Overview

This best practice provides a set of recommendations for publishing news articles in your digital workplace.

Recommendation

Here are five tips on publishing engaging news articles in your digital workplace:

1. Format: news/updates here should follow a consistent format, layout and presentation to avoid changing the user experience from article to article. Visuals should be used where possible to help break up a wall of text to make the article more visually appealing to read and seem less intimidating. It is strongly recommended that you create a template for each news channel.
2. Content:  it should be clear, concise and short. Avoid paragraphs that are too long or giving more information than is required. The information should be engaging and encourage readership because people find it interesting, not because someone demands they read it. The tone should be consistent and resonate with the culture of the company. The average employee is busy with their day to day, and an interesting and engaging newsletter can serve as a break in their day.
3. Summary: always create a summary which is a brief summary of what a user can expect to see within the news post so they can decide if the article is relevant to their role in the organization.
4. Feedback: always encourage employees to provide feedback on your article and/or news channel. This can be easily done by allowing employees to comment, rate and like your articles. Engaging with the content makes the experience more interactive versus always feeling like top-down communication.
5. Subscriptions: How many subscriptions are set, the frequency and the audience should be well thought out. If not everyone will need to know about Marketing updates – don’t subscribe “all members” but rather just the marketing group. Setting meaningful subscriptions will discourage people from unsubscribing themselves from feeds because they see the importance of the information to them as an individual, and aren’t overloaded with noise. Teaching users how to subscribe themselves to content will allow for interest-based subscriptions of information that may not be critical to their role, but that they have an interest in keeping up to date with.

Optional Ideas

• RSS Feeds: add external RSS news feeds to areas where external content will add relevancy. This could include bringing in industry, competition and product news and trends to augment existing news articles.
• Social Media: encourage employees to share posts on social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo) - where applicable. If possible, even write the post for your employees to encourage more sharing.
• Twitter Feed: think about pulling in your corporate Twitter feed onto your digital workplace homepage or news center. This will keep it "top of mind" and remind your employees to check it more regularly.

Top Ten Most Popular News Channels

1. Corporate News
2. CEO Blog
3. Product News
4. Marketing News
5. Customer Updates/Wins
6. Leadership News
7. Hiring News
8. Policy Updates
9. Departmental News
10. Industry News