Signal to Noise Ratio

How much signal can you get out of a message when there is too much noise. Did I lose you? While signal to noise ratio is typically a electronic communications issue, signal to noise can also be a problem with communications. How many companies do you know that when they communicate something to its employees, that they all heard it. Too often that message is sent using only one channel, the intranet, or an email. But to do communications really well, communication must occur over multiple channels over a period of time. And of course, too often it not good either (too much noise).

Why? I believe a section in David Amerland's book, Semantic Search, can help shed some light. No matter the channel used, every message sent and received has three basic pieces, the emitter, the signal and the receiver. Let me use a simple internet example. The person that tweets, is the emitter, the tweet is the signal and the receiver is anyone that is following the "emitter".

Depending on the channel, the noise to signal changes. An email signal to noise ratio is different than using a intranet content. To be successful, the emitter needs to take the amount of noise on the channel into account to ensure the message is received clearly and concisely.

In addition, the channel that is chosen needs to be chosen carefully. As with internet marketing, there is many ways of getting a message out (commercials, twitter, facebook, print, etc.). As with the internet marketing, the enterprise communications team needs to choose the correct channel(s). Choosing the correct channel(s) over a specific time period is critical to ensure that the message is received by as many employees as possible. And remember, sometimes noise can obscure the message, especially if the emitter is someone that sends too many messages out to its audience.

This note was inspired +David Amerland book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 2129.

Keywords are not the only thing that makes a page findable

Photo by Sarah Ziegler

Many people believe that keywords are the best way of making content easier to find. While there is some truth to this, it is pretty evident that as semantic search grows, the power of keywords in relation to other influencers diminishes. In short, in the current day, the power of keywords does not always provide the best way of making a piece of content findable. As I continue my path down of translating ideas from David's book to apply to internal enterprise search, I realize more and more that this basic concept is especially true for enterprise search.

Let's dig a little bit. It is a guarantee that when semantic search is involved, the search query always contains words which are not declared keywords on some of the pages returned in the search results. Instead these words come from other locations, from the content itself, from the comments on the content page, from social media that references the page. In addition, if the content or the page supports the ability to rate or like the content, these items can definitely influence the search results.

For employees to truly benefit from semantic in the enterprise, helping them to find the information they are looking for, social capabilities start to really have a huge influence that can't be ignored. While keywords might help, the content of the page, being written well, using the correct nomenclature on the page and allowing people to interact with the content in as many ways as possible becomes a very important factor.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search - Amazon location 2056

Reducing the Gap through Semantic and Social

Photo by Eric Ziegler

This comment was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search

As I think about semantic search and the value it can provide to an enterprise, I realize very quickly that enterprise semantic search is all about reducing the gaps and the distance between employees, groups, teams, departments, divisions. And combining the power of enterprise social with semantic search is even more powerful that either on their own.  These thoughts lead me to believe that it is all about getting people to realize and recognize that interacting, finding, discovering and interacting again is all about reducing the gap.