Forums

Dawn Lacallade, a social media practitioner whose projects include Dell Community Forums, Ideastorm, and currently the SolarWinds communities, was recently interviewed by OnlineCommunityReport.com.

Relevant excerpt regarding what it means for a company to have a “deeply integrated community”:

When I say this, I mean simply the level of engagement with every aspect of the company. Often I will see companies that are deeply integrated with their community in a single area, like say a support community. That same company will have a marketing team that has no awareness or interest in involving the community in their processes. What about the website team? How about product development? A deeply integrated community is part of the core fabric of a company and can be seen in all groups. I see this as the next great evolution of the companies that thrive on customer satisfaction… get your customers involved in everything!

And as for her approach regarding metrics, I think that she’s spot on in terms of separating them into the 3 different categories below:

In my opinion, there is nothing more important than having clear goals and measures to evaluate the success of those goals. I propose there are three main groups of measures you should be reviewing weekly (for the community manager) and monthly for the “Stakeholders”. (Stakeholders include your management team as well as management from any other groups that are involved in the funding, benefits, or strategy of the community) Here are my groups and a description of what they include.

1. Business Measures: These show how you directly move business measures via your work. These HAVE TO BE specific to your company. There is no one size fits all for discovering these measures. Let me explain. For example: A support forum allows questions and answers. The metric might be “answered posts” and “views of answered posts”, but neither of these is the metric the business follows. To be a good business measure, it needs to be in the business terms (is it on one of the business scorecards?). In this example you would gain agreement that one answered question = one call avoided into the support call center. You might then decide that 1% of all views of the answered content is also considered one call avoided. This would give you a number of calls avoided per week/month/quarter/year. That is the level these metrics need to go to be relevant to the business stakeholders.

2. Community Health Measures: This group generally shows the activity on the site. These include the common measures of new registrations, posts, page views, visits, unique visitors, search data and sentiment. In these measures you are looking for trends and the actions that drive activity. For example… if you had a very high month… was it because you had a brilliant new product released or because your brilliant new product had a huge flaw that made people angry? You must understand the causes of change for these measures to have true value.

3. User Behavior Reports: In order to truly understand and connect with the community, you need to know what the behaviors are and when they change. For example, you know that John has been a power user for the past year posting 5 answers a week. For the past 3 weeks, you have not seen John. This should be a huge red flag for you to reach out and check on John. A truly gifted community manager will notice these things. It enables you to thank those that go above and beyond and bring back those that might be disillusioned.