Socnet ROI Measurements

Connie Bensen reached out to me on a call for a measurement meme that Geoff Livingston made this week. Connie's response nails many of the ways that you need to measure the ROI of products that involve a social component. One thing that I think is important to note is that her measurements don't vary much from what she would be measuring if she were implementing a non-social initiative. I think there are two real opportunities that socnets give us with regard to measurement:

• metrics that use the social graph as an input
• novel visualizations of these measurements

Interestingly, in reading Geoff's original post, he notes, "Most of my clients are looking for increased visibility as an outcome," I can't say that I relate to that much except with regard to my work on serious about camo. That's really an Awareness measurement, and frankly I am more interested in what happens after conversion.

What if in the image on the left the size of the dots corresponded to network size of customers? This type of measurement could help you to shape your product direction; in this case you could posit that your core users have relatively large networks and will benefit from features that cater to occasional use at lower dollar amounts.

There are also some questions I have around what is going on with active users with large networks. There may be an opportunity here to move customers along the left axis. Focusing research on the customers in the lower right quadrant could yield some serious financial gains.

To summarize, I don't think that we have updated our knowledge tools along with our products. I also don't think that we are looking at a greenfield: as technologists we should be looking to politics and medicine as inputs into how we might shape our success measurement and design tools. How does the CDC analyze disease vectors? What analytical tools do Congressional activitists use to figure out how to re-write judicial districts in their favor? The tools exist, they are robust and in common use. They are just in someone else's toolbox.

I'd be really interested in hearing other thoughts on this topic. Time to do some reaching:

• Sam Freedom, your crazy Twitter mining thread has been fun to watch. Whaddya think?
• Damon Cortesi, socnet inputs into security metrics? That might be an interesting thing to hear ... unless you have something else you might be thinking.
• Shashi Bellamkonda, what are your thoughts?