Judging your intranet by hits alone is really a miss

Michael Jordan is recognised as the one of basketball’s greatest ever players. It is obvious when you consider he took 145,236 shots in his career. He played for the Chicago Bulls between 1984 and…

Hang on, you what? He must be a great basketball player because he took 145,236 shots?

That’s ludicrous; we don’t know if he missed them all!

We don’t know from that statistic how many he hit, how many he missed, how many were inside the key, how many were three pointers, how many were free throws and as importantly, how many he missed. You could also look at how many were on the buzzer to win a game.

It’s safe to agree that Michael Jordan is one of the greatest ever players, based on a number of stats but one which tells us very little is he took 145,236 shots in his career.

Compare the above example with the statement “I have a great intranet because we have 100,000 hits a month.” This is equally flawed, yet so many companies do it. I’m going to look at why you need to make sure you are not one of them.

Are You Dunking Baskets or Dunking Doughnuts?

I have countless conversations face-to-face and online with companies who base their intranet’s existence and essentialness on the number of hits they get. Websites are traditionally far more focussed on hits but even they made a move in the early 2000’s to get rid of hit counters and pushed for more meaningful analytics. Now is the time if you are judging your intranet by hits, to stop!

There is so much more you need to know, how do you know those 100,000 hits aren’t you editing pages? Yet worryingly so many intranet products base their statistics modules on hits alone. It’s time you asked for far more.

In Do You Know How Much is Your Intranet Worth as a Digital Asset? we recommended that an estimated ROI was better than no ROI at all. This is due to the difficulty of changing business metrics into perfect financial models. However if you have Interact Analytics, you have no excuse to second guessing how effective your intranet is for your users, Analytics makes it easy.

It is essential to understand who is using your intranet and just as critically who isn’t. Can you define these groups by location, department, type of role, age or even a specific manager? Once you understand this you can work with these groups to encourage the readers to share more and with your non-adopters to find out what the barriers are. Remember not everything has to appear on your intranet, sometimes other mediums can be more suited for a particular item.

You may also want to know who is encouraging social actions on your intranet; they may be liking, sharing, commenting or @mentioning others, bringing them into the conversation and adding new context to attract a new audience.

Interact Analytics – Making Intranet Management Easy

Analytics enables you to view, not just what is happening on your intranet but in what forms and critically what risks are approaching.

As an Intranet Manager you will want to know:

Warnings

• What content has expired?
• Which review dates have been missed?
• How many users have an inactive manager?
• Which content has an inactive author?
• Which content hasn’t been viewed in the last 30 days?

Benchmarking

• How do my statistics measure against other intranets in my sector?

Profiles

• Who is missing a picture?
• Who is and isn’t adding skills and interests?
• Who hasn’t completed their details which impacts your People Directory?
• Who is and isn’t reading their mandatory reads?
• Who are your collaboration catalysts?

Content and Collaboration

• How engaging is the content on my intranet (measured by the Document Quality Score)?
• How many user generated content is being produced on my intranet?

Search Analytics

• What is my most searched for content?
• What are people failing to find?
• Which searches are returning zero results?

Knowing all of these elements increases your potential to have an essential intranet for your company. It allows you to ensure your content is as engaging as possible, your users have provided enough information to be individuals rather than basic entries into a database table and ultimately helps you identify the groups you want to encourage to knowledge share more and the ones you have to work with to begin to use your intranet.

Understanding not just the strengths of your intranet but where it can be improved, is what will lead you to being a great Intranet Manager with a plan, continual improvement is critical to every intranet’s success.

As Jordan stated : “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Interact Analytics is available on all Interact releases from v5.2 and above.