How Do You Measure Community?
Community analytics and social media metrics spur heated debate in many circles. In fact, at SXSW Interactive in 2007, the Social Media Metrics panel had attendees and chatroom users revolting. I was there and hardly knew what to make of the uprising at the time, but in hindsight, I can see how important the information can be to web developers, community managers, and product owners, to name just a few.
But as Lisa Baron says on the Outspoken media blog, “it’s not rainbows and butterflies and sparkles” that build your community and help it meet its goals. It’s not rainbow sprinkles either. It’s the common, lowly buck. And when your communities goals are synced with business goals, you can tie business goals to your community measures.
Lisa has some specific measures that she grouped into four categories: Growth, Presence, Conversation, Sentiment, and Referrals & Conversions. Her insights are extremely valuable to use as communities “grow up” into real make-or-break efforts for businesses and organizations.
Also, be sure to check out Rhea Drysdale’s post on monitoring social metrics where she uses Google spreadsheet functions to count feed results and monitor ratings and so forth. Great ideas.
How do you measure your community efforts?
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