10 intranet lessons from Wikipedia

Why are people so willing to contribute content to Wikipedia, but not the company intranet? Hint: Your intranet needs low barriers to entry, and you can’t get caught up in the technology.

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Persuading employees to use the intranet is one of the biggest challenges intranet managers face.

One of the main reasons is the difficulty in persuading employees to contribute good content that other employees will find useful.

Just how difficult this task can be is highlighted by feedback from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) online benchmark survey. (The survey has been completed by more than 45,000 intranet end users from more than 160 organizations.)

The chart below shows the breakdown of responses to the four questions about how often employees contribute content to the intranet.

As you can see, on average more than 90 percent of staffers are not frequent contributors. (Content contribution methods include discussion forums, commenting, team sites, messaging, blogging, micro-blogging, as well as publishing traditional intranet content.)

That’s a huge amount of handy hints, tips, information, business intelligence, insights, best practices, ideas, innovations, solutions, answers, knowledge, and good advice that is not being properly shared or managed by organizations.

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