ROI of Anything – Good Discipline, Bad Crutch
Time 5:17
The next three posts are conversations I had while attending the NewComm Forum of the Society for New Communications Research and the In-Bound Marketing Summit last week in San Francisco.
Return on Investment is a topic that gets tons of coverage,
plenty of players (Radian6, Techrigy, Buzzlogic) and plenty of others and an endless amount of ROI eye candy, (10 ROI Charts in a pinch, just for the fun of it. )
Everyone can use a little ROI just to compare effective tactics at the very least according to globally recognized analyst Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group. In this podcast we chat about the value of ROI and the value of not being handcuffed by the most common three letters in business.
I’m not opposed to ROI, I am, however, suggesting that sometimes it can hamper innovation. It can focus an entire organization on trees while missing the forest. An interesting comment that I use to support this point is a recent comment during a TED talk in this video below by Evan Williams, founder of Twitter. He talks about Twitter being started as a side project when he was building a different company Odeo. No ROI, no particular strategic end game, just a side project on SMS and text messaging. Nine million users, plus Oprah, later, people are stilling coming up with ways to use Twitter.
Tags: innovation, measurement, ROI
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 4:31 pm and is filed under marketing, social media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 4th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Hey there,
So glad you were able to make it to San Francisco last week for a couple of great events. I really enjoyed being part of them.
I think there’s definitely something to be said for getting too far mired in the ROI discussion. ROI is important, but over analysis can also stifle efforts to be nimble, and discourage the importance of failure in learning and making progress as a business.
Thanks for the mention, and for some thoughtful insights.
Cheers,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@ambercadabra
May 12th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Innovation over gain, but innovation that could lead to gain in the long run. Nice idea.
May 13th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Amber and Roberto thanks for the comments.
As in most things in life balance is the most beneficial state to be in. I sometimes feel the ROI question is raised instead of just saying “I don’t like the idea”
ROI is most beneficial when used to compare certain tactics or assess profitability. Historical trends can be used to establish budgets. For predicting the future, ROI for social media is an imprecise indicator.