A few weeks ago we published an article that looked at Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) and their attempts to measure employee sentiment.

In an increasingly digital world, algorithms, big data and online metrics are going to have an increasing influence on the ways companies are run.

The most recent announcement – again from the ESN Yammer – is that they are soon going to begin measuring influence across their internal networks.

Social Politics

Measuring influence isn’t a new idea. Ever since we all began using social networks in our personal lives, influence has been a hot topic of debate. In its early stages, the only way to measure someone’s influence within a certain field was to look at the number of friends or followers they had.

Very quickly, these metrics carried less weight as key influencers began gaming the system. The next step was for third party applications, like Klout, to begin measuring user’s influence across the web. These applications took into account both the size of your community, how active you were and the popularity of the content you posted. These apps would then put all this data together and give a simple indication of influence.

The most recent development is Yammer’s recent partnership with Klout. This partnership can only mean one thing. Very soon, it’s likely that Yammer will offer the ability to map each of your employee’s interactions on your own ESN. It will then give each employee a numerical indicator of influence within that network.

The Verdict?

Is this a recipe for disaster? Will it encourage unhealthy competition and ugly popularity contests to start taking over? Or maybe it will act as a catalyst to help employees get more involved?

I guess this will come down to individual company culture and the way the network is used by your organisation.

We’re reserving judgement for now, but we’re really interested to see how it works out!

Do you use Yammer at work? Do you think this will improve it?

Let us know your thoughts…