Microsoft ups intranet use by offering appealing content

Employees visit site for information and linger thanks to engaging stories.

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Employees visit site for information and linger thanks to engaging stories

For a company intranet, navigation and design are certainly important, but the key to keeping employees on the site is content. That is, if it’s content of interest to your staff.

“It’s super critical to include what employees actually need, because that keeps them coming everyday,” Microsoft’s Christine Bennett told communicators at Ragan’s social media summit held at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond. Wash.

With 150,000 vendors, contractors and full-time employees worldwide, Microsoft’s intranet portal MSW (Microsoft Web) gets a lot of hits. Only three full-time employees run MSW; the rest of the work is done by about seven full-time contractors who handle reporting, editing and editorial decision-making.

To keep the content fresh, Microsoft taps a number of sources, including external news sites, blogs, user-submitted photos and more. It’s this mix of content that keeps employees coming to the site.

“We do a combination of essential content and mix in news content, and that’s the right mix for us, a balance of the two,” said Bennett, principal content manager.

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