Reagan National Library

Adventures from the Bay Area to Palm Desert

Christina and I hit the road over the last few days to visit her grandparents in Southern CA. We left on Saturday morning a few minutes after 5am and traded off sleeping and driving. I didn’t get to bed until 11pm Friday night because I was up cleaning the house from a long week. I’m always glad I cleaned the house prior to traveling because there is nothing more stressful than coming home tired from a trip than returning to a disorganized home. Not to mention, I had someone checking in on Wilbur, so I wanted to give the impression I have my life half together. I made a big pot of coffee, which Christina and I took with us on the road. About 30 minutes down I-5 I was a talking fool, the caffeine hit me and I don’t remember what the conversation consisted of, but it was tired caffeinated banter from me, I’m sure. I loaded up my iPhone with a bunch of podcasts, which came in handy after the caffeine and my bantering slowed down. I’ll post the interesting podcasts later with some comments, but I was happily playing talk show DJ for a few hours. At some point, she fell asleep, which gave me a chance to listen to Pandora for a while.

I think our first stop was a gas station and then McDonald’s for a gourmet breakfast of Egg McMuffins. The McDonald’s we stopped at was really busy for some reason, and in 20 minutes or less we were back on the road. If my groggy memory serves me right, Christina took over driving and I took a nap for an hour. I can usually get by on very little sleep, but anything under 6 hours, and I’m a zombie. I woke up when Christina was going over the grapevine, and we listened to more podcasts until we hit LA. We talked with Christina’s sister, brother-in-law and saw played with their baby for a few minutes before getting in their car to drive another two and a half hours to Palm Desert, which is outside of Palm Springs. Holy moly, Palm Desert is hot and dry, but I guess that is why the word desert is in its name.

We got back to the LA area around 9pm, so Christina and I went to a nice Mexican restaurant. Somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 I found my hotel, which is a few feet from where trains go through town. Luckily only one train went by which was before I went to sleep. We had planned on going down to San Diego Sunday morning to see friends, but I think we were overly optimistic and decided it would be too much in one day. Therefore, we decided to head back to the Bay Area and hit as many destinations headed north as we could. The first stop we made was completely unplanned, which was the Ronald Reagan National Library (they need a new web designer). Of all places we visited yesterday, I think the Regan Library was my favorite. The above pictures and video are from our visit.

Our Road Trip Route

Bay Area → LA → Palm Desert → Ronald Reagan Library → Bay Area

Posted after returning from Southern California

Beyond Analytics: How Do You Measure Effective Readership?

Measuring True Content Engagement

I received this question this afternoon from an association site I belong to. Below is the answer I responded with on the association site, but I want to make sure anyone can add additional thoughts to this topic, which is why I am also posting it here (similar to the lemonade stand analogy below). How would you have answered the question?

Benchmark Unique Visitors Graph
Unique visitors benchmark data

My Response

Good question, we don’t have a set percentage to gauge success. My benchmark wouldn’t be a traditional benchmark. When news articles or internal announcements get more “hits” we assume it is due to what the article pertains to. We notice that content which isn’t particularly engaging doesn’t get many hits. Anything from C Level Management, or a major announcement tends to get higher viewership. Even every day news items may not pertain to everyone. Furthermore, it just may not interest them. It is one of those instances where “you can lead an employee to the news story, but you can’t make them consume it.”

We may want 100% of our associates reading what we put out, but we are finding that isn’t the case, and we are looking to move to a subscription and “pushed” communications model.

We are playing with a design that has a top portion of the page what has what is considered “pushed” news and a bottom section which contains what each associate has subscribed to. Our philosophy is if they have helped decide what they want to see, they will be more inclined to visit the site, or read the content in the email summary.

The Lemonade Stand Analogy

I’m trying to make it so we think of ourselves as a lemonade stand. We, the Communications Group, push out lots of lemonade. If the lemonade doesn’t have enough sugar in it, nobody will want to drink it. If we put our lemonade on the wrong side of town we make it too tough for them to find us, so we opened several lemonade stands (one on our Intranet and one via email like yourself).

If we sell the lemonade and only focus on how much we sell, as opposed to what people think of it, we won’t grow our lemonade business. Sales and number of product sold is important, but I’d take one customer who pays $1 for my lemonade and gives me feedback to 10 customers who each pay a dollar ($10 total). They drink my lemonade yet don’t give me feedback to improve my product long term.

The lemonade stand that focuses on getting the most customers to its stand may be able to attract lots of customers. But the lemonade stand that focuses on what the customers think of their product will be the stand likely to stay open the longest. And make the most money.

Not sure if that analogy works, but it was fun to try.

My benchmark would be anything that can show you are providing engaging content that inspires enterprise collaboration and knowledge sharing. For instance, an article with 10 replies/comments that is rated highly is of more importance to me from a benchmarking perspective than one that is accessed more often. Great question, that is what I am thinking is the best benchmark, but I’d imagine others may find other analytics more useful.

Quality Over Quantity

Focus on meaningful engagement rather than just pageviews

Two-Way Communication

Encourage feedback and comments to improve content

Personalized Content

Let employees subscribe to what interests them most

Join the Conversation

How would you have answered the question? What metrics do you use to measure content engagement in your organization?