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This video is by Peter B. Giblett, Co-Founder and Chief Ideas Officer of P3 Social Media.

This presentation is designed to give you an overview of how to implement Social Media solutions that work for YOUR business.

Peter is a Senior Business and IT Executive with over 25 years experience delivering successful solutions. Contact him at peter.b.giblett@gmail.com or call in the office at 646 875 4556 (New York) and 905 371 3908 (Toronto).

It has become evident that social medial is no longer simply about chatting with friends and having fun. In fact people are now demonstrating their thoughts and feelings about a wide range of topics from Iran to the colour of their next handbag. Tastes, preferences and values are all being publicly displayed as users build a community and share their thoughts. If views are publicly available then they can be analysed. With all this information this can be a boon for product planning and marketing.

Businesses are also getting involved in Social Media in order to:

• Build trust based networks
• Collaborate with customers, vendors, and others
• Identify opportunities for growth.

Social Media can be viewed by many as the current must-have, but at what cost to the corporation? Are CIOs setting aside the ROI in order to jump start their enterprise social media presence?

On the surface social media tools promise to connect the unconnected, but do they? In many corporations less than 100% of all workers have access to a PC, and many roles possibly will never include any factory worker access to computers, yet those workers still make a valuable contribution to the corporation. Because of the implementation of Instant Messaging (not strictly web 2.0 but it does show the benefits of on-line collaboration) in one corporation a warehouse supervisor spotted a potential error in a customer’s delivery allocation that saved thousands in extra trucking costs – solved by Instant Messaging whilst the department manager was in a meeting and traditionally unavailable.

Contrary to Elizabeth Bennet’s opinion in Feeling the Fear (CIO Insight June 2009) I believe that information sharing tools like wikis, video casts, and blogs can certainly contribute to a transformation of corporate behaviour. An ability to put information, instructions, training material into a wiki or a blog is of great importance. It takes on-line training one step further because the material was written by someone inside the organisation, and may even be someone the user knows.

To say that an organisation is late for the Web 2.0 party is a bit of a misnomer as there is no fixed time by which all corporations have to be compliant.  For some business and IT Leaders there is a tendency to panic once a need is discovered. That panic is based on the (often perceived rather than real) fact that all my competitors are using it and we are not, yet that can lead to a poorly thought out solution that causes more problems than it solves.

I have heard it said that it is not possible to identify an ROI for collaboration improvements and that we only see the real improvements in the rear-view mirror. Yet when I look back over my career this has always been true for any systems implementation. Defining an ROI for any proposed solution is about producing a best estimate  available at the time the need is perceived. That is as relevant for any Social Media implementation as it is for any other corporate change. Remember here the major impact of social medial is more in the area of business than with the technology that underpins it.

Internally setting up of blogs and wikis has more challenges in respect of obtaining contributions that it does with the technology setup. People are keen to initially get involved, but keeping contributions coming after the initial setup is even more vital. This is where the real work occurs in the building of any corporate knowledgebase. Sharing needs to be encouraged through the organisation. This requires a change in mindset, yet many people are already willing and have skills to do it because of their ability to contribute to discussions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

I am not going to enter the realm of the impact on the corporate psychology of collaboration, that in outside the scope of this article. The whole area of social media is always questioned as to whether contribution in the area of social computing (e.g. blogs, wikis, social networks) whether internal or external constitute real work. This argument must be a part of the ROI for Social Media.

Build ROI is based on the premise that “No matter the size of your company or budget, you can increase your ROI” It is focused on solution providers maximising their marketing potential. It is a pay program with the first tier starting out at $5,000 right up to tier 3 that is focused on creating a dominant presence in the marketplace.

So what  does your money get you?

According to Ziff Davis “Tier 1 program offers a variety of multi-media marketing vehicles – from print and on-line advertising, to contextual sponsorship offerings, to proven lead generation”. For the service provider or software vendor it is providing access to services used by their readers use on a daily basis, this is a subscriber base of over 4 million readers. Tier 2 is “designed to get you closer to your prospects… solutions provide intimate and contextual reach that accelerates your pipeline growth” and tier 3 “Create a dominant presence in the marketplace… long-term lead generation programs, lead nurturing and scoring options, strategic consulting services, international programs and a variety of other impactful vehicles.”

I have adopted the mindset of a CEO of a small software company in assessing these offerings. My first thought is that I would have loved to have access to the readers of publications like eWeek, BaseLine, and CIO Insight. There is a difference between having access to readers through RSS feeds, pod-casts etc and developing a direct connection with a prospect. I am then questioning how much value solution providers can drive via other means, e.g. access through Social Media channels. It is always possible that they could be complimentary. Tier 1 can certainly be a useful marketing tool, however to me one of the most important components of the program the “Business Value Calculators” are costed seperately from the main program offering, which is such a pity because this has the potential for being the most powerfull of all offerings.

One of the interesting things about the sight is the availability of free material in the BuildROI Resource Centre. Much of this material is very useful and can certainly be leveraged by anyone researching As with many American based sites it does forget that places do exist outside the USA, when filling in the registration form it requires that I enter a State, but does not include my Canadian province (but does accept Canada as the Country). All of this is a little odd when the report is delivered by email.

At the end of the day there will be IT suppliers that will find the program has a lot of use. I see this as an attempt by Ziff Davis to guarantee a revenue stream in these hard times, not necessarily a bad thing. However where budgets are tight I would think that many will think twice before joining the program.