Here’s another ROI case study of social software from IBM - in short social tagging saves the average user 12 seconds when searching for information.  As there are 286,000+ searches every week, this equates to 955 hours per week resulting in productivity savings of $4.6million per year.

This is similar to the ROI approach I examined earlier where you take the average time saving and extrapolate it across an organisation.  Does it really make sense to talk about 12 seconds worth of savings?  Do those 12 seconds really add up to enough time for an individual to do something else more useful for your company – or do they take an extra minute on their coffee break?

Social tagging’s benefit is not that it helps you find information more quickly, but that it helps you find things that otherwise you would be unable to find

From a company such as IBM’s perspective, the benefit is not that a sales rep can find a compelling reference 12 seconds faster, it’s that they can actually find that compelling reference at all!

The productivity gain is less about how quickly you find information but the quality of information you find, which leads to a more compelling sales proposal which means you win the deal that otherwise you would have lost.

Extrapolate that across the company and you may end up with much more than $4.6m

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