At the recent Ragan Web Content Conference in Chicago, keynote speaker and online communication expert Gerry McGovern had a great riff on the problem with many corporate intranets.

“Most intranets should be subtitled, ‘A Survivor’s Guide to a Shitty Week,’” he told the crowd. “People turn to the intranet when things have gone wrong--like when they've forgotten to fill out an expense report and need to find one in a hurry, or when they need to do something with their benefits.”

A Survivor’s Guide to a Shitty Week. I like that. I like that a lot.

And it’s so true. While the Internet has all sorts of fun things on it—like YouTube and blogs and podcasts and online communities and games and even virtual worlds—the intranet has . . . forms. And benefits information. And lousy search engines. And more forms. And org charts. And more benefits information. And the employee directory. And . . . well, you get the idea.

Of course, there are exceptions. Companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have intranets that closely mirror the external net. They have interactivity and podcasts and blogs and video and other interesting content.

But they are exceptions. Intranets, from what I’ve seen (and I’ve seen quite a few in my work as a seminar leader, journalist, and consultant) usually are fairly functional, and incredibly boring.

You use them when you need to do something and there’s no other way of getting it done. If you were still allowed to enroll in the benefits plan by talking to an actual person or filling out a paper form, you would. But that was disallowed three years ago, so you have to use the intranet.

If you could swing by your boss’s admin and get an expense form for your trip to Des Moines next week, you probably would. But they stopped printing those forms four years ago, so now you have to go on the intranet, type “expense form” into the search engine, disregard the first two or three options that come up, and eventually find the form in the bowels of the HR section of the site.

And so on. Gerry has it exactly right: Most intranets are tedious. They’re task oriented. They are, in a word, boring.

But do they have to be? It seems to me that one of the biggest arguments for adopting social media tools is that they will no doubt make your intranet, if nothing else, a little more interesting.

What if, while you were out there planning for a shitty week, you came across a well-written blog by one of the senior executives of the company, and he was writing about the new product the organization just launched—the same product that you just added to your sales portfolio?

And what if there were 35 comments to that blog post, some of them coming from salespeople—just like you—who were trying to iron out some of the kinks in that new product? Think you might join in? Would you consider that boring? Probably not.

Or what if you were out there to enroll in benefits, and you came across a podcast from the vice president of research and development, talking about some of the cool things that were in the pipeline. And you realized that you could sign up for that podcast now, and listen to it on the way to Des Moines? Might you do that?

Or what if, while you were out there looking for an employee’s phone number, you encountered a MySpace-like page for that person instead—listing all their different qualifications, their interests, the best way to get in touch with them, and a place to leave private messages that you know will get to that person quickly?

There are a million and one reasons to start exploring the use of social media inside your organization (and almost as many reasons to be wary of them).

One reason to give them a shot: it could make your intranet a place people want to go to, rather than a place they have to visit when they’re having a shitty week.