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BACK TO FRONT ROI
Quantifying the return on investment on anything to do with increasing intangible assets has always been difficult and social media is no different. But what if we are asking the question back to front?
Return On Investment – another of those grown-up phrases that gets bandied about and which can send a chill down your spine. It is taken for granted that being able to quantify a return on investment is an essential part of justifying any new initiative you are trying to get off the ground. It would be naïve to suggest that it is a pointless exercise. For projects with predictable and quantifiable outcomes it is useful to have a sense – before you embark on them – of what you are going to get as a return for your investment of time and effort. The problem is that it has been assumed that you can apply this sort of thinking to any and all initiatives.
But in some cases you don’t know exactly what the outcomes are going to be and you will struggle to quantify realistically the results of your actions. In fact it is arguably the case that most of the really world changing developments in technology and business would find it hard to produce a realistic estimate of return on investment. Remember the days when people laughed at Google for their lack of a business model and ridiculed their apparent naïvety in giving services away for nothing. And here they are now, one of the biggest revenue earning advertising platforms in the world. People similarly mocked Facebook ...
