The Missing Metrics in Social Media ROI: Internal Value
I was reading a great McKinsey&Group report the other day about the value that social media will provide businesses over the next few years. (link to report)
One thing that struck me was the amount of financial value that they associate to social technologies. They see these social tools helping companies get more productivity from their workers. What they mean is that there is a lot of internal value including things like faster access to ‘experts’ within the organization, faster access to information and less reliance on things like email that take away from group collaboration in problem solving.
It was a good reminder that social media ROI isn’t all about the external impact. We also need to consider the internal ROI benefit from social technologies.
One example I can think of in my own role is that we often see a number of our international offices download the new material when we post new documents to places like SlideShare and YouTube.
I was asking around about why colleagues like to get it from our social media channels and the response was generally about it being quicker than emailing teams around the world, easy to access, easy to understand and is one of the best ways to stay up to date.
We’re a large company - with a diverse mix of offices in different countries - so there can be challenges to collaborating around the globe. Social media has a lot of potential in this area and we’re already starting to see the (accidental) benefits of social technologies for our own teams, in addition to helping customers.
The McKinsey report is a good reminder that the metrics related to external efforts are just one part of the social story.
Social media ROI measurement will need to start taking account of the internal impact as well as the external to truly measure the entire benefit of social media. In my role, that’s something I only do anecdotally with the odd comment to an exec about how our teams seem to like our content. Pretty soon, I can see the need to start measuring exactly what that means with data in order to keep developing the social media program throughout the organization.
