Webinar: Jet Fuel for Your Community: Finding, Thanking, and Engaging Influencers (12/10/2008)

[#1]

Question: What are some ways to measure the impact of influencers?

[#2]

To start with, define your goal!  This is actually less difficult than it seems on the surface and then more difficult again on implementation.  Follow these steps and then let's talk here more:

1) Define your business objective.

2) Identify the behavior pattern in the community that serves that business objective.

3) Identify which users exhibit that behavior pattern dramatically more than others.

4) Design a program to engage those users?

5) Instrument/track those contributions over time?

6) Correllate back to your business objective and original hypothesis.  Causation is hard - but not much harder than any other investment dollar you try to correllate!

Example:  I want to reduce cost in the call center.  Look, we have users answering questions in our forums.  Some of those users answer extraordinary #s of questions.  Let's thank them and provide them with "stuff" that makes that behavior even better for them.  Let's look at the total # of answers we provide in web self service.  What percentage is community vs internally answered.  How is this changing over time.  Can we measure what would happen if we turned this service off.  The last mile is hard to pave, but not impossible with a quality plan, good platform, good goals, and clear purpose for the project.

sean

[#3]

Sean is exactly right -- the measurement process starts with goals.  If you take Sean's framework of "satisfaction/loyalty/affinity," you might think about measurement this way:

Satisfaction

To what extent are our influencers driving satisfaction?

Sean noted one measure of this -- how many people do we have in our forums helping other users, how many questions are they answering, what percentage of all questions are answered by influencers rather than by company employees?  Influencers can also increase satisfaction by bringing you the best ideas for improving your products and processes -- thus preventing customer questions and issues before they happen.  So another metric might be number of ideas contributed via your idea engine, or the number of high-rated ideas, or the number of ratings points (in our system, "kudos.")

Loyalty

To what extent are our influencers driving referrals?

Your web analytics package tracks how people get to your community and your website.  While many come from Google or other search engines, a large proportion come from links embedded in blog posts, forum posts, and web pages of all kin.  Review these referrer logs to better understand who is driving traffic your way -- it will help you identify influencers in your space as well as measure their influence.  

Within the community on your website, you can observe and record instances of referral and recommendation that occur every day. However, while you can see someone say "I recommend you buy x," it has been very hard to measure whether people actually followed that recommendation.  We recently introduced an integration with Omniture that will allow community managers to measure what content and what members in your community are most effective in driving transactions, registrations, trial or beta adoption, or another other actvity on your website that you want to drive.    It effectively looks at every piece of content and measures it's relationship to a "success event" like a purchase.  It's a very cool idea.  

A last thing I'll mention here is that some companies are beginning to identify influencers using social network analysis -- that is, analyzing how "connected" certain members of the community are to other members.  Could be as simple as measuring an individual's direct connections (how many people have responded to his or her messages, and how many has he or she responded to) as well as indirect (how many people read his or her messages).  This is not easy to measure today without dumping out your database into an analytics tool and crunching the numbers, but I'm sure we'll see it pop up as a capability of community platforms in the future.

Affinity

To what extent are our influencers defending our company and our products?

I think this mostly anecdotal today -- a matter of observing activity in your community and capturing instances.  But the beauty of this kind of activity is that there is seldom any debate about what constitutes "defending."   Sean may have other ideas of how to measure this, but most of the companies I know simply collect examples.

Whatever measurement approach you take, I think measurement is an important part of any influencer program.   When you think about it, how can we ever recognize the great work our influencers do if we're not measuring it? 

Message Edited by JoeC on 12-10-2008 06:47 AM