Biznology

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The business case for social media in the workplace and the inevitable ROI conversation have polarized innovation advocates and doubters for years. There’s a saying in marketing that we always waste half of our marketing budget, we just don’t know which half. The fact that we are still witnessing the infancy of social technologies leads us to this situation where the ground we’re standing on keeps moving and changing all the time, and very few have been able to establish a clear, irrefutable correlation between the adoption of social media and sustained business results. Does this mean that the quest to find the elusive perfect ROI model should just be abandoned by all of us? My answer is yes, but not for the reasons you may be thinking.

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ROI or no ROI? The answer depends on which side of the business case you sit at:  asking for the investment or holding the purse. Last month, I covered the subject of personal ROI in the realm of enterprise social networking: how sustained adoption requires individual buy-in similar to long-term commitments to special diets or exercise routines. The topic of Social Media ROI, due to its complexity and scope, would be better discussed in a book than in a blog, so here are some themes to think about, as opposed to being a comprehensive analysis of this somewhat controversial area. Read the remainder of this entry »

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It’s been seven full years since O’Reilly Media organized the first Web 2.0 conference, and a handful of years since terms like Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business were introduced to our business jargon. However, the reality in 2011 is that the internal use of social technologies in large enterprises across the globe still faces an interesting situation: while most large companies have already gone through some 2.0 experimentation, I would dare to affirm that very few of them–or none at all–have made a complete transition from the so-called 1.0 way of communicating and collaborating to the promised land of pervasive internal use of social media-like channels. Even those companies who started this journey early are still seeing a vast majority of their population communicating and collaborating pretty much in the same way they did in the early 2000s. Does that mean that the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business nirvana is just a pipe dream? Will that ideal of an efficient marketplace for information fueled by social interactions ever be realized within the Enterprise? Oddly enough, my answer is “yes” to both questions. To understand why, we need an understanding of the built-in Return-on-Investment (ROI) framework most of us rely on most of the time, and a trip to a not-so-distant past related to other game changing technology.

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Back in the days when “Web 2.0″ was a hot buzzword, many people asked what “Web 3.0″ would look like. Even though that question sounds now as outdated as an X-Files re-run episode, the quest for “what’s next?” is always in our minds. I’m no better prognosticator than anybody else, but my best answer would be:  look at where the inefficiencies are. In no way is that a good indicator of what 2012 or 2013 will look like. Some inefficiencies may take decades to be properly addressed. But if you are trying to guess where we’ll see the next revolutionary step in social media–as opposed to the much-easier-to-predict incremental improvements–you have to focus where the biggest opportunities are, the undiscovered country somewhere out there. Analyzing the current landscape and the evolution of information markets by borrowing from a product life cycle framework may assist in developing some educated guesses about what the future may bring. Read the remainder of this entry »

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All of our existing controls around content, intellectual property, and information exchange were developed when moving information around was an ancillary function to what mattered at the time: moving goods efficiently to generate wealth. The most powerful nations and organizations throughout the centuries were the ones that mastered the levers that controlled the flow of things. That pattern may soon be facing its own Napster moment. Information is becoming a good in itself, and our controls have not yet adapted to this new reality. In fact, much of what we call governance consists of ensuring that information moves very slowly–if at all. The entities–countries, companies, individuals–that first realize that a shift has already taken place, and re-think their raison d’être accordingly, might be the ones who will dominate the market in this brave new world. Read the remainder of this entry »