http://collaborationevangelist.com/2009/05/04/web-20-roi-must-read-emcone-white-paper/ Craig Underwood's blog about Web 2.0, loyalty and customer service Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:51:28 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 http://collaborationevangelist.com/2009/05/04/web-20-roi-must-read-emcone-white-paper/comment-page-1/#comment-58 Chet Geschickter Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:47 +0000 http://collaborationevangelist.com/?p=409#comment-58 Craig, I'm glad you made the flight ;-) and endured the platitudes to get to Chuck's comments. In some respects, I think the whole debate about social media ROI is a little misguided. Did people debate the ROI of email when it first came into use? Short answer, no. Lotus might have strapped together some ROI business cases for enterprise sales of Lotus Notes, but all in all, how do you put an ROI on people connecting with people and on the value of sharing ideas? We must default to ad-hoc vignettes (for instance, when launching this product employee a connected with employee b on topic z, saving abc months, etc. etc.). The knowledge management "industry" has spun around this issue of ROI from human interaction for many years now, without reaching any sound conclusions. The cold hard reality is that "ROI" resides at the soft intersection of culture, business process and behaviors, none of which fits tidily into an Excel spreadsheet. Which is all a bit of a drawn out way of saying that Chuck hits the nail on the head when he talks about measurement philosophy being more important than specific metrics. For those that need numbers, his sweeping estimates should serve the purpose. They are certain to reverberate around the blogosphere. Good post. Craig,
I’m glad you made the flight and endured the platitudes to get to Chuck’s comments.
In some respects, I think the whole debate about social media ROI is a little misguided. Did people debate the ROI of email when it first came into use? Short answer, no. Lotus might have strapped together some ROI business cases for enterprise sales of Lotus Notes, but all in all, how do you put an ROI on people connecting with people and on the value of sharing ideas? We must default to ad-hoc vignettes (for instance, when launching this product employee a connected with employee b on topic z, saving abc months, etc. etc.).
The knowledge management “industry” has spun around this issue of ROI from human interaction for many years now, without reaching any sound conclusions. The cold hard reality is that “ROI” resides at the soft intersection of culture, business process and behaviors, none of which fits tidily into an Excel spreadsheet. Which is all a bit of a drawn out way of saying that Chuck hits the nail on the head when he talks about measurement philosophy being more important than specific metrics.
For those that need numbers, his sweeping estimates should serve the purpose. They are certain to reverberate around the blogosphere.
Good post.

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