Best way to social network?

What is the best way to evaluate a social network's business value?

• One click on an ad can be estimated. However, how to evaluate the value a fan of a Facebook page, the value of sharing a page link?

• Answer:

  First, let's clarify what is Business Value, one of the terms that is most misunderstood when evaluating the value proposition of any project, tool or software. In short, Business Value often embraces intangible benefits that determine the end impact felt by not just by the end-user or the customer, but also by the company, its employees and also all the stakeholders. Now, for a Social Network, when you refer to Business Value, the following important points come to mind: Timeliness: This aspect of Business Value refers to the amount of time it takes for the news/information to really reach the end-user/customer. How soon can you reach out to the user and provide the piece of information? Timeliness as a measure has more importance particularly if the social network has strict time constraints in terms of the time lag between the instant when the information was pushed into the system by someone and the instant when it was actually delivered on to the other side. Imagine, how painful it would be if Twitter has a large time lag and if it took several minutes to get the latest update. If Timeliness is a measure that is looked upon as a critical factor for the users, it is important the social network meets the expectations. User Experience: How does the social network really touch the end-user from a user-experience point of view? Providing the rich user-experience is an important aspect of any social network. This refers to the way the user would interact with the network and the experience he/she feels when doing so. Would the information be delivered through mobile or be limited to just websites? What would it require for the end user to access the social network and how easy is it for him/her to communicate with others? How easily can he/she find other friends and reach out to them.. all these kinds of aspects are evaluated as a part of the User Experience aspect of Business Value. Scalability: Scalability is all about how easy u can scale the network for more users, different languages and user's needs. Scalability determines how flexible is the social network to accommodate the new needs as and when they flow in. A majority of people already want Quora to support languages other than English. Now assuming that the Quora social network infrastructure lets you accomplish this in an easy manner, there is a huge Business Value in doing this. Operational Efficiency: What I understand is that currently the Quora questions and answers are manually monitored by Quora admins. They delete what they feel doesn't really fit the culture here and promote stuff that helps Quora gain momentum. Imagine if all this were to be done automatically. That would save a whole lot of the admin time in looking through the questions and answers and manually doing what is needed. This refers to the Operational Efficiency of a Social Network. Having an automated framework that does the admin work will result in a huge Business Value, specific to Operational Efficiency. Of course, there would still be some amount of manual effort needed in refining the accuracy, but nevertheless it results in a huge cost and FTE savings. Operational Efficiency is an important factor to consider while evaluating the Business Value of a social network. However, one important point to keep in mind is that Operational Efficiency usually doesn't result in a huge impact on the end users and most often results in benefits within the company. Innovation: When you evaluate the Business Value of a social network keeping Innovation as an evaluating factor in mind, what you are doing is basically answering questions such as "What innovative capabilities does it add to the existing ones around us?" and also "How do the features of the Social Network let users stretch their capabilities?". You tend to think from the end user perspective about what is it that I am really getting to learn and is there something new that I get to explore as a new feature here. Does the Social Network change the way I execute my daily tasks?, and similar questions. When you referred to the value behind sharing a link or clicking on an ad for a Social Network, try mapping it to the various aspects of Business Value and measure the impact that feature creates for the end user, the company and all the stakeholders as a whole. Measuring the Business Value is necessary keeping the end goal in mind and this usually prompts a company to do something that is really necessary and matters and not trying to accomplish something just because it is cool.