More on ROI — and reporting

6 months after we launched the community site, I was provided assistance and loaned 30 employees from other parts of the company. The goal was to help jump-start the online community and also put some systems and processes in place so that it could easily scale.

Unfortunately, I think too many cooks were in the kitchen, and that we got a lot more done — got a lot more traction later on when I was able to hire 10 employees. One of the ‘loaners’ was a Six Sigma Black Belt. While I am a big fan of Six Sigman, I think we made the mistake of over-engineering our dashboard when he came on board. Below is a snap shot of all the items we wanted to track. 18 months later, we do track almost all of them.

The problem is that if you can’t your point across with 10 different numbers (or even less) than you haven’t really defined the important drivers of your business. I guess one could argue that it is important for me, the general manager to have my pulse on all aspects of the business. I believe, however, that it is important for a community team to define the ten most important items to track and establish a process where learnings can be shared with other parts of the company and that users can either get their questions answered or obtain valuable and useful information to help them in the personal and / or professional lives. Below is a list of some different types of users:

1. Streakers: Seriously, there are many users who come on the site and just go to 1 page and never come back

2. Unregistered Lurkers

3. Registered lurkers: Users who register at the site, but never post

4. Users with X number of posts within different time frames (weeks, months, etc.)

5. In-active registered users: Registered users who hanve not posted in a while

6 High Resolution/Answer Person (Answering 50+ or more posts)

The original problem with this is that someday 50+ will have to change plus some users do not just answer posts. Some just reply and then it is up to the other users to determine if the posts are useful or not

7. Users who ask and answer multiple questions

8. Registered and Active

– Active was defined based on activity, which I think is a good proxy. The activities included doing a search, posting, subscribing, etc.

9. AllStars or Key Answer People:

– This could be based on X number of posts or replies OR someone who the community or a moderator has annointed as a person who adds tremendous value to the community

10….. WELL, I know that I am leaving out several. What group(s) do you think I should add?

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Spending Wisely

How much do I spend on Community

This all depends on whether or not you are a believer. This depends on the WHAT — what are you solving for. And whether or not you believe that Community can add value to your organization. Obviously, this brings to mind the tough ROI question. There is no golden answer — just like there is no golden answer for general awareness advertising. I always preferred direct marketing and ecommerce because I could track to the dime the amount my revenue my campaigns drove. I hate those ‘general awareness’ brand ad agencies that told me how much I was spending for eye ball. What do impressions get me? So what if someone sees my ad. I guess you could test their ability to recall the ad, but…. So, questions to ask yourself about how you spend your dollars:

– What does it cost to get someone to post (how much money have you put into the damn community and how many posts is that generating

– What does it cost to get someone to respond (separating our an initial post to a reply)

– What is the movement on the NetPromoter score for the site (it is tough to say that your community is really moving NetP for the brand)

– What is the speed (timing) to get product development ideas — vs. traditional usability and market research (how long does it take from the time you decide what questions you want to answer — to the time the ideas and priorities get back to your engineers?)

– What about the assumption that for each post — you avoide a $5+ call to the call center — OR you can just look at the number of posts responded to with a favorable rating and multiply that by the $5+ (it costs a lot more to answer a person’s phone call unless you using skype : )*

– What kind of learnings are coming from the community? This is worth putting a formal structure and process around.

More to follow in the ROI section.

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