Social First by Dion Hinchcliffe @dhinchcliffe #intra11

After Peter Hinssen opened the Intranet Conference, Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group took the stage. His talk was about Social Intranet in the context of social business (- you can get his slides here).

Dion's work rotates around what the implications of the new web are for the workplace, for business. How is the internet and social media impacting the way we do business and organize businesses? For some time this field was called 'enterprise 2.0', but Dion says, it's called 'social business' now. (A large part of the insights Dion gets, come from the 2.0 Adoption Council, by the way.)

The audience is challenged to rethink the intranet as a social workplace.

What are the drivers for next-generation business, according to Hinchcliffe:

• pervasive global connectivity
• frictionless interactive platforms
• network effects

70% of the content on the internet is generated by social tools. The usage of social networking tools has overtaken email usage on the internet. Not many businesses see this. Businesses should focus on social capital. And the great thing is the social tools are cheap (no large investment needed) and sometimes even open source.

Open should be the default inside companies. Free the content on your intranet: open it up to all. Too much information is stored in silo's like file shares and email.

Social should come first (instead of content). People and relationships are at the core of the intranet. The intranet used to be the welcome page, it is now there to support change of behavior and be the social operating system of companies. The new intranet is about social networking, rich user profiles, activity streams and microsharing. A social intranet should support 3 types of work: ad hoc (most of our work is ad hoc), process and content-oriented work.

It is important to put social in the flow of business. Social tools should be connected to the flow of the business, it's business processes.

Two interesting remarks Dion made:

• The 50 foot rule (by Kraut). Being 50 foot apart from each other is a barrier for collaboration.
• Knowledge workers spend 1 dag a week on searching for the information they need. This is old news, but being remembered of this fact is useful.