Comments on: ROI of Social Software

By: How I Address the Question of Enterprise 2.0 ROI « Fredzimny’s CCCCC Blog

Sun, 10 May 2009 12:07:39 +0000

[...] Enterprise 2.0 ROI is like trying to measure the ROI of email, it can’t be [...]

By: How I Address the Question of Enterprise 2.0 ROI « I’m Not Actually a Geek

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:36:06 +0000

[...] Enterprise 2.0 ROI is like trying to measure the ROI of email, it can’t be [...]

By: Samuel

Samuel — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:57:41 +0000

He’s in IT.

By: jonmell

jonmell — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:43:33 +0000

Thanks Phil – I definitely believe that’s the way forward!

By: Phil Warner

Phil Warner — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:38:56 +0000

One way we’ve found to demonstrate ROI is to pick a small process that isn’t working very well as the entry point for a social software solution, and then improve it with the application of social tools (tagging for example). Get enough of these in place and you could be sitting on a fait accompli.

By: jonmell

jonmell — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:00:02 +0000

Samuel – many thanks for your kind words. I’m intrigued by your boss’s comments, does he sit in ‘Business’ or ‘IT’?

By: Samuel

Samuel — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:12:25 +0000

Thanks for all your posts on ROI, I like them. Richard Dennison of BT recently had a different take on ROI and social media, relating more to your first 2 sentences. The difficulty with many IT projects is defining a hard business case (- or maybe the hard stuff is easy and we forget about the soft part like productivity improvement). My boss says – and I like that: with IT projects it’s about the good idea first, numbers will come later. Anyway, your posts help the social media evangelists by giving them example calculations and I’m thankful for that.

By: Jon Mell

Jon Mell — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:39:00 +0000

@tubbydev – do you mean in terms of what happens if you don’t get involved?

By: Tubbydev

Tubbydev — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:26:00 +0000

In this kind of problems, may be it’s more efficient to think about “non ROI” .. or NOI (negativereturnoninvestement)

By: Jon Mell

Jon Mell — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:12:00 +0000

Aha – that makes more sense! Many thanks Bertrand, I completely agree. Talking about the ROI of social software only makes sense when applied to a business problem. Then it is a question of social software affecting the ROI of a previously identified issue. It’s like asking what the ROI of a hammer is. If you desperately need to hit a nail, then it’s good. If you don’t, it’s pretty worthless.