Measuring value of social media and learning: Burying the myth of the magic formula

Jane Bozarth wrote an excellent piece recently for Learning Solutions magazine called Assessing the Value of Online Interactions. In it, she explains how she applies a conceptual value-measurement framework developed by Etienne Wenger, Beverly Traynor and Maarten de Laat (see Assessing Value Creation for Communities of Practice and Networks: A Conceptual Framework).

[A side note: I obviously respect the work of Wenger and Traynor (see references in previous posts here, here and here) having used Wenger’s work in teaching my class on knowledge sharing and collaboration. It has certainly contributed to the development of my point of view on learning and sharing knowledge: that is, it’s largely about social interactions and practice (practice in the sense of a professional or academic domain).]

What I like about Bozarth’s recent piece is that she starts by arguing against those who engage in a knee-jerk search for “the magic metric.” She explains that, as she conducts various workshops on using social media to enable social learning within organizations, someone invariably comes to the session looking to challenge her to prove that engaging in social collaboration technology at work isn’t just simply a waste of time. She writes:

They usually want some magic metric, some formula like, ‘two hours on LinkedIn + four comments in groups = tangible outcomes for the organization.’ It doesn’t work that way. A great deal depends on how the worker chooses to spend that time in social channels, how well he filters and curates information, how she chooses the people with whom she’s interacting. The quality of those interactions depends in turn on many other issues, including trust, a willingness to ask for and offer help, and time invested in developing ties deeper than those purely at the surface. Likewise, a worker expected to improve performance and support organizational goals must know what the expectations are around that. (Bozarth, 2012. Learning Solutions Magazine)

This certainly aligns with my experience – especially the “it depends” elements of social channel choices, filtering and curating, network connections, trust, willingness to be open and to invest time in developing deeper ties. See my post on half-baked thinking for more on that topic.

But the critical element of Bozarth’s piece, for me, is really a call-to-action to think more deeply and critically about how we see and understand how people gain value by adding digital interactions into their social and professional lives. We need to stop trying to see and understand in purely formulaic fashion (e.g., magic metrics and ROI). And we need to stop treating digital interactions as if they are entirely separate from our non-digital interactions.

The Wenger, Traynor, de Laat framework makes explicit one way of attempting to think more deeply about seeing and understanding how people gain value through interactions both non-digital and digital. It’s not a simple approach because it requires you to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to connect-the-dots between short-term activity and some value that results over the longer term. And connecting-the-dots, in large part, is based on story telling and reflection. Bozarth tells a story in her piece to illustrate this; but the story is only clear in hindsight. In the short term we simply do not know how (or if) specific interactions may benefit us. We need to let the full story unfold.

A framework that relies on story-telling to help us understand value creation presents a number of implementation challenges. Collecting and analyzing stories is a non-trivial task, as Jenny Mackness articulates nicely in her post on the value-creation framework.

But it’s an effort that takes us on the right path. Right-er than ROI or mythical magic metrics.