The Value of Social Software and the Collapsing Cost of Content Management

The conversation around the ROI of social media/social software is one that gets batted around quite a bit and there are a couple of approaches to considering its impact:

• It improves existing metrics like awareness, positive brand association, lead generation, reduced support costs, etc.
• It improves relationships, increases serendipity, increases retention, increases innovation
• It reduces the cost of delivering the above performance

All of those approaches can be valid depending on what you are trying to achieve - a laundry list of metrics as well as some great commentary can be found here.

But I want to discuss a more fundamental shift that is taking place that is at the heart of social software's ROI - regardless of which metric you use to measure its effectiveness. Fundamentally social software does two things, it:

• Reduces the cost of content development and management
• Improves the value of the content

Content is what drives any business and the better the content, the better a business can align with its market.

First, social software collapses content authoring, cataloging, publishing, and distribution into one application. In the enterprise context that is particularly mind boggling. As an example, to publish a white paper, the process that I would go through in the past typically consisted of:

1. Draft the white paper in a desktop tool - transcribing notes and details regarding examples and case studies from other tools.

2. Send the white paper out to 10-20 interested parties. Remind them to edit. Remind them again. Get edits. 50% of reviewers are good about using the revision tool, 50% are not. 

3. Reconcile edits (or the other option would be to send it out to 10-20 people sequentially). Ugh. This takes longer than the original draft.

4. Send draft to 1 or 2 people for final business edits. Reconcile.

5. Upload document into content management application.

6. Create a ticket in a project management/ticket tracking application for MarCom/editing group to do final edits on.

7. Receive notification of final draft available in content management system.

8. Create a ticket for the web team to publish it to the website. Wait.

9. Receive notification that it is published to the website.

9. Create an email marketing campaign to let the core audience know that it is available.

10. Send email. Hope it's opened.

If lucky, this process takes 6-8 weeks. If the content and writing are being outsourced to a third party, it takes even longer.

With social software, the process looks something like:

1. Write draft. Incorporate content from other sources but also make certain sections of the draft available for others to contribute directly.

2. Alert 10-20 editors that the document is ready for editing. Remind them to edit. Remind them again. (sorry that part won't change). They make edits directly to document.

3. Review edits - accept them or go back to the previous text or edit them.

4. Alert the final 1-2 people to review. They make edits directly.

5. Create an alert for MarCom/editing group to do final edits.

6. Receive alert that the final draft is complete.

7. Change permissions on file and publish to website directly. People subscribed to RSS feed will get notifications immediately.

This change to the fundamental process of content creation and management is not only a cost reduction in the number of applications needed but it is also a reduction in the workflow steps and people needed. In any business process that involves content creation and management, social software can dramatically reduce costs - and ensure that content is stored and categorized centrally...no more losing tons of data when employees leave.  It's almost enough to recommend to IT departments that they not give employees MSFT Office apps - although we are not there yet because of the need to share documents with external partners and customers.

Secondly, once content is published, social software allows the audience for the content to add tremendous value to the original content. Simply by adding ratings and reviews, the value of the content is doubled. Think of the Amazon model - the publishers content is useful but the ratings and reviews are even more so. In niche markets these ratings and reviews increase even more in value. Why don't most companies allow for this?

Then think about enabling customers to create content about your products or services. That probably doubles again the usefulness and value of the content to the end customer. ExpoTV is exploiting this by allowing people to upload video reviews of products - essentially taking that value away from the manufactures and distributors of the products themselves.

So your executives are afaid of negative reviews? Clearly they are happening anyway and if a product is truly that bad...shouldn't it be taken off the market anyway since it will undoubtadly lead to high service costs and a negative reflection on the brand...don't they want to know that? It's happening anyway, the support and brand costs are just hidden from sight and impossible to track if you don't encourage customers tell you directly.

Content. It's what drives business. Making it easier and cheaper to create - and then allowing customers to add to it - will be the way businesses win. Win repeat customers, win new customers, win loyalty, win evangelism. And in this day and age you can't affort to not make your customers into marketing partners.

Comments

[Michael Chin]

Reducing it to content creation is an interesting point. From a marketer's point of view, most definitely. I think the Trinity are: content, activities and interaction. The most important one to you may depend on where you stand.

What are your thoughts on the value of this in a media company? Say a newsroom?

[Rachel Happe]

Hi Michael -

Thanks for the comment - I think content combined with behavior tracking is even more valuable because you can gauge which content inspires the behaviors you want. It allows marketers to get feedback on how to value their content - and when to end of life it.

As for media companies - it is partly why they are going through such dramatic upheavals. They have the infrastructure built for highly produced, very expensive content in a world where content creation costs have dropped through the floor. They are now competing (if not directly) with girls in their dorm rooms for audience attention. And they have their costly infrastructure that is forcing them to continue old models. They are in a tough spot. There will still be room for highly produced content but it won't have the same market share as before and the media companies should be investing is more forms of social content creation.

[billy cripe]

Great points Rachel especially WRT negative reviews. Business should deeply desire that information with as much immediacy as possible. Furthermore, they should maintain that information such that it can be consumed, mashed up, paired with, and analyzed against other signals (customer support, web site and blog comments, anecdotes from the sales gang etc). That way they can manage crisis, spot trends (good or bad ones) before competition, and generate better business intelligence for themselves (e.g. longitudinal analysis of shifting opinions on product or services). But only if the content - the unstructured information - is managed and accessible through numerous and flexible access points.