Online community effect proves tricky to pin down, claims survey
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US-- Businesses are reporting gains from running their own online communities – but there are problems in measuring the success of the objectives set out at the start of the projects, according to a new survey.
The 2008 Tribalisation of Business Survey, carried out by Deloitte, social media marketing agency Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, collated the responses of more than 140 companies who have built and maintained online communities.
Results showed that 35% of respondents saw an increase in word-of-mouth for their brands while 28% said their overall brand awareness had increased as a result of their community activities. Meanwhile, just under a quarter said communities were making it easier to bring outside ideas into their corporation and helping improve customer loyalty.
However, the survey found “significant gaps” between community goals and how success was being measured. Generating word-of-mouth and boosting brand awareness were the key goals cited by companies, but what is most measured to assess success are “less helpful metrics like ‘number of visitors' and ‘page views'”, according to the study.
Measurement was not the only problem reported, as the survey found that the majority of communities had 500 members or fewer. Half of respondents said that getting people engaged in their communities was the biggest obstacle they had encountered, while 45% claimed that finding the time to manage their community had proved difficult.
Author: James Verrinder
Comments (1)
From Matt Rhodes, FreshNetworks
Interesting article and the issue of measurement / ROI in online communities is something that is obviously close to us here at FreshNetworks.
The Deloitte study is interesting because most of the communities studied were very young – less than a year old. In our experience impacts such as word of mouth are better measured over a longer period. Whilst a brand will see value from a community very early on, a proper evaluation of such young communities may not yield the most useful outputs.
We think of communities as going through a growth process from infancy to maturity and it's only really toward the maturity end that I would think it useful and informative to conduct an evaluation of success. Alternatively of course, it would be interesting to segment the evaluation by how developed the community is. This is something we do with our communities at FreshNetworks although it will obviously take time to build a data set worthy of analysis.
Finally – your point about measurement often being focused on quantitative data (especially hits or registered users) is true. There is not, by necessity, a correlation between hits and success of the community. Whilst it might be useful as a check of reach, you are measuring the wrong thing as what you really want as a brand is useful engagement or insight and not just hits. We find that the emphasis on these kind of measures is often for two reasons:
1. Some of the agencies providing online communities are from a software background and so for them these measures are the ones that they are used to.
2. Some companies think of online communities purely as an extension to their website and so adopt the same measures they may have in place there.
Neither is particularly useful.
If you're interested, there's a panel debate on measurement I was part of here earlier this year
Also we've written about this study here.
