Disruptive technology and Social Media R.O.I

Dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy deliv­ers prod­ucts which should not be com­pul­sory tech­no­log­i­cal prod­ucts but just com­pletely new prod­ucts, break­ing into the scene of new mar­kets, being the turn­ing point of life styles and practices.

Pre­cisely, com­pa­nies engag­ing in dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy, are able to inves­ti­gate these new mar­kets and cap­ture the niche of cus­tomers who are expect­ing and are in need of that dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy. (source: The Innovator’s Dilemma, Chris­tensen, Clay­ton M.).

From that point on, that tech­nol­ogy has great pos­si­bil­i­ties to suc­ceed in the case that the owner com­pany is able to under­stand the laws which rule that tech­nol­ogy and apply them.

Think about how many attempts at flight human beings made and how many times they died before being able to fly in air­planes trans­port­ing peo­ple and wares at high speed as is the case nowa­days. Actu­ally we had to under­stand the laws under­neath, such as the law of grav­ity, in order to suc­ceed in that dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy (source: The Innovator’s Dilemma, Chris­tensen, Clay­ton M.).

In addi­tion to that under­stand­ing the kind of processes and prac­tices to apply to the tech­nol­ogy is essen­tial. Accord­ing to that small com­pa­nies would have many more pos­si­bil­i­ties to suc­ceed than big com­pa­nies which would move as clum­sily as ele­phants on dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies and as lightly as a but­ter­fly on sus­tain­ing tech­nolo­gies which are exist­ing products.

The rea­son for that is that big com­pa­nies have devel­oped effi­cient man­age­ment, processes and prac­tices and know their mar­ket of sus­tain­ing tech­nolo­gies to such an extent that they can eas­ily mea­sure their R.O.I.

On the other hand all these struc­tured processes and prac­tices do not find any appli­ca­tion in dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies which need flex­i­bil­ity and can­not grow in exist­ing mea­sur­able mar­kets but in new explorable markets.

Given that, small com­pa­nies actu­ally have an intrin­sic capa­bil­ity of devel­op­ing and com­ply­ing with dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies, evolv­ing them­selves together with the tech­nol­ogy and the new mar­kets, adapt­ing to the new cus­tomers who are float­ing in a change­able state for a non deter­minable time.

Even bet­ter, cus­tomers’ behav­ior is going to be ever and ever chang­ing. So tech­nolo­gies which will adapt con­stantly to the cus­tomers who will win.

Social media are that kind of dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies which are sup­posed to win more than oth­ers because of their com­plete adher­ence to cus­tomer inter­ests. Actu­ally, social media are made by peo­ple, by users.

The tools social media offers to users are meant to meet users’ needs for first hand infor­ma­tion, inter­ac­tiv­ity, engage­ment, aggre­ga­tion and further.

Sev­eral kinds of busi­nesses are start­ing to be involved in social media because of that. E-commerce web­sites them­selves are adapt­ing their sales processes by involv­ing users in the sales through web tools which let them dis­cuss and rat­ing prod­ucts and retailers.

Apart from that, com­pa­nies are won­der­ing how to mea­sure their invest­ment on social media and are find­ing often no answers and results which can be com­pa­ra­ble to those pro­vided by invest­ments on sus­tain­ing technologies.

In fact, social media are fill­ing the gap in mar­kets which have not been inves­ti­gated so far and that makes Return On Invest­ment far from being mea­sured and analysed in the same ways as it is pos­si­ble for sus­tain­ing technology.

Last but not least Social Media slips out steady rules and mea­sure­ments because of the inter­ac­tive nature it is made of which drawns a flex­i­ble and chameleon-like shape.

Nev­er­the­less, mea­sure­ments can be made.

It is all a mat­ter of evolv­ing the stan­dard analy­sis meth­ods and upgrad­ing them to a flex­i­ble level much bet­ter at adapt­ing to cus­tomers’ fickle behaviors.

Social Media trig­gers sales and rev­enue by dri­ving an increase in rep­u­ta­tion, noto­ri­ety, reci­procity, sense of effi­cacy, attach­ment to and need for a group.

After engag­ing in Social Media, web­site vis­its and social men­tions mul­ti­ply and rev­enues start slightly or con­sid­er­ably being boosted.

These impacts can be mea­sured by cross­ing web sta­tis­tics and rev­enue before and after Social Media campaigns.

Fur­ther­more sta­tis­tics would col­lect not only stan­dard web stats but also data such as Twit­ter and Friend­feed fol­low­ers, friends and fans on Face­book, Plurk, Diggs, Friend­ster, con­nec­tions on Linkedin, Xing, Plaxo, blogs sub­scrip­tions, Pos­ter­ous and Youtube sub­scrip­tion, com­ments on blog entries, link refer­rals, track­backs and so on.

It is cru­cial to define new analy­sis meth­ods and Olivier Blan­chard by The Brand Builder defines Fre­quency, Reach and Yield as busi­ness met­rics to mea­sure Social Media. Watch out the video.
Business-oriented ROI for Social Media: F.R.Y. Met­rics explained

Tags: blogs, Business/Finance, Christensen, Clayton M., compulsory technological products, diggs, disruptive technologies, Disruptive technology, E-commerce websites, Facebook Inc, friendster, Innovation, linkedin, Marketing, microbloggin, Olivier Blanchard, plaxo, posterous, Product management, R.O.I., Social information processing, Social Media, social media marketing, social media measurement, social media metrics, social media ROI, Technology/Internet, The Innovator's Dilemma, tools social media offers, Twitter Inc, twittwer, web statistics, web stats, web tools, xing, youtube