You CAN measure the ROI of relationships – personally, and professionally, and this seminar will show you how. No spreadsheets needed for this lecture, and only minimal algebra. Bring a cocktail napkin, a flair ink pen, and learn how to calculate the net present value of your future mate, your pet, or the 8,299 followers of your company’s Twitter feed. Yet ROI alone will not tell you the ultimate value of your relationships. What other indicators do you need to be looking at to predict whether or not you, your future mate, your pet, or your followers will be happy with the relationship in the long run?

Strong relationships depend on other factors – connection, a sense of fairness, health, humor, fun, the ability to learn and evolve together, and a sense of overall engagement with each other, and with life. At a more macro level, communities need to understand the equity they are building not just economically, but socially and environmentally as well. As the social graph reveals a huge volume of data about our actual relational behavior, we have an opportunity to pause for a moment: to consider the value system reflected in how we measure each other, ourselves, our relationships in the world. Participants will walk away not just with a clear and precise method for how to measure ROI, but also a holistic framework for measuring return on social behavior.

Vote for this panel at the SXSW panel picker.

The recent weak news on the unemployment front leaves some of us wondering: Where are all of the green jobs?

The U.S. Department of Commerce made an attempt to answer this very question and set a benchmark to measure the size of the emerging green economy by the number of green jobs it has created. The answer in the report, “Measuring the Green Economy,” depends on how green you want your green economy to be.

The report found that green products and services made up between 1 and 2 percent of the US economy in 2007, the last year that business census data is available. That translates to somewhere between 1.8 and 2.4 million private sector jobs.

Why such a gap in measurement? The Commerce department is solving a classification challenge that has plagued previous efforts to set benchmarks and counting green industry and job creation. This is because not everyone can agree on the definition of a green job.

For example, for solar energy panel installation or recycling of paper products there is little debate – these are green jobs, reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and conserving resources.

However, the installation and management of nuclear power plants cause endless debate in environmental circles. On the one hand, nuclear power plants do not depend on fossil fuels and result in limited carbon dioxide emissions. But on the other hand, the mining of uranium is an energy intensive process, nuclear waste is radioactive and toxic, and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters remind us that nuclear energy is not without risk.

Biodiesel is another product that pits clean energy investors against deep green environmentalists. Yes, biodiesel reduces the need for fossil fuel, but the agricultural and refinement process to make certain types of biodiesel are considered to be highly resource-instensive and emissions-producing.

Other, less controversial products like bikes and used books and clothing are often not included in economic reports tabulating the value of the clean energy industry. Yet the use of bikes and the reuse of books and clothing can contribute to reduced reliance on energy and materials.

The Commerce department’s categorizations – with a “narrow” and “broad” definitions of green, is curious. The lower estimate of 1% fits the sector of the economy that generates little debate regarding their greenness, while the larger estimate of 2% is based on the broader definition.

By allowing for flexibility in its measurement and analysis, the report is able to effectively benchmark the state of the emerging green economy – modest, slow growing, but growing nonetheless.

From big picture to smaller picture, these acronyms all give order of magnitude value to the financial return of our efforts as humans on this earth.

I’m going to start with the big picture, GDP, and look at the developing alternatives to a one number view of a country’s well being.

GDP: Gross Domestic Product which is the value of private consumption, gross investment, government spending, and total exports minus total imports. Consumers drive this measure of global growth, with 60-70% of GDP in the US made up with purchases of things and services over the past 50 years. Recent reports on sluggish GDP lament slack consumer demand, and cross fingers and hope that resurgent future consumer behavior will “save everything.”

So why is such a number so hated? GDP is under suspicion for not measuring the true standard of living of an economy, leaving out relative shifts in worker income at home and abroad, the effects of all this spending on scarce environmental resources, not to mention the relative happiness of the citizens.

A number of replacement metrics have been set forth by government groups, activist organizations, countries, and economists looking recast what economic health really means. All of them seek to develop a new metric for economic vitality, translated into a squishy, hard-to-measure value like happiness, equity, and environmental health. Always interested in the efforts of those that wish to put numerical values on the most squishy parts of life, I’ll be investigating the following GDP alternatives:

Happy Planet Index (HPI)

Human Development Index (HDI)

Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)

Gross National Happiness (GNH)

GINI Coefficient (Gini)

Which one will replace GDP headlines in the WSJ or in your future Flipbook Social News Feed?

Talk at ITP Summer Camp for Makers:

Secret tricks for learning about how stuff is made. Be a responsible maker: know where your stuff comes from, who makes it, how it affects the earth and the people that make and use it, how to use it best, and where it should go when it’s time for it to no longer be usable stuff. You’ll never look at making the same way again.

Am I am Just a Shopping Cart to You?

This is my second installment in a series I’m titling “The Measurement of Us” - measuring the impact of the time and attention we pay to social media in our lives, companies, and communities. First I’ll take a look at the easiest things to measure - financial ROI.

Of course you can measure the ROI of any relationship. And you don’t have to change the acronym to stand for some weak sounding thing like “return on influence” or morph it into “return on relationships.” You simply measure the costs in, the return out, and do some algebra 101 with a discount factor to know if you’re winning or losing on your social media marketing investment, or if you should marry your future spouse.

Which gets to my main point – measuring ROI in transactional costs is possible, but does not tell you the whole story of value that you get from a relationship.

Relationships Measured in Cost Per Order

In starting this investigation, I have the luxury of looking at the many ways the 60+ clients at my company Drillteam and our parent and sister companies Powered, crayon, and StepChange. Most new clients show up with no measurement plans in place, and no effective way to track ROI. A few, however, have shared with us a metric that is popular in web 1.0 digital media marketing – using a last click method, or attribution model, to determine the cost per order.

What it is: A familiar metric for search engine and digital marketers, cost per order determines the cost of ads that lead to a completed sale.

There are two basic forms – last click, and cost per attribution.

Last click looks at the last site clicked that led to a sale, and assumes that the cost of the ad placed is the cost per order. Last click is worth looking at, however, because your customer may not have clicked an ad on a social net, they may have seen something in the friend’s or followers info stream, or may have been on a web 2.0 site that has no ad placement, like a user-generated community forum.

Cost per attribution was invented to overcome the inherent flaw in measuring the last ad clicked, whether that ad was a display ad, a social ad, or a keyword buy. Cost attribution technology has been developed to track beyond the last ad clicked in order to assign a percentage to the “team of ads” that results in a conversion. Innovative ad tracking providers have been testing methods that track not just ads, but potentially URLs and other forms of social media. ROI data then can show up as a cost per attribution (what did each ad cost, in relationship to the final action) and therefore a cost per order for each conversion.

Note you can use both of these methods to track cost per lead, or cost per action, not just what goes in the shopping cart, but I have only seen it used in companies with a major ecommerce offer.

Who uses it: Digitally-strong marketers, particularly those that invest heavily in SEO, digital agencies, SEO agencies, SEO-focused social media marketers.

Benefits: I’ve seen the cost per order model lately used as a way to start measuring social media ads in side-by-side comparison with other forms of digital marketing – particularly display and search. Essentially, they are measuring the efforts of 1.0 web marketing vs. 2.0. It also quickly gives more credibility to social marketing, which appears to be able to be tracked and measured with the same rigor as the rest of digital.

Challenges: Cost per order sees people as online shopping carts, and not much else. What’s missing? Everything outside the commerce path – people who promote the company in their own social networks, both prompted and unprompted by the company, customers who are loyal in offline purchase paths, and the overall sentiment in content that shows up in search queries that positively or negatively impacts the brand.

When to Recommend: Use this method for companies that have a strong ecommerce is a primary business driver, and to compare ads placed on social networks like Facebook to ads on web 1.0 sites. But make sure you have more holistic measurement plan in place so that you can understand why cost per order numbers are increasing or decreasing. Stay tuned for more ways to measure in future posts.

What is the Social Impact of Social - specifically, is all of the time and attention we are increasingly devoting to social media efforts a force for good? Or not so good? Are they good for us as selfish individuals, promoting our personal brands? Or is there a larger collective good we are creating as we spend more time crafting and weaving our network of relationships online?

What is the ROI of Social Media - of course we can measure the ROI of social media, and I will outline this in my next post. We can measure the ROI of anything, even putting your pants on in the morning, because both the time a company spends on social media, and the decision of a person to wear or not wear pants, has a financial impact on the financial well being of the parties involved.

The underlying dynamic I’m investigating here is how large media-spending brands will start to value social media, and how this will impact, shape, and change the  experiences of humans on mainstream and niche social networks, and how the second question affects the first.

This is a rare occasion in business to watch the funding and ongoing growth of “pre business model” services. The last time was Web 1.0, but having lived in the eye of the storm for both 1.0 and now 2.0, social seems to have more legs, because social tends to deliver on the 1.0 promise - sticky sticky eyeballs, fixed on a screen.

Think that mobile social apps are a waste of time and energy? What if you could use them to make the world a better place?  Inhabitat took a look at mobile-based applications and systems designed to promote positive social good. Here are five rising social impact apps to watch.

The Extraordinaries Unable to fit volunteering into your jam-packed schedule, but you still want to contribute towards a cause? The Extraordinaries launched an app that breaks large scale volunteering efforts down into micro-tasks that you can complete, right on your smart phone, and now online. The app has a huge breadth of micro-volunteering opportunities. Anything from Big Cat Rescue – helping to catalogue animal rights abuses to The Sierra Club – helping to map trails in California. As one user expressed, “I love this app! When I feel like fiddling with my iPod I can make my playtime helpful to someone. No more wasted time! It’s a stellar example of using technology for social good.”

Causeworld Karma points donations are starting to show up in Twitter feeds and Facebook streams everywhere, and is a favorite of marketing guru Joe Jaffe. The free app works like any location-based social game, but instead of earning virtual badges or winning prizes, members earn karma points donations and get to choose which charity receives their donation, and then broadcast their good works to their peers. Sponsored by brands like Kraft and Citi, Causeworld is looking to connect shopping and buying with location-based, real-time cause marketing, turning us all into mini-philanthropists.

Frontline SMS Frontline SMS is a service created to allow citizen activists to monitor and track post election violence in Kenya (Frontline SMS and the web portal Ushahidi finds additional use in disaster recovery). The service has been used by non-governmental organizations in both Haiti and Chile to track down urgent messages in order to coordinate disaster relief. Volunteers as disparate as a Swiss graduate student in Boston, an engineer for Haiti’s biggest wireless company, and a social media innovator at the State Department used the service to find survivors, develop a communications protocol, and rapidly rebuild cellular infrastructure. Recent case examples such as the Haiti coordination are best practices for how government, talented volunteers, and citizens can rapidly self-organize to support people in need.

mGive mGive is responsible for routing more than 90 percent of all funds raised to date through the mobile donations, and works with more than two hundred nonprofit clients, including the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and the United Way. By not limiting the payment system to a specific kind of phone or service, mGive has wider market penetration than a comparable iPhone or Android based app. During the recent fundraising drive to support Haiti, you may have responded to the Red Cross call to text funds using the “90999” SMS short code. The Red Cross raised over $24 MM via mGive to help the Haiti recovery effort.

Project Noah Project Noah started as a student project at NYU’s ITP school, the free mobile app allows citizens to become scientists. The goal is huge in its mission – to become the common mobile platform for documenting the world’s organisms. Users snap photos of local birds, plants, trees, and other species, and can either identify the organism or leave the classification up to the crowd. Project Noah conducts specific research projects in the form of field missions. Who wouldn’t want to join a mission called “Project Squirrel” – inviting you to contribute squirrel observations, or “The Lost Ladybug Project” – to understand ladybug species distribution. Join a mission today!

Internet of Things defined as the point when data about things is greater than data about people.

You might be sending text messages, but the sidewalk you’re walking on has sensors, and the water mane and the bus and the trains - all of these independent systems have the potential to one day talk to each other, and autonomic-ly self-organize.

The smarter planet potential:

1. Produce greater efficiency, as we learn to coordinate systems of systems and better use the resources of the earth.
2. Generate greater insights, watch new forms of social relations emerge for how we can organize to live on this planet.