As Matthew and I have talked to customers and analyzed usage statistics across existing EditMe sites, we’ve learned a curious thing about how our customers use the product. EditMe’s content-focused, hands-off approach to site organization means we have a well-distributed set of customer types. This graph is based on our most active sites (in terms of content edits) for the past month.

 

As you can see, it’s fairly well distributed between public content sites (like www.editme.com), community sites (like stcbok.editme.com), education/classroom sites (like middleschoolworld.editme.com) and company intranets, which are typically private. Intranet is the largest segment of EditMe’s most active sites.

Prompted by an enlightening conversation we had with a customer recently, we looked at this data with an eye towards how many users were actively editing each type of site. Since we only looked at the most active sites, this data represents a snapshot of successful sites that are actively and frequently updated. Here’s what we found.

 

The slice of the pie chart above that caught our eye was the “Intranet” category. It has the third lowest average number of active editors. The median for public content sites is 1 user, and personal sites are by definition one user, so Intranet has the lowest number of editors among sites that we would expect to have many contributors.

What can we learn from this? A few things come to mind…

Intranets are for the many, managed by the few

In companies, the intranet is not the all-in collaborative panacea that wiki enthusiasts might like to see. Company culture and human nature dictate that a handful of people within an organization manage the internal web site known as the “intranet”.

Many intranets consist largely of policies and procedures. As much as we like to think our companies are democracies, they are not. While top management may not be among the handful of users managing this content, they are certainly the ones deciding what it should contain.

A lot of intranet feedback and contribution happens offline

Only a small subset of employees within a company may feel comfortable posting feedback to a company-wide viewable space. Many would rather drop an email or swing by the office of the person or people who are “in charge” of the intranet, whether they have editing privileges or not.

Intranets contain the scaffolding, not the furniture

As much as we like to think of the intranet as a whole-company collaborative space, we find most intranets are more about the company’s big picture and less about day-to-day operations. There are lots of tools focused on managing day-to-day operations and the right one (or several) for your company depends on what type of business you’re in. But all businesses need a space where they can post the who, what, when, where and, most importantly, how and why, of the company for all employees to see.  The fact is that most operational tools aren’t a good fit for this information.

Let us help you!

We plan to embrace this insight into the truth about intranets and make EditMe an even better place to manage your company intranet. If you’re among this handful of active editors on your company intranet, we’d like to talk to you! What can we do to make your job easier? We have some ideas, but there’s nothing like hearing it from the horse’s mouth.