Discovering common threads.

I’m starting to delve into Google Analytics, looking to understand the story told by the numbers so I can share that story with everyone in my department. The above picture shows the traffic to the 10 most-visited pages on our department in over Q2 (Dec-Feb, we’re on Department of Education time). It’s kinda cool to see how the things our team built got right off to a good start earlier this year, especially considering we didn’t officially exist until January.

Q3
I can’t show the names of the resources in good conscience, but I can share the numbers. By the end of Q3, three newcomers had lunged into the Top 10, while everything else saw serious triple-digit growth. That one boasting over 3,000% growth was a centralized resource library people needed to do their jobs.

KM Lesson #1: Trial and adoption can be exponentially improved by ensuring new tools are developed with end-users’ needs in mind. (Conveniently, this lesson can be extended to blogging, community development, and more.)

Ironically, this resource was scrapped and re-designed in Q4. In the picture below, the new item shooting to the top position is version 2.0. Divide one by the other and you see a solid 222% increase in traffic quarter-over-quarter for just that one.

That second greenie on the list, a custom project tracker, began it’s life in 2nd place (Q2), dropped to 5th in Q3, rose back to 2nd in Q4, and is currently trending in 2nd place 2/3 of the way through Q1. Another resource strategically designed to help people their jobs done more efficiently, this one seems to be evolving monthly, seeing greater than 200% average growth, quarter-over-quarter.

Q1
There’s still a full month left before the end of the quarter, but the resource library is still on top by a solid margin, and is on-track to return greater than 120% growth. Thinking about it a little more, if my estimations aren’t too off-the-cuff, the project tracker should see greater than 130%. These two seem to be tracking within a couple thousand hits of each other, so it could go either way by Thanksgiving.

KM Lesson #2: Give people a centralized place to find what they need to do their jobs and provide them with tools to organize and track their efforts. (Again, how is this different from blogging and all that?)

Speaking of lessons, I’ve learned a big one with regard to community development in this exercise. Going back to Q2 (all the way at the top), the #3 resource was a community we set up for a specific group. At the end of Q3, we’d enjoyed a 270% increase in traffic, but it soon dropped to 7th place with a 23% drop in traffic. Today, it’s down to 9th place and -43%.

Lessons Learned
Personally, I try to keep my distance from said resource library, and the project tracker and I have our disagreements, but the community is something in which I take a great deal of pride. It really bugs me to see it so unsupported and left to wither on the vine, so I’ve started working on it this week to see if we can’t make it more useful.

Have you seen similar results in your efforts?
I’m kind of excited about this discovery. Not that I hadn’t heard this stuff before, but to see it in action is something else entirely. Adapting this lesson elsewhere, how do you think this could be used to build online communities beyond the firewall?

In the glovebox:

• Social Workplace V: Storming
• Social Workplace IV: Expectations & Reporting
• Social Workplace III: Overcoming Inertia