The Community Roundtable

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So Much Community Data, So Little Insight

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Everyone wants engagement, but few know how to measure it.

Organizations are realizing that in the age of options, engagement is a key indicator of attention, commitment, and ultimately, success.

Executives see the level of engagement on platforms like Facebook, SnapChat, and Twitter and they want that for themselves, both with customers and employees. Most organizations, however, don’t really understand the dynamics of engagement, how to deconstruct and measure it, and how to tie online engagement to business outcomes. This disconnect results in both poor applications of technology and uneven results.

Not surprisingly, the result is a mess.

Social technology vendors that support complex, high-value engagement environments are being sold for their parts because their complexity and value are not well-understood by the mainstream market. Vendors that support simple engagement objectives are getting more and more attention because they are easy-to-understand and straightforward. Organizations struggle to see how different engagement approaches impact their business objectives AND that not having access to engagement data will severely limit their ability to succeed. In short, most organizations don’t understand the range of engagement behaviors, how they connect to value, what behaviors they need to support their business objectives, and what technology best supports the range of behaviors they need to be successful.

This inability to show self-evident value has caused the social software market to rapidly commoditize. For most vendors, their front-end engagement functionally, back-end analytics, back-end governance and management, and business models are poorly aligned. This creates confusion and churn in the community platform space and hurts the market, making it slow to mature and hard to understand for stakeholders.

We created the Community Engagement Framework to categorize engagement behaviors and help organizations understand how to differentiate and measure various engagement behaviors. Many of these behaviors cannot be measured easily in existing community platforms and as a result, manual work is required to map existing data to these behaviors.

Engagement analytics are terrible.

There are two big issues with community platform analytics.

  1. Not all engagement behavior is supported, so measuring it is impossible and even when certain behaviors are supported, the data is not readily available.
  2. Most engagement analytics are architected around content or transactions, not people. This approach makes it very difficult to see people’s experience and change in behaviors over time.

What that means is that community platforms are great at displaying ‘vanity metrics’ like how many people viewed a page. Activity like this is obviously important – without it, nothing else happens – but it’s really insufficient at helping community practitioners make good decisions. For example, pageviews are unable to tell you that employees are much more likely to read your marketing content than your customers. Insights from pageview data is incremental and it can tell you that something triggered a click through. The insight from the behavior data is monumental by comparison: it can tell you if your content is not appealing to the people it should be – even if it is good content – and that you’ve got a business problem. The value difference between these two insights is enormous.

As a business analyst, I want to see how activities and content affect a workflow in terms of time, cost, or quality.

I want to know things like:

  • What pathways do people take to successfully complete a workflow?
  • How long does it take people to complete steps along that path and does it vary by demographic?
  • What makes that path shorter for one demographic vs. another?
  • Does adding a trigger help or hurt the cycle time?
  • Does the person get more access/better information via one pathway vs another?
  • What impact does the cycle time have on the profitability of the workflow?

Notice that none of those questions are about whether a piece of content is being read, liked, shared, or commented on. While there will certainly be content, various types of engagement, and transactions as part of those workflows, they are the secondary to understanding the behavior. They are a tactic of addressing a larger strategy to improve a workflow.

Strategic analytics should be architected around people.

Most community and enterprise social networking platforms have databases designed to report on content and transactions. It is either time-consuming or impossible to access behavior and lifecycle metrics by individual or user segment. This creates a troubling situation where the blind are leading the blind. Community manager’s core skill set is in community engagement – not data or business analytics. This makes sense, but also means that they typically don’t have the skills to understand and evaluate the data they can access in the platforms. This also means that they do not ask vendors for what they really need either, so vendors carry on and give them more and more meaningless data. This vicious cycle makes it even harder for them to understand and report value back to their organizations.

Community platform vendors should be taking a thought leadership role in analytics, since good community analytics will be able to sell the value of their platform, reducing sales costs and customer churn. But on the whole, they have not sought out the expertise to architect helpful community analytics. This leaves platform vendors floundering, prioritizing the wrong features, spending a lot of effort selling their platform, and investing too much time to convincing internal stakeholders of value. It should not be this hard.

Who is doing behavioral analytics well?

Not surprisingly, social networking platforms like Facebook have their data architected around the individual. This is what helps them focus on creating a superior engagement functionality. It also makes them phenomenally successful at generating the type of engagement that supports their advertisement-based business model. They understand exactly how valuable their data is when it’s reported this way.

This is getting the attention of all sorts of organizations – who are rushing to adopt Workplace – without understanding the value they are giving up that resides in the data. With GDPR, data privacy issues, and no vested interest in Facebook sharing more than necessary, it is unlikely organizations will be able to access the strategic community analytics they need to carefully monitor and modify their community strategies to serve different business objectives.

Another group that is doing behavioral analytics particularly well is the marketing automation vendors – HubSpot and Hatchbuck both have this orientation and visibility. Embedding these tools into your community can give you tremendous insight that is not possible with native analytics or even many third-party analytics tools because the database architecture makes it challenging to reorient the data. These tools, and others like them, can provide amazing insights into how people are experiencing your community and how their behavior is changing over time.

This approach to analytics helps community practitioners see:

  • The average cycle time between when people join the community and when they first exhibit certain engagement behaviors. This helps community professionals optimize their new member welcome processes and fine-tune engagement tactics.
  • What member behavioral segments exist; members who are consumers vs. question askers vs. explorers. This data helps community practitioners target different segments with different engagement prompts that will have a higher likelihood of success.
  • Which members are super users, visiting the community and engaging in a variety of ways; this helps community professionals develop advocacy programs that are purpose-built for the interests and behaviors of different groups.
  • ROI of different member segments. This helps their stakeholders see the potential upside of additional investment.

Community platforms will struggle until they get analytics right.

Analytics, metrics, and dashboards deserve attention because they’re critical to prioritize community investment. This is true for both community program owners and vendors. Strategic behavioral data would help vendors priorities the right product development, help them market and sell, and help their clients be successful, renewing their platform license. When the platform vendors do analytics right, their value will be self-evident.

Recommendations for Community Program Owners.

If you are currently struggling with analytics, the first thing to do is take a big step back. A good community strategy defines the key engagement behaviors you want and the workflows those behaviors enable. We see this as a four-step process:

  1. Your community strategy should help you identify the analytics you need to track your progress.
  2. Once you identify the data you need, consider the engagement path required to get to those key behaviors.
  3. You can then lay out the behavior path and what visibility you will need from the data to track it.
  4. Once you have your desired behavior path and data requirements, review your current data and identify what you can access, what data is not helpful, and what gaps exist.

You may decide at this point to live with what you have or invest in accessing data directly to create a custom dashboard. Either way, you will be in a much better position than relying on vendors to give you what you need in an easy to absorb format. You will also save time by narrowing in on just the handful of metrics that are truly meaningful to you.

It’s time for community platform vendors to get analytics right.

Notes: This is work we do with many organizations in our community strategy workshops. Let us know if we can help you get the most out of your community. If you’re a platform vendor, we’d love to talk with you about how you can better support the data needs of community practitioners. Contact us!.

Best-in-class communities measure behavior over activity – SOCM Fact #12

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By Ted McEnroe, Director of Research and Training

What is the best way to capture the value of your community?

Communities serve a number of strategic uses, so it can be hard to come up with the metrics that best demonstrate how the community delivers on that strategy. But one thing is certain – the basic activity metrics – logins, visits, and such – won’t capture that value. While almost every community tracks basic activity, best-in-class communities are far more likely to measure behaviors and outcomes than the average community.

Why? It’s no accident. People, groups and organizations typically focus on things that they know are being measured, from the kid who asks, “Will this be on the test?” to the executive who pays closest attention to the numbers that go in the report to his CEO. When you select metrics that get at the behaviors you want in the community, you focus on those behaviors. It’s human nature.

So what should you do? Here are 5 tips.

1. Start with what you want to see, not with what you have.

One bit of bad news if you hoped this was easy. The easy stuff that your community platform delivers you in pretty charts probably doesn’t get it done. Visits, posts and logins make for easy graphics, but they don’t necessarily tell you if people are getting value.

Behavioral metrics also take longer to move. Activity can ramp up quickly – and there is nothing wrong with looking at activity metrics to make sure people are coming to the community and doing things, especially when you are just getting started. But as your community matures, it’s less about them showing up and more about the ways they are giving and getting value.

“Visits, posts and logins make for easy graphics, but they don’t necessarily tell you if people are getting value.”

2. Push the value conversation.

It’s really hard to measure fog. If you can’t express the value of the community to the organization and its members in a clear, concise way, you’ll have a hard time getting members to engage (because they don’t know why they should). But equally important, you won’t know when you are truly delivering value. Stories and anecdotes get you there for a while, especially at the start. But at some point, you’ll need hard numbers – so nail the value piece down.

3. Make metrics a part of the strategic conversation from day one.

Once you have your value defined, identify and begin tracking the metrics. It’s OK if your numbers aren’t huge right off the bat.  Your metrics are the way you will be able to track your progress, and will help you troubleshoot, generate new ideas and recognize gaps.

Plus, you don’t want to be caught flatfooted when someone above wants to know whether this community investment is paying off.

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4. Share your data with an eye toward your audience.

When preparing your data – remember who it’s going to. Your immediate boss may want the intimate details of which customer forums are generating the fastest community response times to support questions. Your CEO probably doesn’t.

5. Storytelling still matters.

While getting the right metrics is critically important, qualitative data, case studies and clear examples bring a human face to the numbers on a page. Don’t get so caught up in the numbers that you stop gathering the pieces that you can attach to show the human business impact of a 58% increase in number of questions answered in your platform.

We can’t wait to hear what you think – tag your thoughts with #SOCM2016 to join the conversation!

Are you a member of TheCR Network? Download the research inside the Network here.

Throwback Thursday – Community Metrics 101

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By Shannon Abram, The Community Roundtable

One of the most daunting aspects of community management for many community managers is how to tackle metrics and measurement. There are so many things to measure, track and report on. And then – what’s the best way to share this data. Weekly? Monthly? With your whole team? Executive reports? It can become overwhelming quickly.

Reporting_Socm2016

Our research has shown that communities need to be aspirational in their metrics instead of settling for what is easily available. Measuring behaviors and outcomes rather than just activity correlates with overall community maturity. That’s a challenge for a couple of reasons – those metrics can be harder to define and they can be harder to track in many platforms. Dive into this week’s #tbt post for a primer on community metrics 101: what metrics you should track, how to think about community value and more!

This week’s #throwbackthursday focuses on Community Metrics 101 – a look at the importance of metrics and measurement in any community.

  • What community metrics are most important to track? – One of the most daunting tasks for many community managers is dealing with community metrics. A member recently approached us with the following question: “I’m getting started with tracking metrics for my community and looking for guidance – where do I begin? What metrics are most important to track?”
  • If you run a community, don’t think like a website on metrics – As we continue to slice and dice the data from more than 200 communities for the State of Community Management 2015, we know that one of the most viewed pieces of the report will be the engagement profiles – the percentage of members who are lurking, contributing, creating and collaborating in the community. It’s a natural thing, especially for new communities, to want to look at engagement and growth metrics early as a way to show to people the success of the community.
  • The Basics of  Metrics and Measuring – If you get a group of community managers together and merely mention the word “metrics”, the first question that comes up is “What do I measure?”… and that is a fantastic question. With a huge variety of forum platforms, an even bigger pool of possible community objectives, and a never-ending list of user types – it might feel really impossible to come up with the perfect community dashboard.

  • For TheCR Network Eyes Only: Community Pitch Deck – Are you a member of TheCR Network? Check out this Roundtable Report: Unlocking the Executive Perspective on Success & Measurement: Business Goals, Community, & Metrics

Want even more #throwbackthursday action? Check out all our throwback posts!

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What community metrics are most important to track?

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By Shannon Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

One of the most daunting tasks for many community managers is dealing with community metrics. A member recently approached us with the following question: “I’m getting started with tracking metrics for my community and looking for guidance – where do I begin? What metrics are most important to track?”

Like so many community issues there is no one-size fits all solution (probably not the response you wanted to hear!) We can tell you that through the State of Community Management 2014 report we found that 85% of best-in-class communities can measure the value of their community, so clearly measurement worthy goal. We’ve put together three best practices for getting a metrics and measurement program off the ground:

1. Ensure you have a clear and measurable strategy.

​Almost 80% of best-in-class communities have a measurable community strategy. Why? That – more than anything else – will give you clear guidance on what to track by articulating the business goals and behavior change you hope to see.

2. Identify a consistent reporting timeframe.

​About 60% of survey respondents prepare reports monthly. Reporting more often is likely a waste of time because behavior change takes time, but reporting monthly is often enough to get the feedback everyone needs to make adjustments to tactics.

3. Determine reporting audiences.

Think about who will be viewing your progress and goals. What story are you trying to tell them? Choose metrics that support the goals of your community and can be easily understood.

We also recommend both preparing monthly reports to track activity and sharing results with stakeholders and aligning your reporting with your community’s objectives to best engage your community stakeholders.

Do you consistently report on community metrics to your team? How did you decide what to report on, and how do you present this data in a meaningful way to your stakeholders?

Want more insights like these? Download the free State of Community Management 2014 report, and keep an eye out for the State of Community Management 2015, due out this spring!

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Community Maturity and Measurement are Linked

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By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

We have been overwhelmed by the response to the State of Community Management 2014! We love hearing everyone’s take on the data, so please keep your tweets, blog posts, articles and reviews coming. This week I’m excited to highlight one of our key findings from the SOCM 2014 in this week’s community fact #2 – maturity and measurement are linked. 

​For many years, community management has been more of an art than a science. That is – the community management discipline has changed as organizations apply more process to the role and its responsibilities. It follows that those who have applied more process are seeing more results – and newer communities are in many cases more mature than those started 3-4 years ago because they are able to make use of emerging knowledge of community practices.

​ Of those with the most mature processes – the best-in-class (the top 20%) in this year’s report, 85% can measure the value of their communities vs. 48% for the average community.

SOCM Fact #2

 

You can review more findings related to community maturity in the State of Community Management 2014. This post is the second in a 10-part series highlighting some of the most thought-provoking data from the SOCM 2014 – brought to you via a fun poster – perfect for sharing on Twitter, hanging at your desk, or printing out and waving around your next community strategy meeting.

You can access the whole report here:

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Looking to take your career in community management to the next level? 92% of members agree that TheCR Network supports and advances their personal and professional goals. Learn how our research, access to peers and experts, targeted content and exclusive concierge service can help you achieve your goals. 

Measuring the Value of Communities

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By Maggie Tunning, Learning and Culture Manager at The Community Roundtable.

It’s the last week to take the 2014 State of Community Management survey! Have you shared your community insights? If you work with an online community we would love to hear from you – you can take the survey here through this Friday, February 28th.

Last week we shared why the State of Community Management research is important to community managers. Today, we’ll give you a preview of how the data supports the importance of community managers.

value of a community manager

Preliminary results show that survey respondents who have at least one full-time community manager dedicated to their community are more likely to be able to measure that community’s value – only 6 percent of those with no dedicated full-time community manager feel they can measure the value of their community, but 51 percent of survey respondents with one or more dedicated community managers indicate that they can measure this. Dedicated staffing for communities is a sign of community maturity, and these communities with one or more community managers are more likely to have a defined strategy and cultural norms for participation.

Stay tuned for more 2014 State of Community Management results on the standards and strengths of online communities. Can’t wait for more community data? You can check out past State of Community Management results here.

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community. We are dedicated to the success of community and social business leaders and offer a range of information and training services. We facilitate TheCR Network – a trusted environment in which to discuss and share daily challenges and triumphs with proven leaders.  Our weekly programming, access to experts, curated content, and vibrant discussions make TheCR Network the network of the smartest social business leaders.  Join today.

Inside TheCR Network: Metrics and Measuring

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We are very lucky at The Community Roundtable to have Jillian Bejtlich on our team.  She has a strong background in enterprise communities from her time with Autodesk and great knowledge on metrics and analytics.  Her superpower however is helping people understand that metrics aren’t scary.  She’s helping our TheCR Network members with their wish lists on what parts of their community they’d like to measure and we thought you would like in on some of the great conversation they are having:

If you get a group of community managers together and merely mention the word “metrics”, the first question that comes up is “What do I measure?”… and that is a fantastic question. With a huge variety of forum platforms, an even bigger pool of possible community objectives, and a never-ending list of user types – it might feel really impossible to come up with the perfect community dashboard.

Fortunately, nothing is ever impossible. The key to communities and metrics is clearly identifying all the pieces to your puzzle.

What metrics are available to me?

With all the various community platforms out there, you’d think that there would be a common point between all of them when it comes to metrics. Slide1Unfortunately there really isn’t. Every platform will provide something different, so it’s crucial to figure out what data you have available before trying to draft up a metric dashboard. Some platforms such as Lithium will have an extensive amount available, and others will offer just the absolute basics. Thoroughly research your options before promising to report on anything!

Who will see these metrics?

This is a critical piece of the puzzle. If metrics are for your eyes only versus publicly available or exclusively for executives – what you report on might be different. Take this into consideration as you think about what metrics you need to pull. Matters of confidentiality, proprietary information, or the message you’re hoping to convey all have an influence.

What is the purpose of my community?

Wondering why there isn’t a one dashboard fits all solution? Every community is 110% different, even if they’re for a similar product or exist on the same platform. The key difference is in your community’s purpose. In general, the objectives of your community will align with business goals. Let’s say your business objective is to provide consumers with a way to book components of their vacation (hotel, flights, etc.). Your community objective might be something like creating a thriving community full of helpful vacation tips that encourages people to book travel. The metrics surrounding that community will be altogether different than a community focused on providing complex technical support for an expensive software product.

What metrics are you interested in studying?  What frustrations do you have surrounding metrics for your community?

 

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The Community Roundtable is committed to advancing the business of community. We are dedicated to the success of community and social business leaders and offer a range of information and training services. We facilitate TheCR Network – a trusted environment in which to discuss and share daily challenges and triumphs with proven leaders.  Our weekly programming, access to experts, curated content, and vibrant discussions make TheCR Network the network of the smartest social business leaders.  Join today.

 

Measure, But Measure Wisely

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MeasureTwiceTwo things recently got me thinking about using measurement and metrics.  The first was a post by Bertrand Duperrin who pointed out that just because we don’t want to or don’t measure something doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be measured and that every business goal, hard and soft, has an appropriate way to measure. It’s fundamentally good management to measure.  The second instance was a community manager who recoiled a bit when faced with a situation where the company expected conversion tracking that aligned with the social media efforts. The examples brought back my years of working with Fortune 500 companies on operational benchmarking… and knowing that even companies that spend significant resources tracking and measuring often need a reminder about how to most effectively use metrics.

There is a lot of lack of understanding regarding effective uses of measurement out there – both on the part of individual contributors and on the part of management.  Individuals often fear being judged or rewarded/reprimanded based on metrics. Management often uses metrics as a weapon. In both cases it indicates a poor perception and misuse of measurement, particularly if what is being measured is somewhat experimental as is the case with social and community initiatives.  However, on the other end of things – no measurement is simply bad management.  The question is – where is the middle ground and what is an effective approach.

From my experience, metrics are essential to understanding if where you are spending your time is working well or not. Is this blogging really worth my time or is my time better used elsewhere, maybe tweeting or cultivating my Facebook presence?  Everyone should want to know the answer to that kind of question. Measuring is one (note I said one) useful indicator to help answer that question. Whether we do this formally or informally, most of us pay some kind of attention to the number of hits our blog is getting or the number of Twitter RTs, etc.  By formalizing this tracking, you are less likely to deceive yourself.  Rich personal experiences tend to color our perception because they are more memorable than the numbers – and that can really alter how successful we think we’ve been if we don’t marry that experience with the hard numbers. What I mean by this is that a blog post may have received a ton of positive feedback from one person who carried on back and forth with you in comments for hours… leaving a deep impression with you that the blog post was excellent… but when looking at the numbers, you realize that maybe only 20 people read the post. Add some content analysis to the metrics and you find out that your enthusiastic reader was your great aunt’s best friend and had no affiliation with the goal of your blog. What you’ve got after some analysis is that your blog post didn’t work very well given your goals (unless you were targeting your great-aunt’s best friend).  I exaggerate a bit here to make my point but in that case metrics are really helpful so you can determine that maybe the topic of the post or the place where you promoted it did not work for your needs. So you adjust and maybe next time you get 50 views and one comment from someone that is more closely aligned with your goals. Bingo – measuring just worked really well for you. The result of the measurement is not to dock your pay, criticize you, or indicate that you should stop blogging.  It was to learn something about how you did something to improve it the next time.  Not so hard to understand or appreciate.

Now say management comes swooping in and says “We’d like to see 1,000 views and 10 comments for each blog post six months from now”. You look at your numbers and cower a bit… knowing your last post got 20 hits.  Holy cow, right?!?  Here is where good management makes all the difference. Bad management would come in and say “You need to get to 1,000 pageviews in six months or you’re out.”  Way to strike fear into the hearts of your employees – good on ya.  Better management would say “Well, let’s track week over week and see where you are after a few months and evaluate whether we want you to continue blogging.” You still feel pressure but you are not staring down the face of unemployment… which is useful. Great management would say “Let’s track for a few weeks then let’s talk about how you are approaching your blogging and distribution – if we are not seeing the lift that will get us to 1,000 views a post within six months, lets brainstorm about ways we can get your posts out to more people through some of our other communication channels and tweak the focus of the content a bit.” Wow – you don’t feel left to blow in the wind at all there… and you may even feel supported. Nice. And management is more likely to get what they need too.

Measurement and metrics tracking is not a decision-making tool. It is a performance indicator. The numbers neither know what you are trying to achieve nor are they the only factor in understanding performance. Do not use them that way – it is simply poor management to rely on numbers to make your decisions. Use them to assess and evaluate. Combine them with content analysis, the business outcomes you are looking for, and some contextual judgment to make decisions about how and what to change if the numbers are not where you want them to be.  A website getting 0 hits may indicate a lot or nothing. If it’s preceded by days of getting 100,000 hits you really may want to make sure your data center is up.  If it’s Christmas Day… maybe your website just isn’t all that interesting to people who are at home celebrating with family and that is OK because you know network reliability content (for example) is not relevant in that context.  So, please measure but measure wisely and remember the old adage – measure twice, cut once… still great advice.

Aaron Strout on Measurement and Best Practices

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tough night I’ve been friends with Aaron since he and I were on the team together at Shared Insights. We worked on community projects like “We Are Smarter than Me” and traveled the country recording podcasts with industry rockstars. It was a bit odd interviewing Aaron since we’d tag-teamed so many interviews in the past, but we muddled through. 🙂

On the podcast, Aaron shares more about Powered, including how their “four super powers” – Strategy, Content, Measurement and Platform – support communities for clients like Radio Shack, Sony, HP and Atkins. We dug into content and measurement in detail, exploring how companies should think about these important facets of community building.

We also talked about Aaron’s role as an evangelist (or the Kevin Bacon of social media as Adam Cohen noted) and what best practices he’s picked up along the way. Given Aaron’s success and influence this is must-listen stuff. He’s humble of course, but shares a lot of nuggets about the secrets to his success.

Download this podcast (22 minutes/19.8mb)

 

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

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