The Adoption Blindspot

You probably hear people talk about deploying a social business solution in your organization as a journey.  I'm one of those people.  Deploying social in your organization is not a quick trip to grandmother's house rather it's going on the road to follow Phish.  There are stops along the way, it never really ends, sometimes it's smelly, but it's all worth it for the shared brilliance.
 
Anyhoodle, you are on this journey and at some point you or someone above you (like the person who ponied up the resources for the project) want to know how you are doing.  The easiest number to quote is an adoption rate.  Here there be dragons.  Adoption for adoption's sake should not be your success measure.  The usage statistics that tend to fall under adoption, like # posts, unique visitors, # comments, and all of those relatively easy statistics to pull (and so the most often used when a sponsor asks about progress) don't matter in the end.  90% adoption doesn't mean anything in the end if all everyone is doing is participating in a ballroom dancing community.  (Granted if your only business goal is adoption then that number does matter, but I have yet to run into a large corporation whose only business goal is employee engagement.)


 
Usage statistics and adoption numbers are signposts along the journey.  They can help you understand if you are still headed in the right direction.  They should never be your end goal.  When your fundor asks 12 months later for the results of deploying social business in your organization, she will want to know results against real business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).  How has the company benefited as a result of its investment?  The McKinsey Group provides a great starting point for you.  Every year for the last few years they have surveyed companies that have deployed social business tools within their organizations and shared the business results these organizations are seeing.*  These results include:

• Increased speed of access to knowledge
• Reduced communications costs
• Increased speed of access to experts
• Decreased travel costs
• Increased employee satisfaction
• Reduced operational costs
• Reduced time to market for products / services
• Increased number of successful innovations for new products / services
• Increased revenue

If you set your specific end goals in the beginning, based on these types of business KPIs, it helps set the direction of your journey and set measurement baselines.  Of course adoption is important - if no one uses your new solution you won't hit your business goals.  Just don't get stuck focusing only on adoption - it will sit there in your blind spot and get in the way when you need to be more agile in order to hit your end goals.
 
What sort of KPIs are you measuring in your organization?
 
 
*The McKinsey Global Institute published a great paper last year that does a bit of a recap from the last few years of data from this annual survey.  You can check it out here.