How to build a social intranet that employees will love

If you’re an internal communicator, you’ve likely had your heart broken by an intranet.

You devote countless hours of research and experimentation into crafting a site your employees will love, only to see them shrug it off and forget that it exists.

How can you avoid the pain and heartbreak? How can you ensure your intranet will win over staff and become an invaluable resource that they can’t imagine working without?

Sarah Nilson, senior corporate web strategy specialist from QuintilesIMS, shared how her team constructed such an intranet in a session titled, “Creating an enterprise social intranet in ‘the cloud’ to connect a global staff and open up communications” on March 29 at Ragan’s Social Media Conference for PR, Marketing and Corporate Communications at Walt Disney World.

Here is some of her advice:

1. Determine the must-have features.

Any intranet’s primary goal is to provide employees with the materials, information and resources they need to better do their jobs. Figure out what your employees need and want and then go from there, Nilson advised.