Although
social technologies enhance cooperation amongst organizations and enhance their
levels of collaboration with each other, it only contributes a very small deal
to the true Return on Investment of an organization. Still, organizations
around the world are concerned about finding ways that can increase their ROI
given the reason that social technologies have potentials to take the business
to newer heights. As long as the changes are implemented in an effective
manner, crowd-sourcing and customer feedbacks have the potential to translate
into ROI. It is suggested by the social innovation adopters that the collection
of new ideas form the business world and the collection of new business
knowledge through different social technologies is a very profitable aspect of
the corporation, if it is used effectively for multiple gains other than simply
increasing company presence.
Social technology implementations involve employees in a collaborative environment of
research and exploration in order to collect and form new ideas for business
interest. However, a contribution to the organization’s ROI will not be
possible until and unless those ideas and feedback are put into concrete practices.
This is why companies are increasingly concerned about not only exchanging
ideas but “practically” implementing those, too.
In
order to gauge the success or failure of a project in a successful manner, the
ROI numbers need to be as accurate as possible. Without truly knowing about
these figures, assumptions regarding the effectiveness of the project can only
be made. Gathering the right type of data involving social technologies
implementation is indeed a tedious task. For this reason we selected IBM as our
company, in order to see if social technologies implementation at IBM
contributes to its ROI or not. Forrester Consulting group is a company that
mainly deals in realizing the ROIs of companies that implement social
collaboration technologies within their businesses. It has been studied by the
IBM Corporation that an adoption of social media tools can result in providing
profitable incentives for the prospects by its partners and business
collaborators. It was maintained that social technologies implementation will
result in bringing new revenues to each set of new products for the
corporation, savings of staff productivities and more profits on incremental
sales.
IBM’s
total revenue: $20
billion a year
Revenue of new products: $420,000 -
$8,400,000 (likely estimate: $2,100,000 per year)
We
get the following estimates for the profits by adding up the low, likely and
high estimates in these four years’ categories:
Profits
(1 year)
- Low – $1,045,500
- Likely – $3,041,813
- High – $10,556,813
Profits
(3 years)
- Low – $3,136,500
- Likely – $9,125,439
- High – $31,670,439
The three ROIs for social technologies implementation for
IBM are as follows:
ROI Low=47, 53%
ROI Likely = 329, 23%
ROI High =1389, 67%
These figures illustrate that IBM can realize a good degree
of financial success of it implements social technologies using effective
social media marketing tools.