“The Long Neck is where the business case of your websites lies. It is the small, crucial set of tasks and content that your customers really come to your website for,” writes Gerry McGovern in Do you know your long neck?
“Intranet or public website, government or commercial-every website has a Long Neck. It is crucial that you know what your Long Neck is so that you can deliver maximum value with scarce resources.”
Gerry
Bettman needs to go!
http://www.firebettman.com
Haha! Nice. I like the video… I hand't heard that song in a while… quite appropriate that its sung by Mr. Hockey (Long Island version)himself.
Hi Toby
I don't think I agree on our recommendation about content and Gerry's description.
User search behaviour – I would claim – is based on expectation, what they are used to find on an Intranet. The bullet-list above is al top-down distributed content.
Is it possible that the searchpattern would be different if the content would be based on a bottom-up approach?
Thanks for the comment. Hans, what you suggest is certainly possible. You reference user 'search behavior'… that's a slightly different topic than what i'm discussing which is what employees are ACTUALLY reading or using. It may be different at your organization or another, but in the dozens of organizational intranets that I've been privy to, the list I presented holds true.
If organizations were to provide more bottom-up content then it certainly stands to reason that it could be more popular. Note however that the Internet is not the intranet. On the Internet, people are mostly looking to be entertained and to connect with other people. Even a majority of consumer e-commerce purchases are 'entertainment' of one kind or another (travel, books, DVDs, games, hobbies, fashion, etc.). On the intranet, employees are not looking to be entertained, they want information for their jobs (a phone number, a form, a policy, some research, or look at the latest news). This is just one reason why social media such as blogs and discussion forums (bottom-up content) often are not popular in many organizations.
Now organizing content from a bottom-up approach is strongly suggested. Content must be intuitively organized so emmployees can find what they need as fast as possible. This however won't change the fact that in most organizations, those employees are still largely seeking forms, policies, news, and directory information. But of course every organization is different…