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