garykoelling

I seem to be getting enough requests for access or screen shots I thought I'd just post them here.

Here's a recent email exchange around how to measure and benchmark social media. Please feel free to question or comment.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tracie [name]
Sent: Thu 6/26/2008 8:59 AM
To: gary at blueshirtnation dot com
Subject: Need help

Hi Gary,

I am a director at [company], Inc. I am a part of the corporate
communications department. I oversee [company]'s corporate portal
intranet site and business applications. We are close to rolling out our
custom enterprise 2.0 framework and am trying to reach out to other
companies who have been successful in their deployments to set a
benchmark for comparisons of adoption and overall usage of these
features.

I am also interested in learning what "terms of service" or "usage
policies" where deployed to your work force.

Thanks,
Tracie

Hi Tracie,

not sure how answer benchmarking questions without comparing apples to
oranges. were there specific metrics you were looking for?

Hi Gary,

Thanks for sharing the "use" policy. I think it's to-the-point and the
writing is very clever- who wants to become a social outcast...

At [company] we went live with our new intranet portal in Jan. We
receive great adoption and are planning to launch its 2.0 framework this
summer. I've been working with our Legal and HR departments to develop
an appropriate "use" policy that umbrellas each 2.0 feature and the new
intranet site as a whole. So, I really appreciate you sharing Blue Shirt
Nation's policy.

Well, as far as benchmarking  questions, I guess I'm trying to work on
my approach and show to our middle management the benefits to embracing
2.0 within their areas by reaching out to other companies who have taken
the plunge and have received great benefits b/c they implemented these
collaborative features.

As far as benchmarking, what I am trying to benchmark is employee
adoption and effectiveness of introducing 2.0 features into the business
environment. Also, how did you get middle management to embrace these
features? I will need their support in effort for their employees to
embrace it without labeling 2.0 as add time or responsibility to their
workload.

Currently, my biggest hurdle I face is convincing our operations
managers, HR and Legal departments that these new features are helpful
and will empower associates to be informed, connected, efficient and
make better decisions.  I want to articulate and show the business the
value and gains of deploying these tools.

Let me know what you think. Need help here.
Tracie

Tracie,

Measuring social media is hard. It’s hard especially if it’s being used to judge ‘success’ or roi.  I think part of the answer is you have to examine the opportunity cost. What are you potentially losing by not providing such a tool. This is true from a recruiting standpoint (for an increasing amount of prospective employees this is just the cost of doing business) as well as a retention standpoint to say nothing of the any peer to peer efficiencies you might gain plus any “game-changing” or even incremental innovations that might surface as a result of giving folks a social platform to connect.

After being live for 2 years blueshirtnation.com has about 23,000 registered users. That’s out of a total workforce of 150,000 employees. Nearly all the users came to the site via word-of-mouth. Everyone I talk to thinks its a success on that metric. But what we use it for and what the expectations are for it both near and long term are very likely different than the expectations you may have. The best advice here is to set out one or two objectives then test and try so you have a baseline that you can look at and be sure to seek out and act on user feedback. That being said, the two numbers I tend to watch most closely are ‘active users’ - the percentage of users who visit at least once a month and average time spent on the site - higher is better.

In terms of middle management including legal and hr, my best advice is to get an executive sponsor. In most organizations the middle represents inertia - it’s their job. Senior leaders are your best bet. That advice may not be very encouraging but it’s essential. So to answer your question, I didn’t get middle management to accept it. Senior leaders saw the potential value and then users saw the value then the middle saw the value.

I’m not sure what else to say except good luck. I’d be happy to dig further into specifics if you lke. You may want to take a look at a recent article that gets at some of your issues here:  http://minnov8.com/2008/06/27/bsn/

Cheers
Gary

Got an email from a college student doing a summer paper on social networks. Here's my response:

Adriana,

So these are some pretty tough questions but I’ll do my best.

“What has Best Buy accomplished by launching the site [BSN]?”
I think BSN gives Best Buy a communication platform that is non-hiearchical.  Because there is a certain level of anonymity on the site users feel more like peers with other users. This is important for everyone along the hierarchy spectrum from the COO to the cashier at a store in Riverside, CA.  It allows people to engage in honest dialog and get to know each other as humans - something that’s easy to forgo in a giant corporation.

“What are some of the disadvantages?”
I think it’s incredibly easy for people to forget the ‘social’ part of a social network. In some ranks there is a tendency to look at the BSN community as a vending machine for answers without understanding that the answers they are looking for require good questions and relationships. You can’t just walk into a cocktail party without knowing anyone and expect to hook up just because you showed up.

“What are some of the ways you keep people active in this online community?”
At first we thought we’d have to bribe people to contribute. We ran contests and gave out awards. But what they really wanted was tool that was valuable on it’s own. A place to easily find other people I have stuff in common with so I can share my stories. So we spend most of our time listening to what the users want and rolling out those features in ways that are easy to use.

“How do you know it’s working? What metric do you think is most important to measure?”
 I wish I had a really brainy answer for this one but I don’t. I guess how you define whether or not it’s working is the first step. For me it’s a laboratory that lets me learn. For others it’s a way to share best practices. I must admit I do look at how many users show up every day and how long they stay. But that doesn’t really reflect the total impact. Culturally it has had a huge impact on how people think about solving problems and how they think about their coworkers - as more than their title. So for me, I measure the amount and impact of the stories it generates - more stories means it’s working better.

“Why an employee network? How did Best Buy decide that this was the best way to tap intot he social network stream?”
The average age of a Best Buy employee is like 20. They’re right in the prime demo. But the real reason was to get a better for what’s happening across the whole enterprise. We’ve got around a thousand stores scattered over the US - it’s hard to keep everyone connected and get a feel for what’s going on. As it turns out, it’s been a great place for us to get educated on how to use social networks without appearing clueless.

We're essentially presenting the same story about BSN that we presented in February in SF. The audience slightly different this time and so we'll tweak the information a bit. This time, instead of saying, "You can't do this" and here's why, we thought maybe we should talk a little bit about where we think things are moving and how to take advantage.

A reorganizing force is coming to bear on American Corporations (from inside and outside) as a result of the spread of social technology that is 1) easy to learn and master 2) widely accessible 3) easily adapted. The result is that companies are no longer the sole purveyors of cultural content. In fact, they are being forced to become consumers of cultural content for maybe the first time since the dawn of the mass communication era. This new found and often unwelcome and disconcerting role of cultural peer has the effect of revealing a long-masked sociopathic nature of American companies.

I feel like I need to take just a second here and clarify a couple things about BSN (BlueShirt Nation). The presentation notes that I published under breaking it down for internal communicators for the conference “Social Media for Internal Communication” have been referenced a few places out on the interweb. Awesome, but; “Best Buy claims their social network reduces turn over” and “How an internal social network can dramatically reduce turnover ” worry me. These posts present a correlation as causal. Ruh roh.

Here's what the presentation said: “In a company with a 60% turnover rate, the members of BSN turnover at a rate of 8.5%.” What that means is the members of the site turn over at a rate lower than the company average. Why? Not sure why. Could be lots of things. There are many variables. The presentation also states, “We are getting the most engaged employees on the site and talking about how to make the company better.” That means that we think that employees who are engaged (dig their jobs or at least dig Best Buy) are more likely to be members of BSN than those who aren't engaged. Participation in the site is voluntary so the people who show up do it because they want to.

There are many other factors that need to be examined to really parse the 8.5% statistic. Like who are they, what do they do, how long have they been employed, and on and on. Jumping to the conclusion that BSN or any corporate social network reduces turnover, while I'd love to make that claim, is a dangerous mistake.

/clarification