One my favorite strategies for developing new approaches for measurement is to adapt ideas from the outside world.

So let’s pay a visit to Facebook. The world’s most popular (1.9 billion users!) social networking site doesn’t just have one way to allow users to express their opinions; it has six emoticons: love, laughter, excitement, amazement, sadness, and anger.You pick the icon that best represents your feelings (after holding down the like button, the choices appear).

This has interesting implications for internal communicators. Using the like button inside organizations has been a weak measurement tool. For example, is it helpful to know that the intranet article about the CEO’s visit to a customer got 32 likes? Not so much.

But monitoring employees’ feelings on a topic could be very helpful. So, if 100 employees clicked confused for an important article about a customer service initiative, that would prompt you to investigate why and kick up communication on the topic.

What can you do with this idea? Quite simply, create custom emoticons suitable for employee communication.