Giraffe Forum

The first step in creating a genuinely useful intranet is to ban the intranet team from using the word “information”.
“‘Distribute information’ is by far the primary perceived role of the intranet, increasing by 7 points from 2006 up to nearly 60 percent saying “absolutely” in 2007. However, “facilitate collaboration” stagnated at 20 percent and “facilitate […]

Not only do many websites have unreliable metrics; they’re usually measuring the wrong things.
“75% of the data Web marketers collect are either misleading or inaccurate,” according to MarketingExperiments, a website optimization research company.
According to MarketingExperiments, poor data quality can be due to:

Inadequate tracking;
Improperly configured measurement tools;
Faulty test structure and protocols;
Validity threats;
Inconclusive results.

However, many websites […]

The Web is showing us that in a great many areas of human endeavor the best intelligence lies in the network as a whole, rather than any one element.
‘The Origin of Wealth’ by Eric D. Beinhocker is full of wisdom. In it, Beinhocker challenges a lot of the principles of traditional economics. Like, for […]

Press releases are a form of propaganda. Publishing them on your website shows your customers how you are attempting to spin the media.
The Web is where we go because we don’t believe the hype, because we don’t like being spun. The Web is the land of the thinking customer. So, why do so many […]

The Web allows us to marry collective intelligence with expert knowledge. This is an unbeatable combination.
I grew up in a small farming community in Ireland. You never questioned the expert. The teacher, the priest and the doctor ruled. The idea that they might ever be wrong was not even an idea.
Well, the teacher, priest […]

The Web offers one of the most significant opportunities to communicators in modern history, but requires a total redefinition of what communications is.
Traditional communications is one-way, passive and past-tense. It is all about telling people what you have done, what you are doing, or what you are about to do. There is a core belief […]

Traditional advertising is broken because it charges us time, when time is becoming our most valuable resource.
Traditional advertising works well in time-rich, money-poor economies. It works less well in today’s money-rich, time-poor economy. There was a time when we were prepared to watch something that might be vaguely interesting.
We watched the car ad even […]

Redesign is classic organization-centric thinking. It rarely has much to do with making things better for the customer.
Your website isn’t working. What should you do? Well, how about finding out why it isn’t working and fix that. But let me tell you this, the problem with your website has rarely anything to do with […]

Installing Google for your public website or intranet does not replace the need for professional management.
The cult of technology can be disturbing. For years, a scruffy bunch of people within organizations went around muttering: “A Portal. A Portal. What we need is a Portal.”
Some of these people became seriously disturbed and could be […]

The Web is supposed to replace manual service with self-service, but sometimes our number one task on a website is to find someone to talk to.
Over the years, I have noticed that a key task, particularly on intranets, is to find people. This is somewhat ironic when you consider that the business case of a […]