Measuring the ROI of Social Media

Mashable has put together a really useful post on "How to measure the ROI of Social Media" in the post they refer to a presentation called "Basics of Social Media ROI" which we've embedded below.

This is a really interesting and funny way to look at ROI, which is well worth reviewing.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

Happy bonfire night!

Happy bonfire night to all our readers, we hope you have a sparkling time.

Sowing the seeds of change

Mary Abraham at the Above and Beyond KM blog has written an interesting post on change. Called "Are you ready for change" Mary looks at some of the obstacles and challenges for Knowledge Managers in Law Firms.

In her post Mary points readers towards another blog post called "9 tips for change agents" Mary argues quite rightly that one of the difficulties with managing change is where you don't have any experience of actually "working" in the business e.g. you're not a lawyer a paralegal or a banker.

There are some very good tips contained within these posts, which for anyone involved with projects or change management are well worth reading.

Who knows what?

Who knows what is the title of an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal. In it the author describes how in "big companies" in-house experts who might have specialised skills and knowledge will exist but people in the same office might not know they exist!

The authors goes on to identify two problems with some of the systems that are designed to manage "expertise"...there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts. Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts' "softer" qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn't easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries"

The author goes on to describe how social-computing or social media tools might help with some of the gaps in the current approaches to managing this content. The two tools that the authors discuss in more details are Blogs and wikis, although they also mention Social networks and tagging as a source of expert information.

I believe blogs are an excellent way to identify experts, especially if someone is dedicating their own time to create and manage content on a blog. Wikis are also another excellent way to identify experts and potentially where there might be "holes" in a teams areas of expertise which require filling, either by developing/training an individual or asking another team member to provide the expertise.

Overall this is a really interesting article, which is well worth reading.

Is it about the culture or the technology?

In their post "Culture makes the collaboration, not technology" the Knowledge Jolt blog looks at some of the factors associated with the successful implement of social media tools. The post makes reference to an article called "Corporate Culture, Not Technology, Drives Online Collaboration" so which is more important, culture or the technology?

We'll let you decide! but I'm sure we all know the answer.

Checking your premises

Mary Abraham at the Above and Beyond KM blog has written an interestin post on her blog. Called "KM's worst enemy" the post ask whether KM's worst enemy is actually the people responsible for developing KM in the first place - namely Knowledge Managers.

From Mary's blog post "Knowledge managers should lead by example when it comes to finding creative solutions to practical problems. The first step along this path is to question our premises. When we fail to do this, we pursue outdated goals and methods, thereby relegating our KM programs to an increasingly irrelevant position within the firm"

In the post Mary highlights two areas which Knowledge Managers have traditionally considered important in terms of the development of Knowledge, "document collections" and "model documents" but are they?

Who know's what?

"Who know's what" is the title of a very interesting blog post on the KM Space blog. In the blog post the author reports on "Who Knows What? Finding in-house experts isn’t easy. But most companies make it harder than it should be" this article explores the expertise location benefits of social media tools.

The blog post and the article are well worth a quick read.