Posts related to the intranet content – the written word, photos and video, plain English, writing for an online audience.
I’ve been using collaborative documents quite heavily for the past few months of the website convergence project, working on documents with over 20 other people. For me, making changes to a document and seeing changes that other people are making at the same time is the height of collaboration. It’s the best that it gets in my workplace, anyway.
Companies invest time and money in campaigning, advertising and link-building with the aim of drawing visitors to websites. But if visitors arrive and then hit the back button, that’s an awful lot of waste.
A/B testing can help to pinpoint the type of content that staff are most attracted to. I ran an experiment to find out which advert was most effective in an internal campaign.
The job of the shelf-stacker is to fill the intranet shelves with junk. It’s a fairly easy job. They don’t have to think too much. It’s not difficult to shove something on a shelf. They might stack it next to something similar, but it’s not so important to them where it goes. Some of the shelf-stackers don’t stack items with the labels facing the right way. As long as it’s on a shelf.
At work, I teach a course on writing for the intranet. It takes an afternoon and covers online writing and editing techniques, SEO, how to handle graphics and accessibility. I also touch on writing in plain English. For this part of the course I usually use the latest IT announcement as a demonstration. IT announcements highlight how not to write plain English. Right on the button. Every time. Guaranteed.