Great Discussion on Social Media ROI and Metrics

This will be a first for me: I'm recommending the comments on a blog post more highly than the post itself. I just came across a promising blog that I plan to return to frequently, The Brandbuilder Blog by Olivier Blanchard. After reading just a few posts I was struck by this one about measuring the ROI for social media: Impossible? Think Again.

The blog post itself, and the embedded video, are essentially a teaser for future posts and a book. Olivier promises that measuring the ROI of social media is, in fact possible, as well as fairly simple. But neither the post nor the video reveals how.

But the comments delve into a number of tactical and strategic examples, in which questions, ideas and suggested solutions are debated by Olivier and his equally capable readers/commenters. I learned far more from the comments, so don't miss them. In fact, by following a link to another blog written by one of the commenters, I've found another promising site which I plan to explore further: Metrics Man. I can already recommend the latest post, The Difference Between Value and ROI.

And I suggested you bookmark The BrandBuilder Blog or add it to your RSS Reader, as I did, if you're interested in social media metrics. Really good stuff there!

Jive SBS Training Course Is Now FREE!

I'm really loving this move by Jive Software: they just made their online training course for Jive Social Business Software (SBS) free for the first time. Like so many organizations today, we're cutting costs everywhere we can, so paying extra for this kind of training was never going to happen with us. And that put the burden of developing training materials on me!

No surprise that I haven't found time to develop a nice training package around Jive SBS's nifty new features, even though we have already upgraded. Making the Jive SBS training free is a huge win for us, as it has saved me days or weeks of development work and it means more members of our community will learn how to better use the system.

Thanks, Jive!!! Now we just need to get everybody to take the course...

UPDATE:
Thanks for your comments, Claire and Rick. I'm also going to share the links you sent me, Claire, since people who find this blog post likely would find them valuable, too.

Finding people and Content--> http://www.vimeo.com/1620741
Finding People via Filtering --> http://www.vimeo.com/1304560
Connecting--> http://www.vimeo.com/1555432
Organizing Yourself -->http://www.vimeo.com/1622605
Collaborating--> http://www.vimeo.com/1621749
Sharing Files--> http://www.vimeo.com/1516195

Tackling Technology vs. Community Building

As a community manager, my mission is to build and develop our online community. Yet I am also the system administrator, and at times technology issues consume more of my time than I'd like. The past month has been an especially tough one for our technology.

Change is the enemy of stability when it comes to technology, I am learning. Last month we started preparing for two major changes: upgrading from Jive Clearspace 2.5 to Jive SBS 3.0 and also implementing Akamai's Content Delivery Network (CDN). In the middle of all of this, we suddenly experienced a major loss of system functionality (no one in our largest division could download file attachments from the system).

It took more than a week to resolve the file download issue, and it got worse before it got better. Meanwhile, our upgrade date rapidly approached and we kept our commitment to get that done. Now we are doing our best to thoroughly test the Akamai integration -- which promises to finally resolve our long-standing complaints about slow system response time outside of the US -- and hope to be ready to cutover the entire site by Friday.

The trade-off for all of this focus on the technology is clear: our community has been neglected. I'm looking at usage statistics for April and May and see downward dips after months of upward movement. We've taken our eye off the ball (community development) so it's not surprising that growth and progress have stalled. Still, it's frustrating and discouraging.

The plan now is to maintain a stable technology situation for as long as possible once we get through this push. We'll likely wait until November to upgrade to Jive SBS 3.5 (it's due out in September), both so we can avoid inevitable early-release bugs and so we can extend our focus on community development for a five-month stretch.

There are so many steps we are ready to take with our community. We have raced ahead for nine months now. We've lost a bit of momentum over the past two months, but lulls are to be expected, especially after the new-ness of the technology wears off. I'm hoping we are just catching our breath, so to speak, and with the new features of Jive SBS 3.0 plus the speed enhancements from Akamai's CDN we'll start a new push toward the next levels of community maturity.

That's my mission. Now, if we can just get the technology issues wrapped up so I can get to it!