We’ve seen an increase lately in customers wishing to implement intranets and extranets to improve their internal communications. In today’s challenging times companies can see real ROI on a solid intranet that not only reduces costs but actually improves employee morale and communication.

Here are some thoughts on why having a corporate intranet can be a real benefit to your company.

• Improved internal communications – store information centrally and know that everyone is accessing up-to-date information. Your intranet provides greater version control than shared folders. It is the location for approved pieces (not all the work-in-progress items).
• Increase communication and sharing – by putting best practices and resources in one place you create a more collaborative working environment – both internally and with your customers, vendors, distributors, strategic partners--everyone.
• Secure communications – instead of sending sensitive information, such as price lists, over email, make everything available in one password protected location.
• Improve customer service – when all employees have easy access to the same information, they can answer customer questions more accurately and quickly. Open up some of this information to your customers, and then they can get answers to their questions even faster.
• Reduce paperwork and email traffic – put all your forms in one central location and allow them to be completed online and you reduce the effort of sending these forms by email and printing them out
• Increase productivity, flexibility, accessibility – an intranet is more accessible than a file system or a virtual private network (VPN). With everything in a single location, employees can easily access what they want, when they want. Do employees work from home? Do they travel? Might they be working at night or on the weekend? Your intranet gives them access to whatever they need, whenever they need it.
• Build an online community - an intranet can provide things to organization members that the corporate office alone couldn’t provide, like an anonymous comment box. It can also help foster and create an online community within the organization. For example, the day after the company picnic, you can post pictures of the event.

-- Mike

I can’t seem to go to a meeting these days without the topic of Twitter coming up. Twitter is one of the pioneers of micro-blogging – sending curt (140 character) posts with the goal of answering the question “What are you doing now?”

I’ve been using Twitter myself for over a year as an off-shoot from my Mind of Men podcast. My twitter ID is currently @mindofmen. And I’ve been very successful at using it to stay in touch with friends, follow interesting items, and meet new people along the way. And as a social tool it is really great. However most of the conversations I’ve had about it during business meetings center around trying to understand what the potential value is to using Twitter as a part of their online marketing efforts.

My normal response is simple. People are using Twitter (and other social media outlets like YouTube or Facebook) to converse – to share their opinions. And somewhere, somebody is probably tweeting (posting an update to Twitter) about your company. Could have been that they were on the way to your bank branch, had a great experience ordering online from you, or even perhaps that they weren’t too happy with an experience with your company. Either way there is a conversation going on out there, and by your company joining in you can change the monologue into a dialog.

Just tonight, I received a tweet from Lance Ulanoff, editor-in-chief for PC Magazine (I’m a follower of his Twitter account @LanceUlanoff) linking to an online article that talks about some big-name companies that are using Twitter in some pretty effective and exciting ways. So if you are interested in exploring a bit check out 10 Corporate Accounts Worth Following on Twitter.

And if you’d like leave a comment here, or send me a tweet, I’d love to have a dialog with you too!

-- Mike