Desperately seeking metrics: what’s the business case for social media?

About a week ago I became famous. Well, ok–famous inside the company where I work. But since that company (Intel) employs around 85,000 people, I’m going to do a happy dance for this proverbial five minutes of fame as they may be all I get. How did this come about? Recently the team of company journalists who publish our intranet found my internal company blog on social media and decided to link to it on the front page of the intranet website. This sparked an amazing dialogue, with nearly 9,000 views and 50 comments. And it was interesting to see the reactions of folks from a company like Intel–where it’s not unusual to run into colleagues who have worked at the company for 30+ years. (Intel is celebrating its 40th year this year).

My blog post, and the subsequent discussion, focused on whether employees should be encoraged to participate in social media externally. (Internally we already encourage the use of blogs, the Intelpedia wiki, and other collaboration tools). And I was surprised to see how widely people’s sentiment of social media varied. From extreme “be very afraid” to “keep up the good work,” many of these comments asked for the same thing: show me why.

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