We’ve mentioned memes as a great way to spice things up in your intranet.
In the blogging world, a meme is an idea starter or prompt used by various bloggers to create content (see examples below). A blogger usually creates a meme and then tags other bloggers to create content around the same meme. Bloggers link to each other’s meme contributions, which helps them get traffic to each other’s blogs.
You can use memes in your intranet, too.
Memes are useful in intranets, because they:
- help generate additional content for your intranet, with little work from you
- motivate intranet users to participate and interact on the intranet in a light-hearted and low-risk way
- help users learn how to create and upload intranet content, post comments, and use other intranet features
- put the fun in an otherwise all-business intranet
- are a great way for staff to learn more about each other
Blogging Memes You Can Use In Your Intranet
Here are examples of memes that can easily be adapted to your intranet. Most blogging memes are for specific days of the week — which is not to say you should have a meme every day on your intranet! One meme per week is plenty to start with.
Meatless Monday
The Big Idea: Spend the entire day without eating meat.
On Your Intranet: Every Monday, let employees share what they’re eating instead of meat. They can post pictures of what they had for breakfast or lunch, and share recipes of what they’ll be cooking for dinner.
In-Your-Neck-of-the-Woods Tuesday
The Big Idea: Answer a set of questions about yourself and share. For example, here are the questions I found on this blog:
- Name, admitted age and how old you feel?
- Canuck or Yankee?
- What do you blog about?
- What song are you currently listening to over and over and over again?
- Who was the last person you said “I love you” to?
- How would you describe yourself? Glass half-full or half-empty?
- Do you have a private stash of junk food? If so, where do you hide it?
- Chocolate or chips?
- Best vacation ever?
- Bucket list of travel destinations?
- What do you constantly tell your children to stop doing that you do yourself?
- If you could pick your last meal, what would it be?
- Could you give up your cell phone for a week?
On Your Intranet: Rotate this meme among employees, so that one employee shares their answers each week.
Wordless Wednesday
The Big Idea: Post a photo you took — but don’t explain it. There should be no captions, no titles, nothing.
On Your Intranet: Create a Wordless Wednesday blog, where users can post their Wordless Wednesday photos. While they can’t explain their own photos, they can comment on each other’s pictures.
Thankful Thursday
The Big Idea: Focus on the positive by sharing what you are grateful for.
On Your Intranet: Make a Thankful Thursday gratitude wiki page, where staff members can anonymously post what they are most thankful for on that day. Or simply create a thread using Status Update.
Friday Fling
The Big Idea: Everyone’s looking forward to the weekend anyway, so why not let people get it out of their systems?
On Your Intranet: Let staff post a picture, video, link, phrase, or word in the Status Update of what they’re looking forward to in the weekend.
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you don’t work on Saturdays and Sundays, so I’m leaving those days out of this list.
Take one meme from this list, or use it as a jump-off point to brainstorm your own intranet meme. Then keep me posted on how it goes!