Should You Put External News on the Intranet Homepage?
Jinfo Blog

By Steve Bynghall

Abstract

Placing an external news feed on your intranet homepage is an option as long as it provides value to your users. Steve Bynghall explains three reasons to put news on the homepage.

Item

When disseminating external news feeds to users, either from premium content or from free web-based news, there are several choices as to which channel to use. A vendor platform, RSS reader and email are key options. Although technology and licensing issues may provide some constraints, the corporate intranet can also be a good way to reach a wide number of users.

Where Do You Put External News on Internal-Facing Channels?

Delivering news via the intranet itself (and related digital channels such as enterprise social networks) also leads to a number of options as to where to place a news feed. For example, you may want subject-specific and specialist news feeds to appear in different areas, pages or even within different communities.

In general, a rule of thumb in the decision of where to place external news (and indeed whether to use the intranet at all) is that it needs to add value to the user. For example, does an external news feed give context to the content adjacent to it and vice versa? Does it appear in a place where a highly targeted set of users who are interested in that content will visit?

How About the Homepage?

A relatively uncommon approach is to add external news to the intranet homepage itself but this can indeed add value to the users in a number of ways. 

The most obvious of these is that the intranet homepage tends to get a lot of traffic, so external news on here may be viewed by users who wouldn't normally see that content.

Intranet homepages act as a gateway to a myriad of digital services, content, workspaces and communities. Sometimes it may be the load page every time employees boot up their preferred web browser. Presenting external content here is likely to extend the reach and increase the views of certain stories.

For example Suncor Energy, a Canadian oil and mining company, operates a feed of external stories relating to their sector, keeping employees informed on the wider goings-on and increasing commercial awareness across a wide base of users.

A Counter-Balance to Internal News

Another area of value is provided because this news is external. Intranet homepages still tend to be dominated by corporate news written by internal communications, particularly on the homepage. An external news feed provides a good counter-balance to corporate messages intended for internal audiences.

News which shows an external view of what is going on with a company or perhaps the bigger picture with a sector gives a far more authoritative voice for news. For example US-based energy provider AEP featured a prominent feed of external news (PDF) on the homepage titled "News from outside AEP". This shows that the intranet is more than just a channel for corporate comms.

Targeting Content

Many intranets provide the ability to deliver targeted content based on an individual user's profile, so that content based on a function, location, role and country can be delivered to the homepage. On social intranets this is even more targeted and usually personalised activity streams relating to memberships of different communities and groups also appear.

Using either of these facilities for disseminating external content can bring a feed of highly relevant external news items right to a user's homepage.

Find out more in Steve's recent article Approaches to Delivering External News on the Corporate Intranet. This Blog item is part of the FreePint Topic Series: News, and Beyond.

« Blog