How are you going to run your Social Software program; as a cost center or a revenue generating program? No, you can’t cop out and say both. At the end of the day, you need to pick on or the other. If you choose cost center then you need to focus your energy on constraining the program. Management is about containment, so running as a cost center makes a lot of sense. You can cut down on the software and choose the lowest cost provider. You can purchase the lowest cost infrastructure and get as few resources as possible. Don’t laugh, most implementations will do exactly this but won’t use the same descriptors that I have.

The alternative is to focus on the revenue side where assuming you can produce real value that people are willing to pay for. Most business units will spend money to save money. If you can define a solution set and end user experience that deliver definable value then the business will pay. When can deliver “work worth paying for” then you can do what any business would do: expand. Yes, the goal in deploying social and collaborative software is not to contain ones existence but to expand the products, services, and solutions. Once you can generate a revenue stream then you can grow your business and begin to extend into other areas of the social space.

The irony of these to perspectives is that at the end of the day neither will matter. Suppose you spend $500,000 and deploy as a cost center versus spending $750,000 as a revenue program. You Fail! Will you be able to save your job by saying, yea I wasted $500,000 but I could have wasted $750,000. Don’t bet on it. Or the other way around, you are a huge success; your program generates $10 million in cost transformations. Will anyone actually say great job, that additional 2% is great. The only way the strategy selection matters is that if you deliver a run of the mill solution. As the old saying goes

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. –Michelangelo”