Page 90 - Social Media Marketing

chapter 3: BUILD A SOCIAL BUSINESS ■ At the most basic level, as with any online interaction, the activity itself can be
tracked. Accessing a page, submitting a form, downloading a file and similar content
measures provide a well-understood framework for measurement. However, given the
existence of profiles (explored more in the next section) and the behaviors associated
with curation—rating, ranking, etc.—much more interesting and useful metrics can be
established and used to create very robust measures of participation.

As another aspect of participation and its direct measurement, consider “point-
based” social community reputation systems. Participants in a support community
are very often rewarded through increasing social rank based on contribution to the
community. Upon joining, you may be assigned the rank of “newbie” and then over
time earn your way to “expert” status as you contribute and gain the votes of others in
the community as they curate your contributions. At some level, there is a basic point
system that is translating individual actions within the community into personal repu-
tations: it may be visible, or it may be buried in the inner working of the community’s
reputation management system. Either way, it’s there and can tapped as a source of
68 metrics. When participants do something beneficial, they earn a point. When they do
something that offends the community they might lose a point. Track both and you’ve
got a solid assessment of participation.

In a thoughtful analysis using tested techniques applied in a novel manner,
social media strategist Bud Caddell points out a very straightforward method for cal-
culating the relative distribution for participation and thereby gaining quantitative
insight into the role of community influencers. Bud’s method—simplified—is based on
a statistical approach to tracking the spread in variance based on ratings points over
time. Communities that have high variance are being influenced by a relatively small
number of people compared with those with lesser variance. This is important because
over time what is generally desirable is a more equitable distribution of participative
effort—lower variance—across the community.

Measure Relative Participation

Bud Caddell’s insightful measurement technique for assessing the degree to which a commu-
nity is influenced versus peer led is not only useful, but also shows the ways in which existing,
well-understood statistical techniques can be applied to behavioral analysis when setting
up measures of participation for your online community. You can follow Bud on Twitter:
@Bud_Caddell.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/measuring-participation-inequality-in-social-

networks