Why? Because business is social ¾ companies don't create products, close deals or make service calls-people do.  Leading adopters already see the tremendous potential of social software as the tool for improving business performance in the workplace ¾ inside and out.

How? By connecting talent, teams and knowledge throughout the entire organization; across geographies, time zones and hierarchical boundaries. This new level of transparency leads to heightened corporate capacity, problem solving and innovation.

By embracing social software in the workplace, managers can start to facilitate, promote and even reward social interactions that drive business transactions for the company. This new behaviour is already beginning to shift the focus of management teams away from being gatekeepers to being enablers-to helping their teams to build relationships, share knowledge and solve business problems that lead to increased business flow and financial transactions.

Measuring Return on Investment (ROI)

But what's your return in investment from using social software for business?

The business value of these emerging social tools has yet to be fully realized by most organizations. ROI from a social context is not about "monetization" but measuring the incremental value it brings to your business.

When considering the business value of your investment in social software solutions, consider the following questions:

1. Do you get new products or services to market - faster?
2. Are their resulting cost reductions in existing business units because of improved processes and communications?
3. Has the community improved knowledge sharing? (i.e., best practices and tools that improve the quality of processes, products, or services)
4. Are you better connected to your customers? And are they more satisfied? Resulting in higher customer retention and/or minimized support costs.
5. Has sharing increased rate of innovation? New product improvements, methodologies and ideas?

Find answers to questions like these in my session at Canada 3.0.