[…] Measurement can make the community. By accurately tracking and understanding your community and its trends you can assess the health of the community, determine where it needs to go, and align its success with that of business goals across your company. The metrics that will be available to you may be platform-dependent, but there are common measures that fall into categories such as population, activity, and value. Your business needs will determine the format and frequency in which these are delivered. Your business needs also drive what tools you use to report. If you are delivering periodic reports, Microsoft Excel may suffice. But if you are reporting across multiple platforms, then you may need more sophisticated tools such as mashup reporting tools or an enterprise data warehouse. Likewise, if you are measuring and reporting on lists and counts for your metrics, you can achieve that with spreadsheets and databases. But if you are looking for deep data analysis of the unstructured data in your community forums, you will need specialized tools for collection and processing. As always, being prepared will help ensure success. Setting a baseline and understanding the context of your metrics will support your efforts to explain the results to your executive sponsorship and quantify the value the community health has to other business units. All levels of your company need continual proofs of the proposition that your communities give you unparalleled access to your company’s most valuable asset—your customers (from Brooks, Lovett, Creek, “Developing B2B Social Communities”, 2013:181)
cosimoaccoto.com 