Business, Featured - Written Tuesday, August 4, 2009 by Naumi Haque - 2 Comments

The collaboration box score

A few weeks ago I asked what the NBA could teach us about measuring collaboration.  As a follow-up, I thought it might be neat to think about the elements that would make up someone’s collaboration box score.  The box score is telling because it’s an aggregate of performance, so it accounts for tradeoffs made by players during the game (e.g. shoot the ball for a point, or pass it for an assist) and demonstrates how they use the limited time they have on the court.  Brainstorming with others in the office, I came up with this initial list of box score categories, but I’d love to hear what other Wikinomics reader think:

Signal-to-noise ratio: I think the most visibly important metric – analogous to points on a basketball stat sheet – should be one that is focused on the value and quality of content you broadcast.  Using Twitter as an example, measure tweets versus re-tweets.  If your content is getting re-tweeted it’s safe to assume that it’s valuable (signal) and not noise. For blogs, the metric might be comments per post, indicating a compelling or timely argument worth discussion. Using online sentiment analysis tools, companies could add an additional layer of complexity to this stat by also measuring positive versus negative comments.  As a basic example of signal-to-noise, my ratio based on re-tweets/tweets is: 10/91 = 0.11.  For comments/blog posts it would be: 289/79 = 3.7.  Of course in a multi-channel world, the metrics get muddled.  If re-tweet is the new blog comment, how do you calculate the metric?

In/out ratio: How good of a curator are you of information?  We interviewed the company Cataphora a few weeks ago (recently profiled in BusinessWeek) – their software uses social network analysis to identify good content by how much it is shared and passed around and track document originators and curators to assess individual productivity.

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