- Branding should play a minimal role in business-to-employee, B2E, communications. Unlike typical business-to-anything, your target audience is your employees which is made by your employees. Your employee already knows they work for you, so you can focus on your message with less restrictions and more creativity.
- Be okay with ugly…at first anyway. The greatest hurdle in using a content management system (CMS) like SharePoint, WordPress, Drupal has always been its default look and capabilities. With B2E, it’s wiser to sacrifice beauty to maximize functionality and adoptability. (Don’t confuse aesthetics with the user interface and user experience. The utmost importance should always be the user interface and user experience or else no one will want to return willingly.)
- Ditch the corporate voice and acknowledge your employees are real people who are already invested in what you have to say. Ask yourself, does it appeal to you in the way that you intend to appeal to them? If not, it should.
- Take back valuable real estate. By losing focus on your logo and a uniform look, you can focus on conveying what you are trying to say.
- Spend your time effectively. If it takes you a long time to get and apply your standards, it might not be worth it.
- You have two end users to look out for, those creating the content and those interacting with the assets they create. That means you should design a platform that is simple and intuitive to create, update, monitor, analyze and manage that delivers meaningful and memorable interactions.