Building Your Social Intranet - Step 4 Choose your platform(s)

The last couple of weeks I've been blogging about my experiences with social intranet. I started out by defining 'social intranet', then moved on to the first three steps towards a social intranet: listen, define goal(s), and choose a roll-out strategy. It's great to see the posts are being shared and appreciated!

Step 4 is about choosing a platform for your social intranet. I'm not going to give lengthy advise about how to do this. I hope to do that in a separate post. My short advice is to choose a platform that is truly social. People and their networks should be at the core of the tool. This is more than having profile functionality. And it's also more than being able to share and publish content.

You can also choose platforms, plural. Based on my experience most organizations don't have one platform, but several platforms. And isn't this often the easiest way forward? Why try to push everything into one platform, if it just doesn't fit the tool or work for users? In the past IT taught us one platform is better. It's better from a financial and maintenance perspective. This is understandable. Practice shows this principle is less true nowadays. Social tools are (often) dead-cheap and are (often) not hosted by IT, leading to lower maintenance costs. Furthermore people are used to switching between many applications to get things down outside work (e.g. Gmail, Skype, Facebook, Twitter). Doesn't this also fit with they way they get things done inside the organization?

How did you or your company choose a platform for social intranet? Is it or is it not a truly social platform?

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