Selling Corporate Blogging: Keep Quiet on ROI

Getting the buy-in for a social media initiative, such as corporate blogging often requires some solid ROI calculation. Often, budget managers won't see the value of it, because it doesn't have an obvious link to a revenue stream.

It's uncommon for any commercial project to be given the green light without translating the effort required into cost and potential profit.

Any project involving IT will have to overcome internal scepticism and mistrust -- fuelled by a litany of commercial IT projects in the past that turned into disasters, in terms of cost and, in some intances, negative PR.

Even email, if looked at on an ROI basis is on shaky ground. I have already described how to preserve your productivity by staying on top of your email. But, email can also be responsible for stress and for wasting time and money.

On average, managers spend 40 percent of their time on email, according to Mike Song, Vicki Halsey and Ken Blanchard, the authors of the 'Hamster Revolution'. Yet, despite all these productivity issues, the requirement for email is not questioned, barring a few exceptions such as IBM's 2.0 expert Luis Suarez who declared war on e-mail and almost succeeded.

So is ROI a valid way of showing how useful corporate blogging can be?

My take is the following:

• People don't invest in a social media project because it brings profit but because it enables them to reach people in different ways that are beneficial to the brand.
• Social media projects typically have a minimal drain on budgets. In fact, they may even cost too little -- some budget-holders rank the importance of projects by the amount of budget they take up, not the amount of benefit they promise.
• User-generated content is also a major source of production of high quality content which can then be used in many instances such as client-facing meetings and lead generation. It's a cheap addition to expensive internally created content. Any one video could cost from €1,000 to €15,000 but I have seen some instances in which a very talented consultant generated 8 videos worth at least €6,000 each for nothing.

Maybe the final reason for not falling into the ROI trap is that ROI is often used by execs to get rid of subjects they don't like even though there may be no other rational reasons for them to do so. The best thing in this case is to avoid the matter altogether and concentrate peoples minds on what the company can gain by using social media.

(Pic: Annie Mole cc2.0)