Blogs ROI

InfoWorld has an article on the ROI of Web 2.0 applications. Back in 2003 when I deployed Blogs (and Wikis) inside IBM, I continually kept getting asked the question: What’s the ROI on Blogs? We even had an MBA student trying to quantify this elusive number. Nonsense. If you are an individual and don’t have a blog, continue not having a blog, and you’ll never know the benefit of one. If you are a company and would like to keep stifling communication within your organization, go ahead and don’t deploy blogs. Getting a blog server is easy, there are plenty of free servers out there and if you don’t want to worry about it, buy one. The ROI is binary in my opinion, you get a return if you have it, you don’t get a return if you don’t. In IBM, we have 400K employees. However, it doesn’t mean that everything I deploy for them has to be used by all 400K of them. If 10K of them use it, that’s ROI. What’s the exact percentage? I don’t care. If a small group of individuals in my team can make the lives of 10K, 20K, 50K people easier and happier, I consider my project successful.
In addition, the report found that the perceived business value of different Web 2.0 tools varies widely, with instant messaging and RSS noted as being the most valuable for organizations while blogging is at the bottom of the list. Only 11 percent of those surveyed said blogging had substantial benefits, while 48 percent said blogging had moderate benefits to the company.
via Dave.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Blogs ROI,” an entry on Elias Torres

Published:
07.31.07 / 8am
Category:
Technology