dsp· by gregor hochmuth

Introducing Community Analytics

In Community Management on 13 August 2008 with 1 comment

The industry of measuring how many visitors you have, what they click on and what turns them away is enormous these days. The reasons are financial and therefore quite obvious — especially when you’re talking about e-commerce sites and sites that depend on advertising.

But when you’re running a site that’s built around people and the content they bring to you, there is another set of questions that’s just as important: Is your community working? Are people nice to each other and respect your guidelines? How do you know?

Visitor counts, bounce rates and browser statistics won’t help you much here. A new kind of analytics, with new tools, measurements and methods, is needed — so let’s start talking about community analytics.

Community managers and their tools

Community managers have a rather lose job description, spanning everything from hostess to fireman. But no matter how fuzzy their work might sound, anyone running a people-based site will tell you that their role is absolutely essential. The early success of Flickr is largely ttributed to the strong involvement of the team in setting up the platform and being in touch with its first users.

So today, I want to tho introduce the theme of community analytics, and tools for community management at large:

• How do you get insights about your community?
• How do you know what’s going on?
• And what actions can you take in response?

Those are the questions I’ll explore in more detail.

Keeping track

The larger the site (and the smaller your team), the easier it is to lose track of all the moving parts and all the interactions that take place. It’s not difficult to watch your most active of users, but what about your large “middle class” of users? That’s where community analytics is meant to kick in.

I haven’t seen any tools that are built specifically for managing and analyzing live communities though (forums and email don’t count, and academic projects such as NetScan can’t help you on the job either). Moreover, the art of community management itself is still a rather clouded and shrouded topic, which is why I also look forward to interviewing seasoned community managers to share their experience with you here. Needless to say, I’m quite excited about this series.

What have you come across? How do you gain insight into what’s going on with the sites you run or worked with?

photo credit: pruned.blogspot.com