ROI and Enterprise 2.0

Welcome back once again bloggers, sorry for the late post but i have been dealing with a little bit of unfortunate family business over the last week and i have struggled to find time for my blog post. The topic i want to discuss in this weeks post is ROI or Return on Investment and its relationship with Enterprise 2.0. For those of you who are not all that familiar with the term ROI it is essentially based around what you are receiving in relation to what you are putting in. In the context of Enterprise 2.0 for example, a business might put 10 man hours into implementing a facebook advertising and fan page which they paid 1 individual say $500 to do. If they make over $500 off the advertising capabilities of this page then that is a positive Return on Investment, if they dont then they are left with a negative Return on Investment.

Many debate that discovering just how much of a return an organisation makes on any sort of investment maid for an enterprise/social media strategy is a waste of time given that there are an insane amount of factors involved with any business and it is far too hard to isolate the investment by itself in terms of returns. I would like to disagree mainly because i am a big fan of social media strategies and just how much of a return can be made off them is an interesting topic for me. It is an obvious fact that people especially those people who run a business really do enjoy money, i can understand this point of view rather well as im sure most can. There is a problem though, how do we measure how much money is being made in regards to social media/enterprise 2.0 strategies? Yes it is a tricky question to answer but here is an example.

For this example I want to take a slightly different approach and look at the side of things many neglect. The measurement method i want to talk about is all about analyzing Intra-Business functionality and employee participation. Now if you remember back a few weeks you will notice i do talk a lot about wikis, this is because I very much think this is a substantial enterprise 2.0 implementation technique. Now im sure some of you reading this will think oh this isnt a good measure of the Return on an Investment because your employees don’t give you money for being happier doing their job. This is true BUT an employee who is provided with all of the tools required to be informed and productive will be a far better asset to an organisation. Helping get employees motivated and enthusiastic is the hard part of this equation, however i am a firm believer that wikis and other tools that can aid in connecting a business on the inside is the first step in increasing organisational effectiveness, look at the concept of crowd sourcing and the wisdom of crowds for many examples of this. the second half of implementing these tools is making it easier for the employees as i mentioned briefly before. If an employer provides employees with a rich and fulfilling environment to complete their work in they are much more likely to in the end produce a better final product, whatever it may be. I have seen first hand how changes in a work environment can effect the attitude and enthusiasm of individuals within an organisation.

I know some of you might be thinking that the returns of having happy employees and better organisation effectiveness might not be that relevant to ROI because they arent direct forms of currency in your pocket. However I believe that the combination of increased organisational effectiveness and an enthusiastic bunch of employees is a far better return than a few dollars and over the long run it provides other benefits like employee retention which can be critical in times of need. Thank you so much for reading my blog this week, feel free to drop a comment

Reference List:
Watson, J. 2012. ROI, Adoption Wider Issues From INB 347 Lecture