Are You Measuring Success?
Flickr Photo: NCBrianChris Brogan is one of my social media heroes. I really respect his approach to the power of these tools and how we should use them. (And you can learn more from him at our Ask the Expert session on May 5th -- free for NTEN Members!)
Chris has a great post today about Online Community Management in which he shares how he would measure a community manager's performance:
- Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
- Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
- Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
- Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
- Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
- Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
- Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.
I love measurement. I track everything all the time -- graph it, chart it, measure it against all the other data I can find. That's because I'm a goal-oriented person.
The tough part is that success isn't always measured in numbers. You can be commenting more, posting more, and getting more comments, but still not actually be heading toward your goal. Here's a classic example from the nonprofit sector:
You can hand out more eyeglasses each year, but are you really helping people see better?
In terms of measurement, I think it's important to make sure that what you measure isn't geared just toward productivity, but also success. They aren't always the same thing.
The way I try to approach it is by articulating my theory of change. It's actually a whole discipline here in the world of nonprofits (see http://www.theoryofchange.org), but what it boils down to is this: making any one thing happen is never as simple as direct cause and effect. We can never really articulate what exactly will cause fewer hungry people in our communities because hunger is a complex issue with lots of causes. But we CAN articulate our assumptions about what's causing the problem and what we think will address those causes. Then we can set goals and design strategies that we think will help us get there.
So to put an overly-simple example out there - if you think that lack of public awareness is one of the reasons that homelessness persists, you would probably set goals around the number of people you could get to view a video about your cause. Your assumption is - more people viewing the video equals more awareness, equals more people taking action to end homelessness in their community.
So that's where matching metrics to goals comes in. You definitely want to measure, but you don't want to waste your time. Only measure what matters.
What if I'm measuring the wrong thing? I loathe measurements, but the moment I thought about paying someone to be a community person, I realized that someone other than me might not know whether they were doing a good job based on anecdotal evidence.
Thus, the thought is now grinding in my head.