Lars Wehmeyer › Likes

Marcello, I think you hit many important points, but I wonder how much to present in the area of costs of implementing, using, and supporting social media in an organization. I get the impression that that topic tends to be swept under the rug by a lot of people, either because (a) they don't really know what the costs are, or (b) because they don't want to be too up front about what the actual costs will be. I tried to address the issue (http://www.ddmcd.com/fix.html) but it's not discussed openly. - dennis d. mcdonald

Dennis you're right, costs tend to be forgotten sometimes. I think costs can vary tremendously, considering the different objectives and solutions adopted. When you talk about strategic programs costs and benefits should be addressed with serious business cases, evaluating impact not only on financial objectives but also on your value proposition and customers relations, your critical processes, your internal skills, systems, climate and and organization - Marcello Del Bono

Marcello, all of those measures are great for doing a business case -- as a consultant I've done that many times -- but the first step should be understanding the costs, and I am just raising the question of why costs of social media aren't discussed more. - dennis d. mcdonald

Probably because it is difficult to foresee them? Also, once you set them, you are supposed to deal with them. And we all know about projects ending up with final costs more than twice the original estimate? - Marcello Del Bono

costs is a very important issue. costs in terms of money, for sure. but also costs in terms of other factors, mostly named by you marcello. but i also see a very important cost factor which lies in privacy. how much privacy does a company give up using social media? of course, it depends on the extent of using it. but here in germany i guess many companies fear this factor most above all. just think of putting private data on an external kind of intranet like google pages for example. - Lars Wehmeyer

and then i just read this article about a company using facebook as its intranet (http://tinyurl.com/6z2kw4). this is a great post which gives nice insights on the why and how. - Lars Wehmeyer

That's right, privacy is abig concern in Italy too. Expecially clients from conservative sectors like finance for instance, are really afraid, and that fear is really slowing down the adoption of the new social tools. Anyway they are not totally wrong: social media providers are not giving fully satisfactory answers... - Marcello Del Bono

Great debate. Marcello, thanks for sharing for slides. Dennis - you raise an important issue about cost. I'm used to cost justifying implementations and there's not much point in hiding it. On an Intranet it's relatively easy: the cost of the technology is usually explicit and there will be a number of centres of information creation that can be costed. With SM the cost of technology is low. The cost of training is not insignificant. The cost of staff time is very significant but difficult to quantify. - David Sim

... You could say the greater the success of SM within an organisation ,the greater the cost of staff time using and contributing to it. The key metric is return on investment, which is perhaps easier to demonstrate on a case by case basis. If team A shares documents, what is the time saving for team B? If individual A finds individual B to help with a project, what is the cost saving and improved product / customer support? It is complex: we need to co-develop more case studies and return metrics. - David Sim

Yes, David, case studies and return metrics is what I'm also looking for. Any idea on how to get this sorted out in a sensible way? I'm thinking about this for a couple of days now. I guess, I would like to see kind of a presentation (ppt) with rough overviews of the use cases provided (eg company, what, when, how, outcome positive/negative) and a link to the blog entry where details are given. Any other ideas? Why doing that kind of work alone when collaboratively we can get much better results... - Lars Wehmeyer

Lars, if you are going down the route of case studies and return metrics, you don't need to limit yourself to reviewing other examples of social media implementation if you are looking for ways to cost-justify. Firms justifying any software or database implementation project have been doing this for many years. Some are so structured now that software tools are available for automating part of the estimation process, e.g., justifying investment in call center technology with savings in seconds per call. - dennis d. mcdonald

Dennis, good point indeed. This will definitely work in this area of topic as well. But isn't it still hard to pinpoint what the real effects of social media marketing/management are? I mean, what is your answer on: "And what exactly is it now what you can do for us?" Of course, I immediately come up with a lot of answers. But in the end, a potential client always wants to see hard facts and get there ideally pretty soon. - Lars Wehmeyer

I think I'll try to address this in a blog post over the next week - I'm on leave so have some time to think about it! Dennis raises some valid points on his blog. As a general observation, low cost pilots to demonstrate success in an organisation are critical. These pilots must have clear objectives, can be selective, and must have measurable outcomes, agreed with the organisation. Because culture and org structure plays such a big part, case studies can only take us so far. - David Sim