The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same…Research on Online Community ROI Techniques

As part of our industry leadership role, we belong to the Online Community Research Network. We’ve been mildly intrigued with the research surveys the network has performed over the past several months, but the most recent survey based report “Online Community ROI: Models and Reports” surprised us. Call it a case of “The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same” syndrome.

Here are some of the report’s findings:

1. Only 31% of respondents have a comprehensive online community strategy in place (53% are developing their strategy as they go!)
2. 59% of respondents say their goals are closely aligned with their organization’s corporate goals.

We find this response interesting as if only 31% of respondents have a strategy in place, how can 59% have closely aligned goals?

Additional findings:

1. Metrics are still confusing people in terms of how to use them for ROI. The top ranking metrics be noted as critical for ROI are listed as traffic patterns and statistics (visitors, visits, page views, etc.).
2. Cost savings for Customer Service/Tech Support, Trial Downloads of products, both scored the lowest as critical metrics for ROI. Yet, these two metrics are the easiest to use to demonstrate a base level of support for an ROI case.

Community Managers who responded to the initial survey ranked Membership Growth as the number one success or performance indicator they report on regularly. The most important data that they report upward include (in ranked order): number of members, basic metrics (whatever that means), online content, number of visitors, number of posts, and other meaningless metrics.

More shocking than this is the response to the level of satisfaction/believability of the data with your executives and how satisfied the executives are with the reports they are receiving. A whopping 23% responded very satisfied with 19% responding satisfied. The executive teams we deal with want clear, concise and relevant reporting. That doesn’t sound like what the respondents are delivering to us.

Think there might be a correlation between the lack of a cohesive online community strategy that closely aligns with corporate goals and the lack of sophisticated measurement and reporting? We do.

Many of the respondents (and members of the OCRN) are still confused when it comes to demonstrating the value of their communities to management. With the lack of refinement comes the claim that online community is a soft application that doesn’t deliver results. During budgeting, how can your online community efforts get the funding you need if your team cannot prove its value to management?

Based upon the responses, we wonder how many of the vendors in the Online Community space don’t understand measurement and reporting issues. With budgets tightening, it is clear to us that this has to be a key issue for the industry. Yet in our opinion, the methodology and understanding regressed to pre-2000 levels. That’s a shame, because our ROI analysis does deliver an easy to understand measurement of how the community is delivering on organizational goals.

We help our clients understand exactly how their communities can help with organizational goals and how to measure their success. We start with targeted audience attraction through PPC efforts and sponsored content efforts, then follow these members through the online community value chain to demonstrate the ROI and value that online communities bring to an organization.

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