Blogs

I'm a late fill-in for a Keynote speech at the Intranet Insider World Tour 2010

The event is a ... practical, information-packed learning opportunity ... ideal for intranet managers ready to learn, share and brainstorm a new mindset about intranets and the profession. The agenda is intended to bring together intranet teams from all departments including:
Corporate Communications, Internal Communications, Human Resources, Information Systems, Marketing, Public Affairs, Web Management, Legal, and all other departments responsible for leading or producing content for an intranet.

There is an ongoing debate among social media know-it-alls and legacy marketing experts regarding how best to put together a team that will evaluate, research, implement and in other ways decide whether and/or how to include social media marketing in a company's messaging.  That's a question for another day; here I'm going to comment on how to create a social media team.  This specific topic is very much related to the wider question raised in the first sentence as it can be reflective of how top management sees social media - as an integrated component of communication or as some newfangled widget (no pun intended) to try out.

Stories abound on the net about professionals who forgot their professional role when creating content on sites like Facebook, Twitter and the like. Health insurance claims have been rejected because a Facebook entry showed contradictory physical behavior to the person's claim. I know of people who have been fired because they forgot or didn't know that supervisors, executives and/or HR departments are spending time on the net "following" (tracking) employees.

In my previous post I addressed the topic of what usefulness a tag cloud could have for your site. I concluded that they serve little purpose for visitors, as intuitive navigation is likely to be the most user friendly way visitors will find the content they are looking for.

Having said that, site based tag clouds are not the only visual search tool on the web. There are also web wide search technologies that display the results in a tag cloud-like view. The results give you a quick overview of the weight of each result represented by the size of the phrase; the larger the text, the more results there are that include that phrase.

Tag clouds became a buzz item for websites some time ago and seemed to capture the attention of the recently new social media consultants. It's easy to understand; they looked nice, were a new way to present a visually pleasing content summary. For my part, I've never used one for browsing a website or finding something I want to get to - properly created and intuitive navigation and search are always more effective.