Development Seed Blog

Bring People to Your Portal Painlessly

There’s one website I read nearly every day, and that's MIT Technology Review. The site emails me between 3:00 and 4:00 am, usually well after I’ve shut down my computer for the evening, with a list and brief summary of interesting stories. This is one of the first emails I open when I log back into my computer in the morning and, more often than not, it baits me over to the MIT Technology Review site.

Organizations rolling out an intranet should use this same practice to get their staff to start using new applications like an intranet or a system like Managing News. It’s not easy to start using a new tool, and many of us put off learning how to use one until we’re forced. As one of the most popular internet-connected applications in the world (as are chat and web browsing), email is the idea way to lure people to adopt new tools. Imagine how your adoption rate would change if your new intranet or Managing News could send out an email to your team members similar to the one MIT Technology Review sends out. I bet you’d see a lot more people using and even learning the nuances of the system.

So, if you can send out an email from a system like an Intranet or Managing News, how do you determine what stories you send? You could send every user the same email,  but that would suck. Everyone would get about one article out of ten that interest them, which could be worse than not sending an email since it could be considered internal spam.

Luckily there are smart ways you can determine what to send someone in your newsletter that will drive content to them that’s important to them. Here are a few ways I came up with that work specifically with intranets and Managing News systems, but also  would work with many other applications.

1) Have your system record what each user is reading, tagging, and voting on. Then look at the metadata on those stories, such as keyword tags, and gather new content based on this information. Instead of doing it manually, which would be very time consuming, you could set up an algorithm that looks at all this data and finds the best stories for each individual, collects them, and emails them.

2) Look at other systems that track user interests (i.e. Facebook, Amazon, del.ioci.us) and use the same algorithm to find this information on your internal system.

3) Let users tag stories that interest them with their name, or ones they think will interest their colleagues with their colleagues’ names. Then you could set up an algorithm that examines metadata on stories and identifies similar ones.

4) Send users any story that was tagged, commented on, or voted on.

5) Use one of options 1 through 3, and combine it with 4.

6) Send headlines from users’ friends in the newsletter, based on articles tagged for the users.

7) Look at other "profile" information like location and the branch office they're in, and collect articles on this information.

8) Look at the stories that users click through in these newsletters and send them more of that candy since they obviously like it : )

9) Send users a newsletter with all new articles from groups they subscribe to.

10) If you have a system with a lot of collaboration, you could send people articles that attract the most team interest – in readership, votes, comments, and tags. This could be very useful for senior executives.

11) Set up newsletter subscriptions based on terms, similarly to Google Alerts but pulled just from your intranet or Managing News.

With advanced internal systems, you don’t have to just make the tools available and hope people use them. You can also work with them and mine the system so that you make them even more useful and tailored to each user.

Here’s an image of what a possible newsletter pulling from an intranet or Managing News system may look like.