Stuart Glendinning Hall

One reason I’ve been writing about KPIs for online communities is simply the lack of information out there on blogs and websites. And what information there is isn’t always clear. The second reason is simply that organisations want to make the most of their online investment. So my aim is to try and provide a simple framework for measuring and monitoring performance of your community so it delivers results.

In my last post I explored how to integrate social media metrics into key performance indicators, to help drive performance.

A key factor in the success of your community is demonstrating that it can deliver results. This is linked to the fact that the role of the community manager has risen in importance in the private sector as how they can help generate value is better appreciated.

When addressing how best grow communities of practice (CoP) it’s wise first to consider what type of communities we are talking about. Typically these communities are by definition common professional, situational or vocational groups, for example professional trade and industrial associations. They are often relatively small in size, especially in comparison to large consumer-driven sites where the social ties are much looser, but the number of members far greater.

One of the key challenges facing communities, especially in their early stages of development, is the need to get people engaged. Later on in a community's development this evolves into providing feedback to your top contributors, as demonstrated in recent HP Labs research.

Different types of online communities require different approaches.  We hear a lot about consumer-driven communities with large numbers of members, or business to business communities for select professionals, but less of the needs of member organisation’s online communities. Understanding the needs of your audience, whether through intensive market research, creating personas of your typical audience types and their needs, or benchmarking what your competitors are offering, all has a part to play.

If a member decides not to complete their profile then they’ve chosen to be relatively anonymous, whether they know it or not. But if as community manager you have a large percentage of members that are anonymous this will obviously negative impact on the quality of conversations. Conversely if you have a community where most members have a rich profile which they keep up to date then it’s likely to result in positive conversations. And positive conversations sustained over time help sustain a successful online community.

The job of the community manager is not an easy one. He or she has to juggle competing internal cultures of IT, senior management, and the community itself in order to deliver results. Results in terms of engaged, active discussions as opposed to corporate generated content which is typical of traditional websites.  At SiftGroups we recognise how difficult this balancing act is.

After picking up on HP Labs research on the value of paying attention to top contributors I thought it would be interesting to check previous research from the same guys at Palo Alto, looking at predicting the popularity of online content (pdf) or read it on scribd). The abstract nicely sums it up. Could be useful for planning a community growth strategy for example:

After reading a blog about burnout the other week I'd been thinking about how to help community managers avoid the same problem, faced by pressures from managing difficult issues online to getting buying from across their organisation. The issue came back to me today after reading FreshNetwork's Holly Seddon ask how to best deal with burnout in the LinkedIn Community Manager group: