Page 91 - Social Media Marketing

As a practical example of the ways in which measurement can be brought to 69
social computing, consider the ongoing investment and attention to social computing at
IBM. Literally for decades, IBM employees have been building, studying, and improv- ■ SOCIAL BUSINESS AND MEASUREMENT
ing its implementation of social computing both internally connecting employees—and
externally—connecting customers.

Social Networking for Business

For more on the direct application of social networking and social computing for business, con-
sider reading Rawn Shah’s “Social Networking for Business,” published in 2010. Follow Rawn on
Twitter: @Rawn.

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/archives/599-Online-Community-Expert-
Interview-Rawn-Shaw,-IBM.html

In a 2010 interview, Bill Johnston, now with Dell, talks with Rawn Shah,
Practice Lead for IBM’s Social Software Adoption effort, about assessing internal ver-
sus external participation:

Internally we have a closed population of users where we know all the indi-
viduals involved. Therefore our internal metrics can be focused down to
the activities of specific groups and populations of individuals—we avoid
getting down to specific individuals to protect privacy—so we can assess
participation based on organizational role: regional versus global sales, for
example. Externally however, the population is much more mixed and rarely
do we have data per specifically identified people. This leads us to very dif-
ferent types of behavioral information: internally we can categorize users by
their level of participation (zero, low, medium, high, elite) in our social envi-
ronments, and then examine the actions or distribution of these members
across the geographies. With the external environment, social media moni-
toring tools and services from other companies allow us to take the pulse of
activity along different topics. We then have to infer behavior based on the
level of interest in topics across the Web.

Applied Knowledge Transfer

Understanding and tracking participation is obviously important in managing the
growth and development of a collaborative community. However, participation is only
half the challenge. Participation speaks to action but not necessarily value. The key to
measuring the value of participation is simultaneously ensuring that something useful—
as defined within the community and then connected to your business objectives—is