What is the state of community analytics?

[Nick Lim]

Hi everyone, just wanted to grab everyone's view on how you use the community reporting and analytics today. Are they useful to quantify the success or failure of a community? How do we link these to greater objectives?

Nick

[Angela Connor]

Hey Nick. Great question. There are lots of products out there to help with this and new ones are being created all the time. Radian6 is popular. Amber Naslund is their community manager and she is on twitter. Connie Bensen works for techrigy, another service provider. There is lots of conversation taking place about which metrics matter most. I don't know that the surefire answer is out there or if it is the same for everyone.
Are you looking to start doing some monitoring?

[Nick Lim]

Thanks for the comment, Angela. Amber, Connie and I chatted last week at Community20 and there are good reporting tools out there. I was just wondering what the community thinks about the linkage of the current reporting capabilities to overall objectives. For example, if a support community wants to reduce its tech support call center costs, how does it link that to bulletin board metrics such as # of posts, # of new users etc? Secondly, it would be curious to hear what actions the community has taken after seeing the current reports, ie. how actionable were these reports? Community managers are really busy, stressed and multi-tasking, so it would be good if the current reporting can be augmented with analytics that saves time with alerts etc... my 2 cents.

[Angela Connor]

Wow Nick, one could make some positive changes and absolutely cut costs if that kind of intelligence was provided in such a way that you could make the right moves and KNOW they were the right moves. It seems that the person closest to this would have some idea how forums and interactive platforms reduced the number of tech calls which would ultimately reduce costs right? I mean if there's a drastic decrease you could potentially need fewer employees if your forums address the right issues. I have lots of alerts set up through our reporting software but I'll admit that those metrics aren't really what I need, or what I would much rather receive.

[Nick Lim]

Yes, it would be great to hear from the community managers what types of REAL analytics would be REALLY useful.

I can start it with a simple one -> 'troll alert' would be one.

Fair disclosure to all : I started a community analytics project at http://sonamine.wordpress.com to codify and share learnings on this project. The goal is to get a whitepaper out by end of June.

[Angela Connor]

Nick, I will GLADLY tell you my wants and needs. Heading over to your site now to check it out.

[Nick Lim]

Hi Angela, I think I missed your comments. Could you send me some via email at [e-mail]? I'm also happy to discuss over the phone.
Looking forward to it.

Angela Connor said:

Nick, I will GLADLY tell you my wants and needs. Heading over to your site now to check it out.