Social Networking Core Tenets -- KPIs
My new organization uses these terms. We didn't. We used some others, but the end game is the same. Just to be clear, tenets call out what we value (though not necessarily why), and the KPI's (key performance indicators) are intended to help us measure our effectiveness against those things we've said are valuable.
And because I don't see any meaningful distinction between social networking and community -- it's all a question of types of associations -- we might also say this is a contribution to the marketplace of ideas on the subject of a core community tenet and it's associated KPIs.
To be clear, I'm not covering community site statistics of the following sorts:
- Number of unique visitors
- New member registrations
- Page views
- Retention/Attrition
- Member loyalty
- Member satisfaction
- Most active members
- Message posts
- and so on
Those are clearly important -- most clearly important for judging the health of any specific community site. At Microsoft we have many, many, community sites (thousands). Our partners have many community sites. The health of our community overall can't be found in the impossible task of rolling up the above sorts of stats across the sites we're able to identify. And to date, our polling mechanisms haven't been wired to answer those questions -- if indeed they could.
But we still have to do so. Here's what I propose.
Core tenet: associations
Call it relationship if you like. The point is, community is about connecting people to people. It may be that the purpose of the connection is to avail one member of the content produced by another, but if it doesn't involve people operating together it may be a wonderful thing otherwise, but it's not community.
KPIs:
- Number of connections per member
- Degree of connectedness between between member connections
- Types of associations by groups and individual
- Message propagation rate across the networks.
I might suggest one or two others, but that will do for now.
There are a couple of things worth pointing out. Most organizations won't have any ability to track this information at all (let me introduce you to yet another reason why we designed our services the way we did). Tagspace, the upcoming Claimspace, and finally the "subscription" services (ohhh, wait to you see this) planned for the first half of fy08, especially considering their integration into our discussion services, round out our story and make it possible to get one thru three. We're still puzzling over four -- but we know we want the information. I trust the business justification is immediate and obvious.
The other thing to consider is that while these aren't exactly site based, they do assume the use of one or more of our services -- and will therefore be limited in that regard. Still, the services it assumes members use touch many sites and indeed many people that may not be members. For those reasons the information these indicators provide offer another view on the health of our community. One that is different from, but complimentary to, and broader than, conventional community site-health indices.
