Metrics, Faith and Patterns: How to establish and discern social success

The problem of metrics and ROI in any social business endeavor has been chapping our collective hides for years. On the one hand, we want some objective measures so that we can guage our progress and learn. And satisfy those who are committed to them. to so that we can show progress. On the other hand, its devilishly hard to formulate a meaningful metric in an emergent system before it emerges. We will show how faith - but not blind faith - enables meaningful progress, and how patterns are the early indicators of outcomes. We look for patterns of behavior that indicate if the flows and payoffs we're planning for are likely to pay off, and give us the opportunity to diagnose and update them.

Patterns of good outcomes usually precede measurable numbers. We'll define what we mean by non-blind faith, and how to lay the groundwork for likely success and discuss how to detect, and learn from early behavior patterns and weak signals.

Deb Lavoy has been studying the dynamics, culture and technology of collaborative teams and knowledge transfer for 12 years, while working in product marketing and strategy for companies as diverse as AOL and Adobe. She is currently Director of Product Marketing for Social Media at OpenText.

OpenText, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management, helps organizations manage and gain the true value of their business content. OpenText brings two decades of expertise supporting millions of users in 114 countries. Working with our customers and partners, we bring together leading Content Experts to help organizations capture and preserve corporate memory, increase brand equity, automate processes, mitigate risk, manage compliance and improve competitiveness.

Gordon Ross is VP Strategy for ThoughtFarmer, the social intranet. A 16 year veteran of the web development industry, Gordon has led numerous web strategy, user experience, and intranet projects for clients like the City of Vancouver, Mountain Equipment Coop, the Government of British Columbia, and the World Bank. He's spoken at the Enterprise 2.0, Social Intranet Summit, OpenGovWest, and LegalIT conferences, and is a frequent blogger on the theory behind social intranets.

ThoughtFarmer is the Social Intranet, an intranet where all employees can author content and connect easily. ThoughtFarmer combines the best of wikis, blogs and social networking into an attractive, easy-to-use intranet solution for Microsoft Windows server environments, installed in both behind-the-firewall and in the cloud and available via desktops and mobile devices 24/7. ThoughtFarmer is used by clients around the world including Continuum, Fokker, Greenpeace, The Guardian Newspaper, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Penn State University, and WATG.