What is a Social Network Worth?

Care2 just published a really interesting tool on their blog, frogloop, a Return on Investment (ROI) tool that calculates the value of social networking campaigns. From frogloop:

Wonder if you should spend your time campaigning in social networks?

You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

Need some metrics guidelines? You might check out some of the online advocacy and fundraising benchmark studies. If you don't measure results strictly by fundraising -- maybe your results are based on advocacy or branding only -- you can just look at the "cost per friend" or "cost per email name" to compare with the costs of recruiting people elsewhere. You can also see how that translates into cost per action or email viewed (opened).

Now, I did some calculations and came up with something like an $8,000 ROI, for an employee getting paid $40,000/year with benefits, which seems pretty high. I'm not sure if this is 100% accurate, but even if it isn't, it strikes me as a great attempt at putting a dollar value on social networking work, and hopefully will help those who are trying to convince their bosses, boards, or donors that this type of work is truly valuable.

If you play with the tool, let me know what kind of ROI you come up with!