Catching up on measuring social and embedding governance

This blog was down for a bit while we moved all our websites, blogs and email to a new host (sayonara #Machighway).  Now that we’re back up and running, I’ve got some catching up to do on two important topics.

Measuring social

First, measuring social. It’s a question I get frequently. Measuring social is different than the metrics we typically use for overall intranet ROI. When proving ROI across the intranet or entire digital workplace, we typically look at metrics in these three categories:

  1. Business metrics (e.g., money saved by reducing printing cost, increase in online training registrations, reduced errors in HR enrollment or form completion, costs savings through collaborative ideation)
  2. Communication metrics (e.g., comprehension of important topics, access to decision-making information, ability to find internal experts)
  3. Usage metrics (e.g., visits, visit duration, entry and exit pages, most visited sites/pages)

Social is different because its value is in participation. This doesn’t mean everyone has to do all the same types of participation. Some can post, others can comment, while still others can rate or vote. Meanwhile, the persistent majority will simply read. And that’s just fine. It’s this dynamic of participation that alters how we measure social and its benefits to the organization.

So, I wrote a more detailed post on measuring social for SharePoint Pro Magazine. Check it out and let me know how you are measuring social. It’s an evolution and no one person has all the right answers.

 Make SharePoint do the remembering for you

We all have too much to remember. Making intranet governance stick is hard to do unless you make your platform do some of the governing for you. SharePoint can do a lot for you in this area if you take the time to configure it.

That’s why I wrote a post for SharePoint Pro Magazine on embedding governance in your SharePoint intranet. If you’ve got the licenses for SharePoint (here’s hoping you’ve got that all right with Microsoft), you may as well get SharePoint to do a lot of your thinking for you.

If you are already embedding  governance in your SharePoint intranet, tell me what things you are doing. What are you making SharePoint responsible for remembering? And what are you doing with all that free time?

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