This evening Neil and I went to hear about how Sun use social media.  They clearly put considerable effort into the area with several full time staff and over five thousand employee blogs, including a popular one by the CEO: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan

In the very early days it was all about the number of people who read what you posted.  Sun have moved beyond that to analysing closely what audience they are reaching but this still falls well short of measuring the return on investment.  Measuring ROI for effort applied to social media is highly complex.  You could potentially measure it's impact as a marketing channel in the same way as conventional advertising media, by tracking response rate and tracking those responses through to closed sales - Dell already do this very successfully.  What is much harder to measure is how much additional "feel good" factor you create by interacting with people, and to what extent you are reducing traffic through other channels.  For example, if a developer has a techncal question answered on a Sun technical forum (but not by a Sun staffer) how much have you just saved in support costs? 

This ties in very nicely to a conversation I was having to a senior marketing executive at Sun the other day, who was telling me that the main change in marketing during his career was the move from measuring the people to heard your message to measuring the impact of that message on sales.  It sounds like a similar revolution is needed in the broader area of social media - and perhaps there are opportunities here for innovative companies?  The other day I read on the Springwise blog ( http://springwise.com/tourism_travel/raveable/ )about a website that uses web scraping and semantic analysis to combine information from many hotel review sites, weight the opinions of contributors, and aggregate that into an easily digestible form.  Could you build a product or company with similar technology to analyse social media interations and score them for value?  Or even calculate the ROI for the company driving them? 

Another thing that struck me was the statistics on the correlation between the degree of interactivity and the readership of a blog. The more comments are received and the more discussion that takes place, the more successful the blog is.  So if we want to make the blogs on this site a success, it sounds like we need to drive interaction as well as traffic - so come on folks, get commenting!  Let's get some interaction going here!

The slightly devilish side of my mind can't help noting that a speaker who attract tens or hundreds of thousands of readers and listeners to live internet radio, posdcasts, twitters, blogs and facebook pages only has a physical world audience of 16.  Perhaps the event should have been online?  Online meetings are nothing new, but networking events are still usually in the real world.  Maybe "live" online networking will be the next big thing?  If comedy gigs ( http://twitter.tiernandouieb.co.uk/ ) can move online (complete with online hecklers), then surely anything can?  Could you build an application platform around something like skype to enable a video-conferencing equivalent of speed networking after an online speaker orpresentation?  Maybe using it for speed dating would be a more lucrative market? 

The great thing about being at Sun and in Silicon Valley is that there is no shortage of stimulation for ideas.  The problem is that it makes getting to sleep rather hard when there are so many interesting things to think about...

Ian