Work area for creating cost justification for Social Networking applications within a corporate organization.

Looking for hard numbers on increased productivity, sales, quality as a result of incorporating social networking tools.

1. Enterprise Applications - effect on:   (Is this where we want to start?  Marketing is more straightforward, but may be utilized by relatively few staff to reach ROI.)

1. schedule
2. resources consumed
3. quality of end product (and revenue value add OR increased productivity of enterprise applications as a result of higher quality.)
4. Supply chain - speed of fulfillment, cost of materials
5. Talent - acquisition, development, retention
6. Operational cost - travel, equipment, phone/network
7. Intangibles - idea generation, wellness/ satisfaction, ....

2. Sales, by product type

1. Penetration
2. Volume
3. Customer relationship, pre-sale/ return customer
4. Customer support, post-sale

3. PR - demise of newspaper readership, etc has decreased the effectiveness of news releases.

1. Goodwill
2.  

Look at balanced scorecard.   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard#The_four_perspectives)

• Financial perspective;
• Customer perspective;
• Internal process perspective;     
• Innovation and learning perspective.

Define organizational KPIs.

Pilot program - Define metrics, measure before & after pilot

• employee surveys
• development velocity
• quality metrics
•  

Q: How do you currently measure the ROI of conferences beyond direct leads?    How do you measure ROI of productivity tools and enterprise applications?

Link to anecdotal evidence down here - for discussion on how to quantify.

Link to existing case studies.

     http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/07/what-to-measure-on-social-networking.html

     Notes on quantifiable improvements in Cisco Acquisitions:  http://globalhumancapital.org/archives/170-Cisco-CEO-Shares-Impressive-MA-Collaboration-Story-and-Video-Centric-Network-Vision.html  

     http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=632

     http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Information_Technology/Management/Building_the_Web_20_Enterprise_McKinsey_Global_Survey_2174?pagenum=6

Approaches to calculating ROI:

1. Calculating the ROI of blogging: http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2006/10/calculating_the.html

2. A Model for Measuring Blogging ROI: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/10/a_model_for_mea.html

3. The Real ROI of Online Social Media: http://onemansblog.com/2008/11/05/the-real-roi-of-online-social-media/ 

note: the above links and so much more can be found at http://drop.io/socialmediameasurement#thumbnail/sort_by_display_type/order_by_asc/300

Define "Social Networking":  interactive web or mobile based applications

Examples:

• SMS services
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Virtual communities (or practice, of interest, affinity groups)
• Open Source & Open Content, CMS
• Message Boards
• RSS & Aggregators
• Web Conferencing
• Video Conferencing