Intranet News

I read this post from Paul Miller on Intranet Life with interest. Paul suggests that the amount of page real estate on intranets devoted to 'news' will decline in 2008/9. I think Paul is probably right, although not for the reasons he suggests. You can see my comments on the site, so I'm not going to repeat all of them here.

However, I do also think that we'll start to see news treated, not as some kind of separate entity, but as content that can be mixed in with other content. For example, the online services Paul suggests are going to replace news will themselves begin to host news and other messages from the organisation. Likewise, the social networks being built inside organisations will also mix in news with the user generated content, in much the way Facebook has been mixing in adverts to my news feed. This is all just an other example of the blurring that is going on. Blurring between home and work. Private and business. Official and unofficial. One geography and another. One platform or another. News and opinion.

I also think people will consume far more via RSS and their news readers than by going to the sites themselves. We're already seeing a huge growth in RSS news content inside the organisation I work for. And that's another reason why news will need to find its way to other platforms.

And in this new boundary-less world, we'll make sense of it all by trusting the content from those with the highest reputation, not those who wear the official badge.

We won!

Last night I was at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane where my team collected the award for the best corporate website at the CorpComms Awards! I knew we would. Really, I did. Because we've developed an awsome site. Of course, I had very little to do with it. All the hard work was put in by my team. I was presented with the fetching glass and chrome trophy by comedian Frankie Boyle. Photos and everything.

What a great night!

I do wonder how many people in the room realised how fundamentally the corporate communications profession is going to change over the next few years. We have Generation Y people coming into the workplace who will be their own communicators, and we have technology - like the technology I'm using for this blog - that removes the barrier to entry to communications. So people will be willing and able to do it themselves. Communicators really need to re-assess their role now that everyone has a radio tower. Carefully crafted messages and beautifully designed websites will be less relevant, and probably not timely.