The Challenge for Communities Now Is to Demonstrate Viable Business Value
Companies are seizing the opportunity to use online communities to drive innovation and collaboration, but now must translate that engagement into real business value, according to the recently released State of Community Management 2016 report from brand community collaborators The Community Roundtable.
“Online communities have moved from afterthought to strategic asset in the minds of many executives,” said Rachel Happe, co-founder and principal of The Community Roundtable, in the release. “But as the data show, too few communities can clearly define their value or provide the success metrics that will ensure sustained executive attention.”
Among the key findings, respondents disproved the “90-9-1 rule” of social media engagement, which claims just 1% of users are active content creators, while 9% contribute to content and 90% lurk on the sidelines. For the third consecutive year, communities reported numbers closer to 65-15-20, with more than a third of members actively creating and contributing to content. Set aside inactive members who never log in, and the percentage of actively engaged members in communities rises to between 40% and 50%—in both employee and customer communities.
“The research highlights the notion that communities and social networks deliver different engagement outcomes,” said Ted McEnroe, director of research and training for The Community Roundtable, in the release. “Social networks tend to have more reach but lighter engagement while communities are more effective at triggering behavior change and deeper engagement, like asking and answering questions.”
The report also recognizes best practices in community management, highlighting key findings for 2016 in community strategy, operations and tactics.
Communities that concisely define and measure the shared value to members and sponsors outperform their peers in community engagement and strategy metrics.
Communities that empower members to share leadership opportunities improve engagement.
Communities that measure their value and return on investment (ROI) by looking at behaviors and outcomes, rather than broad-based activity, achieve greater community success than their peers.
Also as part of this year’s report, participants were asked to share data on answered questions and successful searches in an effort to calculate a base-level community ROI. While the data proved difficult or impossible to collect for some communities, those that were able to submit data demonstrated an ROI of 8-11x their community cost.
“As with anything else when you are asking people to calculate value in a new way, the data can be difficult to collect,” said Happe. “But these first figures suggest that simply answering questions and resurfacing those answers through search can provide a remarkable return on investment for communities.”
Among the other data highlights in the report:
Successful organizations make communities a strategic priority. 61% of online communities have an approved strategy, including 93% of “best-in-class communities” (those who scored in the top 20% overall in the survey).
More than half of online communities have a dedicated budget, including 76% of the best-in-class communities.
75% of communities surveyed say they have full-time community management, and 95% have at least some resources allocated to community management.
Work in communities is only half of community professionals’ jobs. Community managers say they spend nearly half of their time connecting with members via email, phone, elsewhere online or even in person.
Engagement data has brought with it executive interest and attention in communities, but Happe cautions that the spotlight on communities will fade if community leaders don’t capture data and stories that demonstrate the value and ROI of community approaches. “The growth and success of community as a strategic approach is something in which all of us who have been involved with building communities can take pride,” she notes in the report. “In the long run, though, our good feelings won’t be enough—we need to show results in business terms.”
Download the complete study here.
Representatives from 339 communities across industries, functions and geographies shared their data on community strategy, operations and tactics for this study. The sample includes both for-profit and nonprofit communities, and both internal and external communities.
Source: PRWeb; edited by Richard Carufel