conference

[SPOILER ALERT - I haven't solved the problem of ROI in social media.  In fact, I mostly whine about it.  But if that sounds good to you, read on. ;-)]

I posted earlier about my experience at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  Now that I’ve teed up the concept of the social business, I wanted to turn my attention to a favorite related topic:  ROI.  The very mention of those fearsome letters causes agencies everywhere to tremble in their [Whatever shoes cool people wear these days.  It's been a long time since I knew.]

Since the concept of social inside a business is still relatively new, there’s naturally a lot of question about whether it’s a fad (like the internet) or whether it’s really here to stay (macrame classes at the adult education center).  Erudite soul that I am, I figured I’d throw my hat into the ROI ring.

It’s certainly possible (although not always necessary) to spend a lot of money on "social" – depending how far you want to go.  Every conference I’ve been to has had a bustling vendor area with folks who are eager to sell their wares into big companies – and many are buying.  But the problem is that social technologies are disruptive technologies.  And trying to measure the ROI of a disruptive force means that we’re trying to measure tomorrow’s business models by today’s standards.

In wikinomics, Don Tapscott argues that we’re entering the era of the collaboration economy – and exiting what we’ve come to know as the information economy.  And if social/collaborative tools are what’s going to get us there, it’s kind of a fallacy to evaluate them based on information economy standards, isn’t it?

At the conference there were a lot of references to the fact that, after WWII, there was an enormous debate as to whether office workers should have telephones at their desks.  Wouldn’t they just use them to waste time and gossip?  And email – enormous amounts were spent on trying to study the ROI of email.  And eventually the case was made that it would be better for people to HAVE email than NOT to.  But the interesting thing is that people always debate and agonize over ROI before investments are made … but they rarely go back and actually see whether the ACTUAL results matched the PREDICTED results . . . it just sort of fades into history.

There are a lot of very knowledgeable folks (mostly in PR, perhaps not coincidentally) who’ve started bandying new terms about – terms like "Return on Engagement" and "Return on Interaction."  And there’s a lot of relevance to what they’re saying.  But it still feels to me like a partially veiled attempt to put a new economy square peg into an old economy hole.

As I declared up front, I haven’t licked the ROI problem.  But I can say this: The answer is out there.  I can feel it – and we’re all going to know it when we see it.  In the meantime, I’m glad to work at a company that’s willing to invest in a future that it can sense, but not quite touch.  And I think that’s enough good faith to give us a significant leg up on reaching an important (but equally nebulous) goal – to become a leader in the coming collaborative economy.

For those who are interested, I’ve embedded the video from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in which this was hotly debated:

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