I first met Sharon McIntosh back in the mid ’90s, (we were in kindergarten at the time 😉 ) when she was at Waste Management and wanted help to implement an integrated measurement dashboard. Yup, she’s always been ahead of her time.
Back then I felt pretty good if I could convince someone to measure PR by doing something other than counting clips. But Sharon pushed “big picture” view into a whole new realm of thinking: She wanted to measure outcomes a decade before the Barcelona Principles were a gleam in anyone’s eyes. Next thing I knew, she was at PepsiCo and once again wanted an integrated dashboard to demonstrate how effectively its “Performance with Purpose” messages and strategy were getting across to employees.
But it was in the area of employee use of social media that Sharon took measurement to entirely new heights. Employees’ use of social media was banned in most organizations, but Sharon and the team at PepsiCo embraced it. They followed Dell’s lead by requiring significant training before employees were allowed, and then encouraged, to use social media in their work.
My team had the honor of measuring that program. Our job was to demonstrate the extent to which employees were effectively communicating key messages and to identify which employees were the social rock stars. One of the highlights was discovering that employees who participated in the program were among the most engaged, according to the annual employee survey. That discovery helped expand PepsiCo’s successful employee ambassador program to more employees, which dramatically extended the reach of their communications.
Sharon is now CEO and Founder of And Then Communications. She writes fabulous, thought-provoking blog posts like this one, and does the EE Voice podcast with Sharon Phillips. For all these reasons, we name Sharon McIntosh our Measurement Maven of the Month for November. Congrats Sharon! ∞
