infoarch

There's a thing about metrics and measurement. Especially in digital channels. We all agree we should measure, but most research reports about social media, intranets and websites conclude it's hardly being done. But the thing I find even stranger is that if we actually measure and share our numbers, big conclusions are derived from them. "Our website is very useful because we have x visits per month." Or: "Our internal microblogging platform is valuable because 90% of our employees has created a profile on it." To be clear I think we should collect these numbers and share them. They do tell us something. But I find it strange that when these numbers are shared, they are shared without any context. And they are shared as if data can tell us the whole story . Data is the only reality. We know it isn't. There's much more to life, even digital life, than numbers. Yes, we should collect data and do that much more rigorously, definitely when it com...

In the last couple of weeks I wrote some posts describing steps that help you build your social intranet. I’ll round up this series of post in two final posts. The last two steps towards a social intranet are: measure and cultivate your community. This post will address measuring. As we know from many intranet studies measuring is almost always forgotten . Not many organizations have metrics to know how well their intranet is received and used. In my experience the same goes for social intranets or elements of social intranets like microblogging. This is often directly related to the fact that these intranets don’t have a goal to start with… I advise you to make sure you measure as much as possible. This is the way to check whether the goals you set are being reached. It also helps you sell the social platform within your organization. Managers will like to know what the return on investment is. Sceptics might be convinced to join if you show them hard numbers. Etc.  ...

Deloitte recently published an interesting report about their research on Social Business . It's titled: "Social software for business. The missing link in social software: Measurable business performance improvements". Some colleagues and I were interviewed for this report (when I worked for Oce) - see table on page 8. One of the reasons I wanted to participate was because this research was focused on truly measuring the impact of social software in organizations. We'd been rolling out social tools and using them widely. Also, we measure or tried to measure the value of these tools for business. We focused on two types of value. Value based on hard (analytics, increased productivity) and soft metrics (stories showing the value of these tools). We combined both because we knew that one can easily shoot holes in the 'hard' numbers. For instance you can wonder if the productivity increase is really due to use of social tools or did other factors (like organizat...

Share to Connect is about aligning our organization, Nokia , and the way we work with what we promise as a brand, says Ming Kwan . Their objective was to maximize the brand's productivity by turning it into a conversational brand. Transparency, listening and coordination will enable the organization to gain momentum in an era of exchange. Share to Connect consists of 3 main elements: organizational optimization workforce collaboration customer participation The main issue they are trying to deal with is information overload. They collect lots and lots of information. Their big issue is generating insights from all the information. So they have this idea/pilot called Socializer. An aggregation and analysis platform connecting the streams from the (social) internet to the organization. Socializer is a social action framework (with semantic analysis), it's internal and external, it's focused on actionable insights, it's real-time and employees can claim actions. Objectives...