The returns on investment for social technologies is often what stumps people.
But measuring the ROI of these technologies has to be done in order to get some understanding of how it is engaging people and correlating to the overall organization.
Socialcast is a social technology company that provides activity streams and social technologies. It created an infographic to show how human resources departments can understand the return by doing regression analysis on multiple data sets.
The infographic is divided into three categories: employee engagement, turnover rate and sales.
For each category, Socialcast looks at the assertion, why it’s important and how to measure the information. The measurement demonstrates the ways to get a picture of the ROI on social technology.
Employee Engagement
Socalcast recommends using survey data that looks at employee engagement and their use of enterprise software. Other engagement and employee data can be added to the mix, too.
“Now, through the use of regression analysis (a mathematical way to model relationships), calculate what impact an employee level of activity in the network (the independent variables) has on his engagement score (the dependent variable).”
Turnover Rate
It’s again about using regression analysis to gain insights. In this case it’s measuring employee data and correlating it to when the social technology had been launched.
“Again, you will need to obtain data concerning the employee usage of the your community as well as other data points that could have an impact on turnover rates like tenure, salary, market conditions and promotional opportunities.”
Sales
Socialcast recommends collecting information about the performance of individual sales people, their use of the enterprise software and other factors that would affect the sale.
Calculating these returns takes an advanced understanding of analytics. You have to be quite accurate or the results can be off.
In the end, though, it should give any company a far better understanding of social software and its value to the enterprise.
(Image source: Nifty lead image is from Socialcast)
