Pieces of me on community... : measurements

Blogging as transformational

b2ix — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:49:00 GMT

Gerald Kanapathy's recent post on successful blogging points towards Microsoft as one company that has been transformed by blogging. Specifically he talks about how blogs "opened up Microsoft" and goes on to say how "it's now amazingly open and responsive."

While great as that sounds, I'd have to agree with Yag in that the most interesting part is when Kanaphathy writes:

What did Microsoft do? I don't know if they had it before, but it takes certain organizational cultural values. It's not about process, or rules. In fact, it requires acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity, tolerance of risk, openness to criticism, and a degree of confidence. These are not things that can be proceduralized, but instead come from how the organization is, uh, organized, and simply the underlying values.

To me, this is key. At the end of the day, blogs are a means by which people communicate. It is a means, not an end. So for all those wanting to start a blog because everyone else is, ultimately it comes down to something more intangible. How open and willing is your group or company to change? To uncertainty? To risk? To criticism? To engage with people in an open an ongoing conversation?

<aside>

At this point, all the marketing types and measurment gurus are probably screaming as this underlying value cannot be adequately captured by a simple measurement such as web views nor time online. There are some intriguing indexes in the works to better capture this space, and there are other ways of measuring the impact however...what is ultimately settled on, if there is such a thing, remains to be seen.

</aside>

While this may come across to some as staying away from blogging if the underlying values are not there, it's not meant to be. I just wanted to call this out by illustrating that blogs are not an end to itself. It's part of a much larger picture, and ultimately it's success (or failure) depends upon so much more than what we can traditionally measure at this time. Should a company, organization or person for that matter get into blogging, I hope they do so with their eyes open to the whole process.

Recent Numbers from Beta Blogs and Forums

b2ix — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:10:00 GMT

This is just a quickie post about some updated numbers (as of May 22, 2007):

56 beta blogs
66 beta blog posts
436 beta forum messages

Way to go team! Live blogs, live forums, live content! Yay :-)

I realize when compared to all the blogs and forum messages out there, this is but a small drop in the bucket. No matter, we have the beginnings of a great social software solution that ultimately helps people create, share and connect.

Oh, and if anyone is curious, I pulled some totals from existing blogs from members of the team. In the past month or so, members of the community team made a total of 23 blog posts about the beta that resulted in at least 73 comments. Way to go!

(xposted on my beta blog)

strange currencies (or, community measurements re-imagined)

b2ix — Fri, 04 May 2007 01:21:00 GMT

"You know with love come strange currencies"
R.E.M -- Strange Currencies
(since thinking about this post, I've had this song stuck in my head :S)

In going through the responses following the announcement of our feedback driven development process, I've been documenting the suggestions, bugs and the like to not only help out the test team, but also to help us determine what all we need to be doing. Along the way, I've also been gathering some raw stats about our various sites/services.

1,879 tagged items
342 messages posted in forums
53 new blogs created

While gathering these stats though, I realized that this may appear to run counter to what I posted just the other day in response to Sean O'Driscoll's notion of thin contributors. Indeed, in some ways it is contradictory in that the features around reporting in the new services are still being baked. At the same time though, we have the foundation in place to readily surface key currencies in our new ecosystem. Some draft manifestations of this include:

Key content -- items (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc) being tagged. What do folks find interesting?

Weighting of key content -- frequency of a specific item (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc) being tagged. What do people find most interesting?

Influentials -- identifying the individuals tagging those items (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc). Additional identification of those individuals validating answers, questions, or bugs. Who is playing a big role in our ecosystem?

Message/meme tracking -- identifying links to a particular item. How far does a particular message spread?

Relative credibility of influentials -- does the history of an influential's actions make sense? How do others perceive this individual?

Answer validation -- how many other agree that an answer really addresses the problem at hand?

Question / bug validation -- how many others encountered a particular question or bug as stated?

Notice how discussion above does not mention anything about visitors or page views? While those data points still have their place, to more accurately measure the impact of community activity, we are building a series of solutions and services to capture that information.

I realize that there isn't too much precedent for this sort of tracking. Indeed, a recent study of community professionals by Forum One Communications (publishers of the Online Community Report), 62% of respondents said they did not collect content tagging metrics. Given that the online community space has changed rapidly in just the last couple of years, I suppose this is understandable. With tagging and other social services taking root though, it's about time that our reporting and stats caught up to all of the changes.

(xposted on my beta blog)

Broadening the base

b2ix — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:55:00 GMT

Sean O'Driscoll has a great post critiquing a recent Reuters article about allegedly low participation rates in Web 2.0 communities.

Sean outlines what he refers to as the thick contributors (video contributors, for example) vs the thin contributors (taggers, voters, etc). I couldn't agree more with his assessment.

Partly, we in this community space online are partly to blame. Not having the proper tools or consistent measurements in place all these years leads in part to the singular, and perhaps inflated, value of thick contributors. Don't get me wrong, the participation of these contributors is crucial to a healthy and vibrant community. However, I would also assert that the contributions of the so called thin contributor is just as important, if not more so.

Thankfully, the technology and the measurements are catching up to the social norms. With tagging becoming an integral part of our new blog and forum solutions, in addition to the introduction of xClaims, there will be even more ways for people to participate. Think of it as broadening the breadth of participation at all different levels of engagement and contribution.

(originally xposted on my beta blog)