Adoption of Just News

Use case

Just News is an enterprise social network made for sharing information and content with large groups of people (one-to-many) – usually the entire organization. Typical examples include news from:

• Management (e.g. corporate strategy, financial updates)
• Marketing (e.g. product launches, trade shows)
• Personnel (e.g. news employees, trainings, team events)
• IT (e.g. new services, updates)
• Customer support (e.g. customer feedback, KPIs)
• …

Defining news channels

Successful implementation of an enterprise social network for internal communication essentially requires the same preparation than the use of social networks for external communication: You need a content strategy defining who is responsible for publishing what information when & where. More specifically, you need to define for each news channel:

• Name of the news channel (e.g. marketing news)
• Content to be posted in the news channel (e.g. marketing campaigns, trade shows)
• Author/admins of the news channel (e.g. VP marketing and assistant)
• Target group (e.g. marketing department)
• Visibility (private to the marketing department or public to the entire company)
• Subscription (mandatory vs. optional)

Additional use cases

In addition to posting news from various departments, news channels can also serve as black boards or discussion forums e.g. for ideas/innovation.

Black boards create an open space for discussions on any topic and thus foster socializing and networking within a company.

Creating a channel for innovation provides a forum for posting and discussing ideas within the entire organization. Since innovation is usually the outcome of a communication process, enabling a company-wide exchange on innovation works much better than implementing e.g. process-based tools for innovation management.

Risks

Without a content strategy, the adoption of an enterprise social network will fail because very few people will produce content on a regular basis – just like very few people frequently post content on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

For example, the number of posts per day for communities up to 1,000 followers is only between 0.2 (Facebook) and 0.8 (Instagram, source: Quintly). Instead, people use social networks mostly for consuming information and content created by e.g. celebrities, sports stars, politicians, companies, brands etc.

The same holds for enterprise social networks. That is why you need a content strategy and define responsibilities. Otherwise there is a high risk that little or no content will be produced and the social network will eventually dry out due on lack of activity.

Benefits

Publishing news content via Just News allows users to

• personalize their newsfeed by (un)following news channels
• process a lot of news quickly by scrolling down
• interact by liking or commenting the news
• read the news when they want without being disrupted needlessly by e.g. notifications

These are major advantages compared to sending news via e-mails which

• are complicated to personalize through the administration of mailing lists
• are tedious to process especially in large quantities (click, read, delete and repeat)
• do not allow for interacting with the content (e.g. commenting) without sending more mails to everybody
• needlessly disrupt people in their work e.g. with notifications

Size of news channels

News channels usually address the entire organization or in big and/or internationalized companies potentially also a business unit, country or language area. If you are dealing with smaller groups of people (< 50), creating a chat group in Just Connect will most likely make more sense.

Public vs. private news channels

Internal social networks are often implemented to foster open and transparent information of the entire organization. That is why all news channels are usually visible for all employees within a company.

Whenever one of our clients wanted to create a private news channel, it eventually turned out that the use case was not information/content but rather team collaboration. Consequently, a chat group in Just Connect was the better option.

Number of news channels

The more news channels there are, the better the users can personalize their newsfeeds. However, from our experience it is also true that the more news channels there are, the fewer users will actually invest the time to personalize their newsfeeds. Thus, we recommend keeping the number of channels small (< 10) to make it as simple as possible for the users.

As a matter of fact, we have seen very successful cases of small to mid-size companies up to a few hundred users, which have implemented only two news channels: one official news channel for everything that is work related and one black board for non-work related “social” stuff.

Import & subscriptions

Users and subscriptions to news channels can be (and often are) imported from Active Directory (AD) or a csv file. If a news channel is optional, users can unfollow the news channel and will then no longer receive these posts in their newsfeeds. If a news channel is mandatory, users cannot opt-out and will always receive the information.

Multiple languages

The easiest and most transparent way of handling multiple languages is setting up different news channels for different languages. This is also best practice followed by international firms/brands on any social network (Facebook etc.). That way, users can simply select the news channels they want to read in their language(s). That way, they will also be able to read the comments of other users and participate in the discussion. If you have country/language information e.g. in your Active Directory, you can also assign the users to the respective country/language channels via import.

Exclusivity

All information posted in a news channel should be posted in that news channel only and not be duplicated via other mediums such as email. As a matter of fact, that goes for any information and any medium: Nothing should be communicated in more than one place to avoid confusion and prevent admins and users from posting and reading the same information twice.

(Change) management

Internal social networks are supposed to foster open and transparent communication. Thus, it is very important that management sets an example by actively posting, commenting and liking content. Why should employees engage when management does not? Especially because it is usually the management that does have access to information that is of interest to the entire company regarding e.g. business development, strategy or financials.

Post frequency

Have realistic expectations on the amount of content being produced. Just because you have an internal social network like Just News does not mean that there is more newsworthy content to be published. From our experience, there are on average about 1-3 posts per day in small to mid-sized companies.

Do not artificially make up contents just to increase post frequency. If there are no news at any given day, then that is fine too: Nobody will complain about having to consume less information. As a matter of fact, chances are that the opposite will be the case: People will be thankful that they have less to read and more time to get their work done.

Usage

Have realistic expectations on the reach of your posts. From our experience, news-based intranets are visited daily by only 25% to 33% of all users. The reason lies in the nature of news content itself: in the eyes of many employees, it is simply not that interesting. In many cases, the lunch plan of the cafeteria is by far the most popular piece of content. Additionally, news content is usually neither time critical to read nor does it require any (re)action. Consequently, many employees log-in only 2-3 times a week, some never do.

Similarly, if you would send the news via e-mail, only a fraction of all employees would read the news. As a matter of fact, many employees automatically redirect emails sent to all employees into a separate folder. That way, they never reach the inbox and are thus unlikely to be read.

Using Just News will make internal news easier to publish, to consume and to interact with. This will improve the reach of the content somewhat compared to both email and traditional news-based intranets. However, Just News will not change the core nature of neither the content nor the use case. Thus, using it as your only app would not be enough to draw most users into Just Social daily.

Therefore, it is very important to implement Just Social not just with Just News but with other apps that support “harder” use cases. This will make people log-in everyday and thus dramatically increase the reach of the news content.

Interaction rates

Have realistic expectations on interaction rates. On Facebook, the average number of interactions (comments and likes) on a post per 1.000 viewers is only 2.0 (Instagram: 8.7) – although most Facebook posts do not only contain information but entertaining and emotional contents including pictures and videos.

By contrast, many corporate news are rather neutral and informative and therefore less likely to trigger any response. If you nevertheless manage to get response rates comparable to Facebook or Instagram, you would still get less than ten interactions per post in a company with 1.000 users.

In any case, there is no need to be discouraged: The interactions rates with Just News will definitely be higher than if you would send the news via e-mail or publish them in a traditional CMS-based intranet. In addition, the communication would be much less efficient (see above).

Overload & abuse

From our longstanding experience, we have very rarely seen any cases of information overload or inappropriate content.

Too much content is almost never the problem since producing content takes time and effort. That is the reason why you need a content strategy: to avoid the opposite and much more likely problem of too little content, as already discussed above.

The likelihood of people posting inappropriate content is extremely low because anonymous publishing is not possible: There is always the name, the picture and a link to the profile of the author. That’s why abusive posts are as unlikely as inappropriate emails which will also disclose the sender.