Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting 2009

The Online Communities: Metrics and Reporting research study was initiated in late July of 2009, and ran until the second week of August 2009. The intention of the study was to get a broad look at what online community metrics organizations are tracking, how organizations determine and report on the ongoing value of their online community initiatives, and the reporting and metrics tools that help companies assess this.



We received approximately 175 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community culture. Participating industry categories include: software companies, hardware companies, consumer goods non-profit organizations, independent consultants and media companies, amongst others.

A sample of the 175 organizations that participated include (with their permission):
Autodesk, BusinessWeek, Electronic Arts, EMC, Environmental Defense Fund, Google, Great Schools, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Quest Software, Sony Computer Entertainment, Sun Microsystems. Viacom, and VMware.

Overall, we were very encouraged by the level and quality of response to the research questions.

Several key issues pertaining to online community and social media metrics surfaced during this report, including:

• In general, organizations need to do a more thorough job of defining their business objectives for online community engagement, assessing ways to measure progress towards these objectives, reaching beyond their native platform metrics capabilities, and finding ways to measure the more qualitative components of community member engagement.
• The Role of the Community Manager is increasingly important to developing and refining business process, and measuring performance in these new “social spaces.”
• There is a growing need for community metric standards that are platform and vendor-independent.