Building Your Social Intranet – Step 5 Measure

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. 

If people measure they mostly focus on hard numbers. Like the number of (active) participants, the number of conversations, the number of page views, how long people stay on the platform, etc. These are good things to measure and pay attention to. However, these numbers don’t really address the value of the platform. And what do these numbers really mean?

I think social intranets are challenging us to look broader. Don’t only focus on hard numbers, but also on the soft ones. They can be just as or even more convincing to fellow employees and decision makers. How can this be done?

When you measure hard numbers, this is done automatically. With an analytics tool for instance. When measuring soft numbers you have to go out and talk to users. Ask them what kind of value they are getting from the social intranet or parts of it. What are they getting from microblogging in a factory or blogging pre-liminary research results? The answers to these kind of questions will never show up in analytics. But… they show the value of the social intranet in a more compelling way. I find they are much more convincing than the hard numbers.

Let me give you an example of a true story. When I asked one person what she was getting from microblogging she shared this story. At a point in time she had to set up a wiki for a project. She was asked to make sure the hard- and software was there and the wiki would work. Before she started ordering, she posted a short update on the microblogging platform. She said: “Going to set up a wiki for a new project I’m working on!” Shorty thereafter someone replied: “Nice and good luck! I assume you know we already have a corporate wiki platform. You can start by creating a wiki page.” Half an hour later she answered: “Really?! Didn’t know that. You just saved us a month in the project planning. Thanks!”

You see? This could never be concluded from statistics. But when I tell this to employees and managers they can’t say this platform is useless.

Do you measure your (old) intranet? And how about your social intranet? In which way do you measure? And are the results convincing to your organization?

Social software for business performance - Deloitte Report

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 organizational and cultural change) actually account for the increase?

Andy McAfee also relates to these issues when discussing this report. We need proof that social tools do improve business. Although many companies have been using these tools successfully, we are still learning what good these tools should and can bring. Measuring in terms of adoption is not enough, as the report says.

This reports points to several companies that focused less on adoption. They focused on operational pain points and tried to solve them with social tools. And these cases show that social tools did help here and did provide measurable and sustainable ("organize for the long haul", as McAfee says in this book Enteprise 2.0) performance increase. I think this relates well to what we've been discussing at the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit and my blogpost about this topic.

Alcoa and OSIsoft are the two cases. And I think Deloitte did a great job in showing they actually made long-term performance improvements. For instance by using a microblogging tool to decrease the issue resolution time.

With McAfee I'm greatful for this report. I hope many more will follow giving examples of others areas with dramatic improvement using social tools.

I wonder how you measure success in your social tool deployment. Please share your experiences in the comments section.

Share to connect: Inside Nokia's Program to Connect Customer Insight with Business Performance by Ming Kwan @mingk #sbs2011

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 for Socializer are:

• create transparency around conversations
• build employee morale
• provide visibility to management
• increase adoption and use of social tools

What's the business value to Nokia? They're developing kpi's for the project based on Jeremiah Owyang's ROI pyramid. They distinguish business metrics, social media analytics and engagement data.

Success factors:

• nudges to guide people and drive behavior change
• social experience design: human to computer to human interaction
• socialize data to get data in the hands for interpretation
• transparency to empower people to act
• measurement to track progress and measure impact on KPIs

UPDATE April 6, 2011: Corrected text, added picture and links.