Community metrics from the Online Community Unconference
June 12, 2007 – 2:57 amThanks to the Online Community Unconference organisers and attendees for opening up their wiki to those of us who couldn’t make it. Sharing is caring 
I was particularly interested in the ‘Community ROI‘ page/presentation which features some of Joe Cotherel’s (Lithium) collated stats (which I re-present gratefully below), and Bill Johnstone’s presentation (.pdf) which includes a very handy list of things you can measure. It also features the elusive and much discussed HBR research into ebay’s communities (.pdf).
Brilliant. Thanks to you all very much.
It worries me when people advocating ‘community’ or ‘collaboration’ or ‘web2.0′ or ’social software’ suggest that measuring things isn’t important; although we surf these things happily and relish in finding new networks to participate in and learn from, it is our time we are spending, and leisure (possibly research) at that. Our clients need things that they can measure; they have accountants asking them what it’s worth, whether we like it or not.
Part of the job for Amnesty is to build a system to capture data representing community changes over the next month as we facilitate and motivate and market the Instant Karma LP; it should be interesting. The database is set up and web frontend on its way. I have no idea what is going to happen, so it’s bound to be fun.
Anyway - back to those stats:
Joe Cotherel’s stats:
• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users.
(AT&T, 2002)
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users
(McKInsey, 2000).
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more
(Annenberg, 2007)
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)
