In a social world, should social be the priority?

Time to get your priorities straight; unless you have very strong governance, content, information architecture, and self-service tools, social media shouldn’t be a top priority. Social media shouldn’t be ignored either…

The problem with most intranets, is that they are pretty awful. This is not usually the intranet manager’s fault, nor IT’s; lack of governance, and funding beget bad intranets. And without strong governance, the vast majority will struggle to find the funding, fail to substantially improve the content, the user experience, and the tools that make an effective intranet so damned appealing (and viable).

Most organizations are dabbling with social media in some form on their intranet. About two-thirds of organizations have some form of social media somewhere on their intranet; about 10% of organizations in the Western World have a truly social intranet (see The Social Intranet White Paper and the findings of the Social Intranet Study ).

Despite its de rigueur status, and I’m partly to blame for promoting it so unreservedly, there are bigger priorities for most organizations, and intranet teams. Of course, readers of this space will think I’m beginning to sound like a tediously nagging parent who is constantly reminding the kids to brush their teeth, but if you don’t have sound governance, you are going nowhere fast. Or you are heading for failure, often very slowly. As I wrote last week in SharePoint Governance , the most important element for an effective governance model – nay the intranet as a whole – is the strength and level of engagement of the end owners. People are the primary catalyst of intranet success, and senior management rule the people. When senior management is engaged, and actively support the intranet – with the requisite political clout and funding – the intranet is 100 times more likely to succeed.

If the governance is in place, then effective, relevant content can’t help but flow from it. It won’t happen overnight, and does require oversight and enforcement, and an effective user experience to support it, but strong content will surge from the right team. The truth of the matter is that content is king, and always will be. User experience, design, information architecture, search, technology and social media are all tools that enable the user to access, retrieve, and reuse content. It’s content they’re after. But if you don’t have the proper governance, how good is that content going to be? How is it being written, managed, formatted, tagged, etc.?

Social media are just tools. A social intranet is just a vehicle for serving up what the proletariat demands: good content. So, yes, social media should be a priority… but there are bigger priorities for the vast majority of us.