Analytics could help fuel Enterprise 2.0 adoption

One of the themes I heard this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was that it's important to find ways to measure success with Enterprise 2.0 systems. As companies begin to make significant investments in Enterprise 2.0 platforms, they want to be able to define metrics to measure how well the system is working to achieve company goals. In fact, Kathleen Culver of Alactel-Lucent speaking at a session called "The Dark Side of Enterprise 2.0" complained about a lack of discernible measurement tools as a weakness in Enterprise 2.0. But it's not just a management issue, users want to be able to look at the information inside their social streams and find better ways to understand and organize it.

Rob Howard who is founder and CTO at Telligent says his company began focusing on measurability some time ago because companies needed to understand what they were buying and what it could do, but he says these tools are really designed to help users more than management.

"The whole purpose of analytics internally," he says "is not for community managers [to understand usage patterns], the reason analytics exist is to help users understand data better."

He says traditional web analytics gives you basic information like how many people viewed the page, but Enterprise 2.0 analytics lets you know who in the community is an influencer and that can be very helpful to people inside internal communities. It's clear that to use the information locked inside social streams, there needs to be a way to find and it and make use of it and analytics will play a bigger role as Enterprise 2.0 continues to grow.

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