While traveling to London meeting with some of our European clients some common questions arose that we get quite often. How do I measure what is going on with my community? How can I calculate the health of my community? How do I identify key influencers in my community? How will this data help me develop a profile about my users? How do I back up my request for additional budget when it comes to social networking solutions vs. traditional marketing avenues? These are all great questions and ones we at Telligent are happy to answer.
I have talked in the past about calculating B2C return on investment. Prior to calculating return on investment, a common understanding of measurable business objectives needs to take place. This can come in the form of basing your analysis on such things as incremental value of the community, to trending the current userbase over time. The key to this is that the variables selected are measurable.
Once you have defined the measurable business objectives it is now time to analyze the data. With this in mind we have focused on developing a new framework to report on the data within Community Server implementations in the form of an Enterprise Reporting Suite. The new Enterprise Reporting Suite will ship with over 60 different reports and charts to help you understand exactly what is happening in your community. The reports will quickly show you such vital user information such as users by day, roles, points, posts, registrations, activity, country. The remaining reports are directly tied to which applications are currently enabled. This will allow you to quickly build a user profile and discover what information is truly valuable to your community.
The data in and of itself is invaluable, now you have the means to manipulate the data based on your measurable business objectives as well as easily writing new reports specific to your needs. Once you have the data in hand then it is a matter of defining which ROI scenario makes the most sense for your given situation, B2B, B2C, or E2E (Employee to Employee) or leveraging a metric such as the conversation index (Total Posts/Comments + Trackbacks + Ratings) to calculate impact of blog posts. I will be posting more about the ROI scenario’s in future posts but note if you need immediate assistance in defining ROI around your current community initiative please do not hesitate to e-mail me.
A comprehensive demo of the Enterprise Reporting Suite is available athttp://reports.communityserver.org/demo/. The reporting package will begin it’s beta testing in early October and will be a must have for any marketing or community manager running aprofessional or enterprise instance of Community Server.
Good data and the analysis thereof shows accountability and reinforces validity of the marketing spend on communities and social marketing in general. You are right, this should be a ‘must have’.
And I appreciate your emphasis on the importance of ‘establishing measurable business objectives.’ You should always start with everyone on the same page as to what ‘success’ is or what ‘conversion’ is.