There is a great case study on United Business Media (UBM) from Forrester on UBM’s use of Social Business Software: Case Study: United Business Media Taps Social Computing To Boost Collaboration And Savings. UBM use Jive SBS as their platform and after a couple of roadbumps, demonstrated tangible hard cash benefits and employee satisfaction. In the latter the site has become the de facto place to find information:
Today the UBM community directory is the best and most up-to-date central source of information available to employees within the disparate operating companies and is widely used by the companies’ various HR teams
On the $65 billion question – yes, this social stuff is actually generating money in terms of increased innovation and decreased costs:
Some of the more tangible measures have been hard savings where companies have
joined together to negotiate better terms from suppliers and a rough estimate that 7% to 10% of usage has driven new innovation in the business leading to top- or bottom-line growth.
It would be good to get more hard ROI figures on the subject, but this study is significant. Social software in the enterprise is transforming the intranet, the way people work and is generating money. I predict that we’re going to see a lot more of these types of studies …
