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Community Metrics: What to Measure
I don't do a lot of live blogging these days but I'm at the ForumOne Online Community Summit and there are some REALLY big community brains here. It's one of the most useful events for me in terms of learning about community and social media. Because of the fact that it's only about 120 people (Jim Cashel/Bill Johnston keep it that small on purpose), it's an intimate setting and you really get to know some of the participants at the event well.
Right now, I'm sitting in a breakout session on "Community Metrics" being led byt Joe Cotrel of Lithium. Some of the companies represented in this discussion (you may have heard of them) are Trip Advisor, Autodesk, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, iVillage, Yahoo so I'm paying close attention to what they have to say. This post will be a little bit stream of consciousness (I may come back in and try and clean up after) but you'll get the gist of my live note taking. Here goes:
Operational Metrics (the way Autodesk measures):
- Tenure
- Recency
- Frequency
- Specific activities
- Downloads
- eLearning
- Contributions (tagging content, posts, friends, likes, etc.)
Interesting sidebar - people here are railing against "page views" as a metric. There are a few dissenters like Alex Kaplinsky of Solution Set. Most people don't feel like it accurately
Marty Collins of Microsoft Windows Live is talking about the importance of "sentiment." Before she talks about it, she is telling us that she prepared her management for the fact that page views would actually go down if community was successful. This is a good point as she was preparing management for the fact that people would ideally spend more time on the site.
We are now talking about the importance of "benchmarking" and the lack of good tools in this space across industries. Alexa is one of the few that give you a decent macro view but don't provide detailed page views.
One of the big questions I have is are we trying too hard to shoe horn measurement into neat buckets just because we can? For instance, would Dunkin Donuts, Merrill Lynch and Sun. I threw that question out and Joe Cotrel, at least, agreed with me.
Okay, very cool. Now the conversation has swung around to tying business metrics to community. Microsoft and Yahoo! build economica models or value models around customer types. Yahoo knew how much everyone was worth from an "ads clicked on" perspective. They were able to run this against things like user generated content. To that end, Randy Farmer (former Yahoo! guy) is a wealth of information. He's providing some of the most valuable information at the session. An example he threw out is the fact that blog writers tend not to click on ads where blog readers do click on a lot of ads.
Deb Schultz throws out the importance of not only throwing out numbers but also including customer quotes. This is a great way to reinforce the overarching message.
At this point, I'm running out of battery. The session is wrapping up but if there's any other major topics covered, I'll try and throw them into the Twitter stream at tag #OCS08.
Fri, Oct 10 2008
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