solid intranet content. Ultimately, a Content Management Plan ensures that content is easily found by employees and is easily updated according to explicit rules and standards.

Read my complete, in-depth column: Intranet Content Management in a Social World

Register for the free intranet webinar on October 10: Intranet Content Management for a Social World