Process checklist

Building a "Social Community" Website Checklist

• What gap am I filling with communication or my website today?
• What are the goals I’m trying to achieve?
• Who is my target audience(s)?

1. Does my audience vary on their need to update content ‘vs’ view & comment/collaborate?
2. Is my community public/private or both?
3. How will I engage my audience in the use of this medium?
4. Will my audience generate new content?

• What needs does my content need to meet?

1. FAQ or questions & answers (Q&A)?
2. Intellectual capital – expert knowledge?
3. Information sharing; learning, documents, more static content?
4. Dynamic – the ability to look refreshed every time my user enters the page?
5. Private – personal dashboard of content and documents for individuals own repository?

• Can I build a site design that is appealing and doesn’t require IT with Guidelines and Rules?

1. Do I need have the ability to modify my colors, design, and layout within the social media solution?
2. Does Search work without a taxonomy structure requirement?
3. Can an end-user build a page of content and have it be automatically searchable?
4. Will there be defined rules or guidelines?
5. Will security work within the guidelines of our organizational requirements?

• Roles & Governance

1. Who makes decisions for the community website?
2. How does implementation and training happen?
3. What types of real-time reporting is required?

Before picking the technology to manage content, focus on the rules.Companies need sensible retention and disposition policies that account for the changing business value of content, compliance and legal requirements, and user expectations about how long information should be retained. This last point is vital since employees would happily save every e-mail and Office file for 100 years, just in case. Companies must balance this compunction with reasonable disposition.
Next comes workflow. The application of content management policies must have a workflow that reconciles robust classification with user productivity. Force employees to click through a 15-step file plan just to post a suggestion to the holiday party planning wiki, and they'll be outside your office with torches and pitchforks.
First Energy's Hawkins found reasonable middle ground between workflow extremes with his company's IBM FileNet ECM platform. He requires every employee to classify e-mail messages before they're sent, but he made the process as easy as possible. "We put a menu toolbar in the UI," Hawkins says. "We give them four buckets to put mail in. If they classify it for retention, it gets picked up by our content management system and managed for its retention period."
Hawkins isn't stopping at e-mail. He has plans to get all the company's content under stricter management, from Office documents to CAD files to audio and video. "We can do a better job of grouping our information for the most efficient access and use," he says.