McKinsey: Social Media’s Productivity Payoff

If you have ever tried to convince a senior level executive in a company that investing in social media would have a payoff, then you know exactly how tough it is to answer the “So where is the ‘return’ on that investment?” question!

The McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm and ‘think tank’ of the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., has just released a new report entitled, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. Like all other reports they’ve released of this nature, this one is free and is absolutely worth your time to read if you have any interest in this topic whatsoever.

The authors of this study, James Manyika, Michael Chui, and Hugo Sarrazin, also wrote this post at the Harvard Business Review touting their study and I really liked their first paragraph in that post since it about sums up the value of reading this report succinctly:

How’s this for counter-intuitive? Social technologies — the software and services that make it possible to show off your vacation pictures to all your Facebook friends and follow your favorite team tweet by tweet — are not just giant time sinks that keep your employees from getting their work done. On the contrary, they may become the most powerful tools yet developed to raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers — the kind of workers who help drive innovation and growth, and who are going to be in increasingly short supply.

How productive did they find social media use? For many of us the findings in this report simply confirm what we know intuitively about the power of social media and connecting with prospects, customers, colleagues and industry peers. But one of the reasons adoption of new technologies always lags we early adopters is because there isn’t mainstream, business-centric and authoritative voices confirming it for organizational leadership.

This study, while still making a few leaps here and there, will go a long way on motivating executives to fund and accelerate the use of these new technologies. Just look at this graph and the “20 – 25 percent” productivity increase and you know this will get A LOT of attention!