Blog post after my own heart by Penny Edward of Headshift on the death of ROI for improvement and innovation.

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Does social software really add value?  Does an Enterprise 2.0 ROI actually exist?  How would you measure it?  Is it just for time wasters (like email, the internet, instant messaging etc.).  During a credit crunch surely employees could be performing more valuable activities?  Social software helps put position yourself to be in the right place at the right time.  The more people know about you, and the more people hear about you, the more likely to are going to be at the forefront of their mind when they, or people you know, are in need of your services.  Social software can become a serendipity lubricant – helping people make connections that give value to both parties at very low cost and, equally importantly, effort.  The problem from an ROI perspective is that the evidence can become very anecdotal.  It is more of a story along the lines of “we would never have won that deal if I hadn’t come across John’s blog post and realised his services could significantly differentiate our offering”.  This is not as measurable as traditional IT solutions where you would be able to say that the manufacturing process has reduced in cost by 25%.  You know how many widgets your factory makes in a month so you can measure the cost benefit, but you don’t know how many community interactions your employees are going to make and how successful (or not) they will be.

Anecdotal success stories are therefore really important in social software, and I came across a great one by Tom Critchlow from Distilled on the rewards of engagement.  It’s worth a read in its own right, but essentially a comment on someone else’s blog leads to an offer to guest author a post which leads to several referrals for opportunities into the UK high street market.  (As an aside, this also shows the value of simply commenting on other people’s blogs as a way to raise your own profile, something I often advise people, and do myself when I can’t think of something to blog!)

An exact ROI is difficult as you have to take into account the number of comments which do not deliver the same results and the fact that there is no guarantee that any comments will directly result in revenue.  The cost of commenting is almost certainly lower than other marketing or PR activities, so it’s even more important to use social software in a credit crunch.  Surely an organisation that takes this approach is better positioned in the stream to take advantage of whatever might come its way.

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I will be speaking at the Somesso Corporate Social Media Conference in Zurich on 31st October on “How to get started implementing social software”.

There is a 25% discount if you want to go, use the code XYSO08CHEADSH after clicking on “Click here to enter a promotional code” on this page

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One of the strongest arguments around adopting social software is that you can do so easily and at very low cost when compared with ‘traditional’ IT solutions.  Given today’s economic volatility and frozen IT budgets it may make sense to pause the $500,000 intranet roll-out based on Sharepoint that is already behind schedule, and see if investing in lower cost, simpler, more social solutions could achieve the same (or better) results at a fraction of the cost.

And it looks like things are going to get better.  Forrester is predicting a price drop of as much as 50% in the cost of enterprise social software platforms.  This should reduce the barrier to entry even more allowing organisations to invest in lower cost projects with higher value returns, which is just what the business will be asking for from IT in the months ahead.

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Just saw this story about City of London corporation choosing Open Text for their content management solution.  What I couldn’t believe is that the tendering process took two years!!  First, this seems an unbelieveably unproductive use of time, and second, surely the problem City of London is looking to solve would have changed during the two-year process?

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Came across another use for Facebook yesterday – my basketball team needs to get photo licenses for a tournament we are entering which we don’t usually need to do.  Cue dramatic scenes at practice with someone bringing in a digital camera at the last minute to try and get passport photos.  But not everyone was there and some were unhappy because “they hadn’t shaved”.

Deadline fast approaching, but Facebook to the rescue.  Loads of photos to be downloaded, printed onto a license card and sent off.  Not that they’re necessarily the most flattering photos in the world…

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A topic that came out of the recent Gurteen Knowledge Cafe was the value of noise.  A lot of time we look to increase the signal to noise ratio with the understanding that noise is bad and distracting.  Luis made the point in his talk, last week that noise is good.  The more you think about the random coincidences that happen on Twitter or on other social software tools, the more you realise that a lot of ideas and moments of serendipity actually come from noise.

So it’s not that noise is unwelcome, just that there is ‘good’ noise and ‘bad’ noise (spam).  This relates to the idea that has been floating around the web recently that information overload is actually a filtering problem.

The tools we use have a significant impact on the value of noise.  Email suffers from the problem of noise because:

• Email is often used to ask people to do things so I tend to associate it with action (or avoiding action) rather than ambient noise
• Email is concrete and disruptive, I have to open my email, it’s very difficult to glance at it
• Anyone who has my email address can email me

Twitter, on the other hand, is a great source of interesting noise because:

• It enforces brevity (140 characters)
• The short messages and the UI of applications like Twhirl make it more ambient than concrete, it’s very easy to glance at
• You can’t spam me on Twitter, I only receive updates from people I choose

I’ve met up (in the real world) with interesting people by happening to see their status amongst the noise on Twitter, in a way that email could never do.  So now instead of simply rejecting noise as ‘bad’, perhaps we just need to think a bit more about the tools we use to subscribe to and consume it.

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Spent a highly enjoyable evening at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe last Wednesday.  Never actually been to one before so wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  I certainly didn’t anticipate running into all sorts of people who I knew from other contacts and networks, some not even to do with the Web (hello Alex, Len, Penny, Luis, Ray, Stuart, Neil and others..!).  The main reason for going was because Luis Suarez was speaking, who I met through this blog and have done some podcasts with in the past.  Luis spoke for 20 minutes about his experiment to drop corporate email and then we broke for discussion around the question of whether or not you could live without email.  What was refreshing was that there was some serious challenge to Luis’s position.  All too often at these events you get a big social software love-in where everyone agrees that the world is going to change completely.  And probably by next week.  I actually thought Luis got a rough ride but that brought out the best in those on the other side of the argument.

The general consensus was that you could not live without email, but you probably could live with it a lot less.  Email needs to be put in its box (private communication, notification, some collaboration across time zones) and kept there.

One of the interesting side conversations was about the amount of noise that email can generate, and whether social software can help increase the signal to noise ratio we’re exposed to in our working lives.  That’ll wait for the next post..

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There was a story last week about an iPhone app that the Obama team launched to help organise contacts in key swing states.  What it does is applies a system to your informal network of friends, to track who has been called, who they are supporting and whether they need a reminder on election day.

So what happens when you apply a formal system like this to a social relationship that is inherently informal?  It’s nothing new, sales professionals run systems to ensure that they never forget a prospects birthday, or that customer A likes squash whereas customer B prefers golf, but that is a commercial / professional relationship.  How would your friends feel being on the receiving end of your system?

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