Measures of Community Success
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Aug 05, 2008
Sunday I jokingly said that today's post would be about finding love in online communities. Actually, a number of questions to the webcast were of measuring the love, or positive effects, of the community.
CP asks, "How do you disaggregate customer retention and repeat business driven by the feedback community versus that driven by other marketing initiatives?"
You can't completely disaggregate them; many factors affect retention. What you can do is look for a statistical correlation between retention and an index of community participation. One suggestion for such an index is to average the number of logins and the number of posts made by a customer.
Michael asks, "How would a company know their word of mouth increased?"
The best way is to put a WOM tracking system in place. This can be as simple as a field on a sign-up form asking "Where did you hear about us?" and including "Referred by friend or colleague" as a choice. It can be as sophisticated as using blog-monitoring software (such as Andiamo Systems) to measure the amount of times specific keywords related to your brand are mentioned in blogs and forums.