The Numbers That Matter

[#1]

Lots happening on the Lithosphere with the new design coming up, so I've been spending a lot of time in another blog recently.

But today I'd like to return to the topic of numbers - specifically, the numbers that matter.

When I was at the Web 2.0 expo at the begining of this month, I had a good opportunity to see what numbers a lot of social media experts and vendors were using to make their case, from numbers of posts, numbers of views, numbers of registrations or even numbers of communities.

And recently there has been a great deal of fuss over the race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to reach 1,000,000 followers on Twitter, as well as Oprah's entry onto the Twitter scene and what it means.

People are looking at the social media space and still trying to figure out how to keep score, when the real measure of success is the same as it's always been: are the companies engaged in social media using it to improve profits through increased revenue and decreased costs. For vendors, are your products and services doing this better than the others?

So in the spirit of the times, here is a collection of numbers from the Lithium Technologies website I'd like to share:

• Linksys, a division of Cisco, has reduced it's call volume by over 1.4 million calls annually as a result of it's thriving customer support community.
• FICO (formerly Fair Issac), a leading provider of credit scoring, realized a 41% increase in spending by community members after the launch of the myFICO forums.
• Sage North America, part of The Sage Group, has seen a 15-point increase in its customer loyalty score and experienced a 300% increase in participation in ... as a result of the ACT! community.
  

Maybe those numbers help explain why Lithium Technologies is putting up some numbers of its own in this tough economy.

To paraphrase Will Hunting: Do you like numbers? I got ROI - How d'you like them numbers?

Photo by TheBusyBrain

[#2]

As far as I can tell, we have not yet achieved ROI ... but currently it is very hard to measure.  The upcoming Community Health Index as well as the planned ROI tools are greatly anticipated.  One challenge we have is that our Community is not integrated with our CRM, so we cannot with definition identify case deflection.  Anyways, it is good to see that your are continuing to grow the product.