Content Formula - Intranet Maintenance

Keeping your content fresh: websites, online marketing, communications and intranets

Maintaining an intranet community

Building an intranet is the easy bit. Keeping it going is the real challenge. Without regular maintenance, an intranet will become irrelevant to its users; content will become out of date quickly and its overall value to the business will fall.

One of our FMCG clients wanted an intranet resource for project managers working on New Product Introductions (NPI) across the globe. The aim of the intranet was to increase best practice sharing between the project managers and to provide a platform to publish NPI processes and project news. Although we built the site for them, this case study focuses on our work after the launch – the ongoing maintenance of the site.

The brief

Project managers are a key part of launching new products for our client, a leading FMCG company. Project managers co-ordinate the many activities and players required for a successful product launch. However, these project managers don’t belong to a formal project management department and so there is little opportunity for them to get together to discuss lessons learned, share best practices and formalise processes. The challenge for Content Formula was to change this and nurture a vibrant community of NPI project managers.
Using the various portal tools available, we were asked to manage the site from the outset, keeping the site fresh with relevant content and attracting targeted traffic.

The Exectution

The cornerstone to any successful and lasting intranet community is a good strategy. Using our experience with these types of projects, we helped our client develop a coherent strategy with clear objectives that detailed:

target audience
information-sharing goals
key messages that needed to be communicated
key players in the NPI community and their areas of expertise
traffic driving measures and marketing

Busy project managers often need a helping hand writing and publishing their content. This is vital if the site is to contain the latest and most relevant news, best practices and lessons learned. We network actively with the project managers around the world, discussing their projects with a view to us writing articles and content for the site. Following the necessary approvals, we then publish the content to the site.
We maintain a content pipeline that helps us plan, chase and write new content for the site. We have monthly conference calls with a core NPI team to discuss the content pipeline and identify the hot issues and topics that need to be covered in the coming weeks and months.
An important part of maintaining the site is to ensure targeted traffic is coming to the site. We create and send out regular email newsletters to alert users to new content, and also work with the owners of other relevant intranet communities to cross-publish content and links that will drive traffic to the NPI intranet.
As well as editorial work, we also pay particular attention to the look and feel of the site to maintain a professional-looking site. We take care of layout, imagery, logos, icons and sometimes even create flash widgets or special graphics to help get a point across in pictures rather than words.

The Result

The project managers within the client company are highly integrated as a community. Sharing best practices is now part of the working culture for these project managers.
The site has helped drive the change towards having a formal project management department – the Project Management Office was recently set up to govern project teams and processes on a global level. The PMO regularly uses the intranet to communicate upcoming goals and recent successes.
Several NPI best practices that first came to light on the site have become global standards within the client company.
We monitor traffic to the site all the time: traffic quality metrics, such as time spent on site, number of pages visited and repeat visits, are all high. We verify and confirm that the traffic remains targeted with a high proportion of the traffic being made up of our target audience.
We continue to maintain the site month-by-month.