I think ROI is hugely important, but lately people seem to be looking to a vendor for all the answers.  The truth is you need to have your own answers to a few questions before we can get to that.

Every person I talk to struggles with the ROI (return on investment) of social media. The first step in finding ROI is establishing what is measurable. I see "ROI" and "measurement" used interchangeably when they really aren't. You can say your site got 10,000 thousand visitors, but until you attach a value to each of those visitors you can't calculate a return. And it's the second step, establishing that value, that is the most important piece.

We could be talking about social media, or people walking around wearing sandwich-boards. If you don't know the value of a few basic things in your company, stop marketing now and leave... please close the door behind you.

You didn't really leave did? Of course not you are reading this... Let's assume you have your house in order and you know the value of a few basic things. These could/should be

• What is the cost of customer acquisition? How much are you willing to spend to get a customer? Before you have pens printed, book a trade-show booth, and of course embark on a social media campaign do you know this value?
• What is the annual value of a customer? Is it a repeat purchase product? A one time, large purchase? High margin, low margin?
  
• What are the costs associated with supporting a customer? What does a single support call cost?
  
• What do you spend on product research? Focus groups, R&D, testing?
  

Almost everything is a derivative of the numbers above. You can talk about customer loyalty, but it's really just the delta between customer acquisition and customer retention. Many companies don't care about keeping customers... just getting new ones. It depends on your business, the quality of your product, the propensity to repurchase etc.

If you make a direct link from your site metrics to the numbers above, bingo!  E.g. X questions asked in our support area times the cost of a support call = return.  Usually its a little harder, not every web question would have resulted in a call to a support desk.  Some customers would have just not bothered (God knows I never call Bell Canada on the phone).  But... how much higher is your customer satisfaction when they can get a question answered immediately?  So really what happens on the web is there ends up being a few things that result, each having incremental value.  Lets stick with the support example.

• number of support questions answered - Customer retention, Support costs
  
• increased customer satisfaction - Customer retention
  
• search engine optimization - Customer acquisition
  
• sentiment data - R&D, product development
  

There's clearly more to write here but I'd be curious to hear what you think needs to be factored into ROI formulas.






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Thanks to all who participated in our Webinar last week.  For those of you that missed it, we talked about the importance of participation.  Its what makes it "Web 2.0".  Participants drive content, which increases the value to the read-only crowd, which may inspire them to participate and add content.  Rinse and repeat.

Then we moved into how can we make that participation frictionless. Remember is always easier to be passive. If you don't grease the wheels of participation you might be missing out on some valuable content.

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So I am missing the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston as I had committed to speakng at Morgan Stanley's CTO Summit.  Honestly I thought I was getting the short end of the stick since its a different time zone and I had very little chance of connecting with my E2.0 homey's  (I don't really talk like that unless I am trying to add a cool factor to what I do.. cue my teenage daughters rolling their eyes).

I actually present tomorrow, but the event kicked off today with Morgan Stanly's CIO giving a keynote and some breakout sessions.  I came "this close" to skipping out and I am happy to say I did not.

I expected the Morgan speech to go like this... "We are a giant company.. play your cards right and you, little vendor, could get a tidy chunk of revenue out of us.  Now dance for us. blah blah blah. "  I have to eat crow here, Jonathan Saxe, the Global CIO, kicked off the whole meeting with complete transparency. He broke out of how they spend money in I.T. and the kinds of problems they need to solve. They were very candid about what works, what doesn't work and how to navigate a financial services company. They even gave a generic session on selling to Wall Street.  They candidly told us home many vendors were followed up with last year and how many got contracts.   I can't say I have ever been dealt with that transparent/honestly by a company that size.

This feels like cheating on a test.  Morgan Stanley has given us all the questions. I'm looking forward to sharing our answers with the rest of the class.
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While the folks in marketing will issue a proper press release, I wanted to take a few lines to talk about why I am excited about our latest release.

Our latest release offers some great features. Last year we introduced "living profiles" giving each community the ability to add profile questions on-the-fly and find out more about their members. More importantly it allowed those members to find out more about each other. There were also some other great features like bookmarking, wiki's, tagging, geo-tagging. Administrators got some help with a bunch of enhancements, including word filters to take different actions on a post based on what words are in that post. I'm skimming the surface, but I'm happy to say none of that feels long-in-the-tooth and here we are pushing the envelope again today.

As you know, Awareness is an enterprise social media platform that our clients launch industrial strength communities and UGC campaigns. A feature I'm pumped about are "People Lists". Friends are important to public social media site, but that doesn't translate to Intranets (aren't people in the same company ALL friends?) or very purposed communities. Awareness gives individuals "people lists" that cane be used to set up content watches and permission what attributes of my profile different people can see. This takes the already granular permissioning that we already have, and puts more power in the hands of the individuals. Those members can also publish a "status" and decide who can see that. While we are on that theme, adhoc Groups are a feature that is in high demand. Our platform already has let community administrators create areas called Neighborhoods that closely mirrored exist company organization structures like "Sales", "Marketing". Communities can now let member s create groups without any administrator involvement. Those groups can be private or public collaboration spaces.

On the theme of "talk nerdy to me", I'm very jazzed about what we have done with our API. We have exposed just about all aspects of the platform via the API so customers can us as an powerful social media engine to drive apps that they develop, or just like before, use our exsiting templates and code to quickly enable communities. I have a list of cool little widgets and mashups I want to see in the platform and now I can get at them without even involving our core development team. Essentially the API gives our clients the social ingredients, and they can dream up all kind of interesting recipes. One of the first usea of the API was to create the MS SharePoint integration we also announced today. If you aren't comfortable with using an API, we also have Widgets you can drop in any web page. Over the coming weeks I'll try to post some code samples. There's a ton more stuff, so visit our site for details. I'll try to blog my perspective and samples.
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Connie Bensen is someone I met via our own blog (she left a comment).  I started reading her blog and following her on Twitter as she covers the Community Manager role in detail.  Connie wrote a guest post on Chris Brogan's blog talking about Building Brand Through Building Community.  Its a good read and she covers some great ground.  Check it out . http://www.chrisbrogan.com/bonus-guest-post-by-connie-bensen/ 
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There is lots of buzz about Web 2.0 apps that are "social". I thought I'd tackle one aspect what that means to an Enterprise Social Media company like Awareness.
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I just read a great article in the Arizona Daily Star on our client EarthKnowledge .  EarthKnowledge has done a great job of taking their environmental-consulting business and enhancing it with a social media community.  We worked with EarthKnowledge  to take geo-specific data and not only provide it to the community to be commented on, edited, voted on, but also mapped using Google maps.  Check out the article.. and check out the Earth Knowledge site. 
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I was reading the recent announcement by FaceBook Friday. FaceBook Connect is very exciting even though it does not seem to have been met with the fanfare of the FaceBook platform last year. That's right, the FaceBook platform is only a year old. Wow, seems like we have had applications like "Scrabulous" and "Visual Bookshelf" forever.
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I used to talk a lot about SEO, or "Search Engine Optimization".  In fact so much that I figured I'd better be quiet about it.  However the question has come up again and I realized it had left my vernacular.

SEO is that act of getting noticed by search engines.  You can pay thousands of dollars to SEO consultants and they will tweak things and suggest words to use to get noticed.   They'll do more than that but in the end here is how I think about SEO and the things that are easy to do.

1. Don't try to game the system.  Google's rules for ranking sites change regularly to weed out people who are trying to give themselves an artificially high ranking.  Companies who have made millions of dollars in advertising because Google was sending them people to view their pages.. which carried ads.. and made them money.  Then one day Google realized they were gaming the system (maybe they were publishing the same content on many different web sites) and boom the traffic stops coming.  John Batelle writes about that in his book "Search" which is a good read. 
   
   
2. Fresh content is a good thing.  I have customers who want to re-word old content to maximize everything.  In the end just write lots of fresh relevant content.  Thats why communities are so good for SEO, lots of fresh content.
   
   
3. Get people to link to you.  To a search engine when someone on another site highlights word and links to you (e.g. Enterprise Social Media), the search engine treats that act as if someone is "citing" your work.  When you are "cited" you are being credited as an authority.  Google ranks you higher when others do this.  Bloggers figured that out ages ago and created "blog rolls" which link to all their favorite blogs.  Of course its polite to reciprocate.  :)  Link to my blog please.  Write an article like "Dave Carter knows a lot about Enterprise Social Media" and link to this article.  (I'm serious, stop reading for a second and go do that.. I'll wait)
   
   
4. Make your content easy for the search engines to read.  This is a little techie, but some designers can chop their content up into tables or use little scripts to place content.  Search engines like Google get confused by that, or ignore it altogether. Basically if someone is designing your site you want them to separate content and style.  Then when a search engine comes to read your site, it just ignores the style and reads content only.  Technically they should use XHTML and CSS (Style sheets.  read my post I wrote a few years ago when I got "schooled" on SEO.  There are a tons of other benefits to this like speed and accessibility.

Those are the "big impact" things.  If you are serious about it you can tweak filenames for your content, be more precise about how you use headings etc.  All have impact, but the items above have the most impact and are authentic ways to work that don't game the system.

Here's the cool thing... When you create a community you are facilitating those big things.  In our system profiles and blogs have unique URL's and are generally set up to link back to the main community automatically.  Lots of members = lots of links.  Hopefully they are posting content which means your sites content is growing and changes daily.  Unless the client tells us otherwise, our templates are very easy for search engines to read and we generally use the techniques I outline. 

So, engage your community and get your company noticed



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A term I find myself using a lot lately is "points of enthusiasm". Its used to describe situation in your enterprise where staff is highly engaged and motivated.  Its during these moments that you want to direct some of that energy and focus towards capturing content or having people update their profile.

I'll give you some examples.  Our client McDonald's was registering users for there bi-annual global  conference.  In order to attend the event, you had to register.  Knowing the flood of activity that came with this, it was decided to ask questions during electronic registration that could be added to the staff's existing profile.  This was an excellent opportunity to make sure profiles were up to date and accurate.  Also, as part of that process, each person was asked if there was a best practice they wanted to share. At eh end of the registration the internal community had thousands of updated profiles and best practices submitted to the community.

Had this just been a link of the community saying "Don't forget to update your profile" or "Share your best practice" the response rate would have been much lower.  Instead we slipped into a process the employee had to engage in anyway. 

Points of Enthusiasm could follow or precede training. They could be major events, performance evaluations for staff, product launches, trade shows or a lot of other things.  During these points people are more motivated to participate or document things they have done.

I'd be interested in hearing what "points of enthusiasm" you might exploit in your company.

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