Kiss of Death for Social Networking Projects: "What is your Business Case?"

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Comment by Jeffrey Levy on April 26, 2009 at 12:13am

Great post and comments. I often talk about "return on engagement" vs. investment. And yes, it's hard to quantify. I do my best to use anecdotes, such as my recent post "Twitter to the Rescue!" You can't know in advance that those kinds of things are going to happen, but they're valuable.

The low expense (often only staff time) of trying some of these tools out means the business case is much easier to create. And don't forget the benefits of learning while doing. I advise managers at EPA that, at minimum, they should learn about the new tools. Even if they don't use them immediately, they need to know what's out there.

Overall, the key is to focus on mission, not technology. Identify a mission need, try some tools out to meet it, measure success, evaluate, reset, repeat. And I like to add "teach" to the end, because we're all learning about social media. So I'll end with saying thanks for an interesting post!

Comment by Steve Richardson on April 23, 2009 at 3:58pm

Interesting topic and great contributions! May I suggest an R&D or advertising/sales model for your business case? Social networking is not about achieving specific objectives; rather, it's an investment in innovation. I'm in the business of measurement, but I don't think this is an activity worth measuring. It should be carefully designed, managed and evaluated on its effectiveness at attracting the type of people who are likely to make valuable contributions and making it easy and rewarding for them to do so (like this site). Quality of the exchange can be assessed as a balance to measures of activity levels. Most results, however, are not likely to be attributable. It really boils down to this: Organizations that do not give creative people discretionary resources (mainly slack time) to exchange knowledge lose those people - or at least whatever they could have created if they had opportunities to explore new ideas.

Comment by Andrew Krzmarzick on April 23, 2009 at 12:55pm

Hi Brock - We should talk soon. Ari Herzog and I delivered a presentation entitled "Social Media Measurement" for ALI's Social Media and Government conference in late March. The slides cover ROI. Also, I have composed a series of posts here on GovLoop and on my blog on measurement that fleshes out the content of the slides:

1. Introduction

2. Brookings

3. ForeSee

4. Forrester

5. PMA/OMB - coming soon!

Also, have you seen the "New Media and The Air Force" guide and video? As I have been saying, forget the gold standard. This is the new Blue Standard for a foundational government social media document.

Comment by Tamara Lamb-Ghenee on April 23, 2009 at 9:26am

I think another quote from Einstein can also apply here. "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." While we don't know at this point what benefits may come from Social Networking, we do know that sharing best practices and developing communities of practice have had positive returns in the past. So to paraphrase Einstein, just because you cannot count it does not mean it is not of value.

Comment by Andrew Ollivier on April 22, 2009 at 9:37pm

When faced with the option of making a business case and not making one - then there is no need to only choose one! Do both together.

In response to Teri's question - "did anyone make a business case for email". Yes, I made a business case and installed email, I also made a business case, and installed a network.

The key was to make the case focussed on the outcome required rather than the geeky tools called email or network.

In the web 2.0 case the outcomes are all the benefits of two-way interchange, speed etc. Matt described an example of this. I'm sure most organisations have others - for instance my organisation is interested in the professional development of teachers - what a wonderful group to explore interchange benefits with.

The key point here is that if the tool is genuinely cheap, then it only needs one smallish benefit to justify the setup. The 'other uses' that will evolve are effectively a free good and grow their own head of steam as the beneffits become obvious to the unconvinced.

This means in turn that the business case for a single benefit needs to be aware enough of the future benefit to create the generic platform for possible realisations in ways we cannot imagine. It was true for networks and emails, it will be true for Web 2.0.

One of the signs of intelligence is the use of tools - they're alive and well right now.

Comment by David Harrity on April 21, 2009 at 9:51am

Love this posting and responses. One observation that I believe makes GovLoop.com successful is that it is built on a (relatively) proven platform, the Ning network. Part of the proof of Ning is GovLoop.com itself so not sure if it's a chicken-and-the-egg scenario. But, another key aspect of GovLoop.com is the diversity of the topics that can and are followed. But, also I don't believe that Govloop.com is fully accepted (at least by the U.S. Federal Government community) because all the details related to security, 3rd party hosting and cultural mindset within the government have been figured out. On the latter, Mary Davie made an observation, "the term "social media" often implies "non-business" related activities to the unfamiliar."

For example, if Steve Ressler locked this down to JUST talk about Government 2.0 and Social Networking, then I believe it would become less successful overtime because we would could run out of things to talk about. But, Govloop offers the ability to create diverse communities ranging from Green Building technology to Communication Best Practices to Gov 2.0 itself.

Social networking in most cases (at least Government-to-Citizen interaction) should be to "compliment" but not replace other forms of communication and collaboration. In Inward Bound as described in Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment"

There is a strong need to combine the commercial offerings (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) to help solve and interact citizens with the government but less of a case to do so for "internal" conversations using social networking. Maybe we need to use the term "social-professional media" or "social-professional networking"

Comment by Brock Webb on April 21, 2009 at 9:20am

Wow, lots of great responses and feedback!

Gwynne -- just wanted to respond to what we are doing with DEFStar -- My goal is to create the best "market driven" user experience, not just another "tool" for people to use. I am trying to market it to both power users which are quick to join, as well as figure out the right motivations and incentives for bringing the rest of the people (moderate to late adopters) in and keeping them active. 80% of the DoD civilian demographic is over 30, which represents only 20% of social networking usage of things like facebook or Myspace -- that imbalance alone creates an interesting challenge.

I want it to be useful within the context of the DoD community, but I want to bring in people from all over the government as well to keep it fresh with ideas and fun!

BTW I firmly believe that "fun" is the secret ingredient, and trying to slide the scale to being more "social" over more "professional" will increase active participation and recruitment!

Comment by Gwynne Kostin on April 20, 2009 at 11:42pm

Got me thinking! And disagreeing, too. After spending many, many (did I say many) hours on projects built on the "Field of Dreams" proposition of if you build it they will come, I think saying that you can't know what the ROI will be is, well, sorry to say, taking the easy way around a tough problem. I'm not saying that you, Brock, are taking an easy pass. And Tim, above, provides a framework to translate some of your thinking into a business case.

I can see from your project that you all are thinking and creating a strategy, but too many people build systems and wait for the users to figure out how to use it. Adoption of the tools is hard and frequently require cultural changes. Not to minimize for a successful implementation. And without the business case, it will be hard to get the resources for the change management part.

I do agree that too rigid a process can get in the way of development and innovation. So I am all for having a loose business case, but a business case all the same.

Comment by Tim Constantine on April 20, 2009 at 4:58pm

Good article Brock!

The benefits of your DEFstar system are derived from people changing their work practices. Tie the tool to the change in work practices, and then the change in work practices to the benefits, then the benefits to your organization's mission.

Technology -> Change -> Benefits -> Objectives

(Each step is critical!)

Managing the project from this perspective will also help ensure that the all important Change step occurs. If you build it, you can't assume they will come. If you utilize this approach, you tie the change to the organization's mission, and you have a better chance of success!

I highly recommend that you read Managing the Realization of Business Benefits from IT Investments.

Comment by Matt Bigge on April 20, 2009 at 2:29pm

good article and love the name DEFStar. It would be great to get more information. Quick point: Facebook is not profitable, but they are generating a decent amount of cash. With respect to ROI, there are ways to measure and justify social software. In fact, the analytics that can be used to measure social software often provide a more concrete ROI calculation than more traditional forms of IT. On a very high level, one can refer to the coup in Madagascar in which the US Embassy was almost overrun. The State Department made deft use of Twitter to inform the mobs that the overthrown ruler was not in the US Embassy. Result: mob dispersed, no NEO required. Cost of a tweet ~ $0.00. Cost of a NEO ~ millions. Glad to discuss more...matt

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