The Online Community Compensation study was initiated in July of 2008 as part of our ongoing research efforts with the Online Community Research Network. The intention of the study was to get a broad look at online community compensation, factors that effect compensation, and the current environment of the community team and community staff roles.

We received approximately 225 responses. Participants represent a healthy swath of the types of organizations participating in online community building activities, including: large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers, interactive marketing firms and independent consultants.

Key findings from the report:
• The majority of the respondents are: Female (55%) vs. Male (45%),
• The majority (61%) of respondents ranged in age from 31-50 years of age.
• Most of the respondents have more than 5 years of experience, completed a Bachelors Degree, and work 41-50 hours per week.
• The average Salary of the respondents was $81k with a median of $72.5k. There were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k), and then also at $60-$65k.
• Women are earning only 91% of what men are earning; women averaged $77k, and the men averaged $85k. The average annual salary for all participants was almost $81k.
• Most participants are satisfied with their jobs with an average satisfaction score of 4.2 and a median score of 4 (on a scale of 1-5).


Gender
This is the first time we have asked a gender question in our research, but this answer, combined with anecdotal data from our events supports a slight tendency towards females being in community roles vs. males.



Age
Most of the particpants skewed towards the 31-40 y/o segment.



Department
The responses indicate Marketing “owning” Community teams, or organizations creating a dedicated team. “No formal structure” and “Throughout the company” were also popular responses. The placement of the community team seems to be very much in flux, with a bias towards the marketing department.



Experience
The respondents generally represented a senior and seasoned body of practitioners. The dip in responses in the 3yr to 5 yr range likely represents the general waning of interest in online community during the 3 years after the Internet bubble, and the relatively recent resurgence in interest and investment.



Salary
The average Salary the research participants was $81k with a median of $72.5k. There were peaks on both the low ($0-$25k) and high ends (more than $150k), and then also at $60-$65k. The salaries reported represent a disparate, but generally healthy, range. Spikes in the “$0 to $25k” can be accounted for by volunteers, part time staff and C-level staff not currently taking compensation in startup environments.



Salary by Gender
Women are earning 91% of what men are earning; women averaged $77k, and the men averaged $85k. The average annual salary for all participants was almost $81k.



Satisfaction
It is encouraging to find that overall satisfaction with Online Community positions is well above average. This indicates the combination of salary, benefits, work environment and subject matter is working for most of the respondents.



Full Report
The full Online Community Compensation report contains a good deal more information on the topic, including:
• Community team size
• Respondent education
• Hours Worked
• Benefits
• Salary by Country (US, UK, Canada)
• Salary by Title
• Salary by Experience
• Salary increases in last 12 months
• Full write in comments from Survey

The report available for free to members of the Online Community Research Network, or available to purchase for non-members here:
Online Community Compensation 2008

Over the last 3 years we've conducted research with over a 1000 organizations actively engaged with online communties, including Fortune 500 companies, cutting edge community-based startups and some of the world's leading non-profit organizations.

We are currently conducting 6 studies annually, and we typically release the research reports (for a limited time).

Currently available (free) research reports include:
Identity, Reputation & Ranking:
The Identity, Reputation & Ranking research project studied current practice with online identity, member reputation (including reputation systems and programs) and content ranking techniques.
Key findings from the study include:
- Members typically don’t fill out non-required profile fields;
- Slightly less than 1/3 of the respondents (32%) have, or plan on making member’s profiles portable in the next 6 months;
- Slightly less than 1/3 of the respondents (32%) have, or plan on implementing a universal ID solution in the next 6 months;
- The majority of respondents have, or are developing a reputation system for their communities.
Download this report (free).

Online Community Revenue and ROI Techniques:
The Online Community Revenue and ROI Techniques research project studied revenue streams of online communities as well as monetary and non-monetary measurements of value.
Key findings from the study include:
- Respondents generally valued non-fiduciary dimensions of value, like loyalty, over direct revenue.
- The most effective revenue generating techniques were advertising and charging for community subscription.
- A member-first attitude is needed when considering the addition of fee-based or revenue-generating services. The best way to find out what your members do or don’t want? Ask them.
Download this report (free).

Marketing & Online Communities:
The Marketing & Online Communities research project was intended to study the intersection of current marketing practices and online community building.
Key takeaways from the study include:
- A list of community marketing tactics that community hosts engage in;
- Feedback on the most effective marketing tactics;
- Host policies that marketers must adhere to;
Download this report (free).

Research Reports Available to OCRN Members:
Online Community: Marketing, Growth and Engagement Report / July 2008 (also available for purchase)
Online Community ROI: Models and Reports / February 2008
Online Community ROI Research Report / April 2007
Online Community Metrics: February, 2007
Online Community Metrics: Best Practices Survey / March 2006
Blogs, Wikis and Workspaces: June 2006

Our Research Calendar for this quarter includes:
Online Community Compensation (team structure, titles and compensation packages from over 250 community professionals): to be published August 2008
Community Vendor Satisfaction (Platform & Services): to be published September 2008

In addition to all the research reports, OCRN members get an active say in steering the research agenda, and also help shape the research instruments.

To find out more about the OCRN, please feel free to ping me.

We conducted the Online Community Marketing, Growth and Engagement research study in May of this year, as part of the continuing efforts of the Online Community Research Network. Our goal was to gain insight into how people are measuring engagement in their online communities and to understand how many organizations were using an elite / influencer program, and how those programs were structured.

One of the most interesting findings was around the concept of member engagement. Both the definition as well as the process of measuring engagement varied across the respondent organizations.

Highlights From the Report:

Most people determine the level of engagement based on the amount of activity and the amount of content created (forum posts, reviews, discussions, diggs, links added, comments and content, etc.). They also look at the amount of time spent on the site as one of the main measurements of engagement. Another important dimension, which only a few respondents mentioned is the number and quality of connections that a member has with the host organization (in some cases brand) and other community members.

Leading Indicators
A few respondents were using a set of "Leading indicators" to benchmark and track engagement:
• "1) Logged in/accessed the site; 2) Posted comments to the site; 3) Posted substantive content (e.g. conversation-starting forum topic) to the site; 4) Completed profile/member survey"
• "Engagement encompasses not only logins to the site, but activity: Digging/burying stories, submitting content and engaging in discussions on specific stories."

An ideal Engagement Metric
Based on aggregate responses, the following metrics would be ideal for rolling up into an engagement metric.
• Amount of activity on site: page views, logins, searches, feature usage
• Number and type of content items created: discussion posts, tags, shared content, etc.
• Number of connections / relationships created: friends added to network, or inferred via frequent discussion exchanges
• Time on site: Total time per month
• Frequency of visits: / per month
• Recommendations: Members referring new community members, passing along community content outside of community, blogging about / promoting community

A perspective on member engagement:
One Fortune 100 Financial Services firm that responded to the survey uses the following definition / measurements of “Engagement”:

“We define engagement in a few different ways.

1) Very tactically in the community. Tactically: How many have registered? What are their posting rates? How often are they are engaging in the community?

2) Strategically with higher-level brand metrics: looking at how this pays off for our overall brand goal. [Company] uses a Net Promoter Score to measure the health of the brand.

We ask “Would you recommend [Company] to your friends?” on a scale of 1-10.

Then we subtract the people who answer low (either 1-3 or 1-5), from the people who answer high (9-10) that yes, they definitely would recommend [Company] to their friends.

That gives us a percentage and we measure it for the [Company] brand and at each of the product levels.

The community is about overall brand engagement and how the community drives loyalty and membership within the [Company] brand.”

Fostering Engagement
All of the responses to the question about fostering engagement raise the point that as community host, you have responsibility for half of the conversation with community members. Themes of regular communication, active listening, strong moderation, fostering discussion and recognition emerged in the responses.

The most popular ways to improve member engagement include:
• Regular and easy communications:
“Send email – ones that are targeted and provide interesting news. We found over our 500 or so communities that those who send regular (monthly) email to members have 7x engagement numbers compared to those who did it less than once every other month.”

• Skilled moderation:
“Keep the forums on topic and firm but fair moderation. “

• Keep content fresh.

• Fostering discussion:
“Encouraging conversation. Sometimes, this means highlighting a potentially divisive, opinionated comment and inviting response. Sometimes, this means asking questions that everyone has an answer to, and nobody minds sharing.”

• Listening to participants:
“Seek member feedback and perspective, build meaningful connections”

• Recognizing members who participate:
“Create a sense of value to their participation.”

The full report is available to Online Community Research Network members. If you are interested in this report (and others), please consider joining the Network. Details are available here: http://www.onlinecommunityresearch.com

At the Online Community Unconference a couple of weeks ago, it became clear to me that we are at an inflection point with the "industry" of Online Community. On of the key issues community professionals face is that we (as an industry) are suffering from a lack of solid benchmarks, including compensation of online community professionals. The key purpose of the Online Community Research Network is to work in a collaborative way to research current practice and help establish these benchmarks.

We have put together a short survey about online community professionals compensation, team structure, and current job satisfaction.

The survey can be found here:
<http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=dmkh9tZ6vZHyheMFqv2mcg_3d_3d>

If you are charged with community management, strategy or design at your organization, I would encourage you to respond to the survey. We are seeking input from all types of organizations, and all levels of seniority.

If you decide to participate, there are few things to note:
• All participants will receive a copy of the final (aggregate) report.
• All data will be processed and compiled in aggregate. Data will not be reviewed or presented in a personally (or company) identifiable way.
• All participants are entered in to a drawing for 1 of 10 $25 Starbucks coffee cards.

If you have any questions about the study, please feel free to contact me. We hope to close the survey by July 17th.

We just released (for a limited time) the Online Community Revenue and ROI Techniques research report.

The study was conducted last fall as part of the Online Community Research Network, and explored issues around driving revenue via online communities.

I've included highlights below. I would encourage you to download the report for the full result set.

Question: Based on your experience, what are the most effective strategies and tactics for generating revenue from an online community?

Summary:
Respondents highlighted several common themes, including:

The need for Advertising:
“Provide a platform for peer-to-peer interaction that advertisers can participate in. By ensuring that advertising content is relevant to the content the community is generating (through tools like contextual matching), we’ve seen high ROI for advertising partners for
branding and lead generation campaigns.”

The need for Subscriptions:
“In our context (most-valued content available only to paying subscribers), we provide high-quality community features – including access to experts – as a privilege of subscribership.”

The fact that Advertising and Subscription are the leading strategies isn’t surprising, given that the model was pioneered with content-based sites. Several respondents mentioned that revenue generation from communities was indirect, particularly with regard to brand affinity and advertising.

Categorized write in answers follow -

Advertising:
• “Ad impressions - both visit duration and repeat visitors.”
• “Ad placement has resulted in game downloads from our casual games forums.”
• “Advertising on member content.”
• “Advertising sponsorships.”
• “Identifying quality community connections to leverage for advertising targeting insights.”
• “Provide a platform for peer-to-peer interaction that advertisers can participate in. By ensuring that advertising content is relevant to the content the community is generating (through tools like contextual matching), we've seen high ROI for advertising partners for branding and lead generation campaigns.”
• “Thought leadership, lead generation, customer retention are top indirect revenue sources. Customer councils, ad revenue and member dues are the most frequent direct sources.”
Advertising, Brand Loyalty, and Upgrade Program:
• “Unfortunately, a lot of revenue generated through business communities is indirect. Brand loyalty, hyper-affiliation, user acquisition are all difficult to translate into real dollars - although some companies try. Advertising is probably still the most effective way to monetize a community though - and the more targeted the ads, the better. For instance, having an "upgrade now" button on the forums for an outdated device, etc. A while ago, we piloted an upgrade program through the dell community that was quite successful.”
• “From our viewpoint, it's really a matter of having a more engaged readership. We're strictly an ad business at this point, and getting more people to come back to the site more often and see more pages is only good for us.”

Brand Loyalty:
• “Clients need to appreciate indirect value of promotion, brand awareness, and loyalty. We work with many of our clients to develop their platforms in a way that the software itself could be resold/white labeled for resale.”


Subscriptions & Brand Loyalty:
• “Allow a big upsell jump. A super-premium level allows people to express their loyalty even if the benefits are almost the same as at the next level.”
Subscriptions:
• “In our context (most-valued content available only to paying subscribers), provide high-quality community features, including access to experts, as a privilege of membership/subscribership.”
• “Providing a base platform for free, and charging for a premium version.”
• “Where the revenue is part of a premium service, as a cost of obtaining value from the community or directly tied to the identity and ego of the community member. For example, some kind of payment to access premium content or tools to take better advantage of the social space. Identity creation is a powerful motivator to which money is a means, not a barrier.”

Sponsors:
• “Incite users to create valuable content that can be sponsored by interested parties.”
• “We have not succeeded in having individuals pay directly; we have had more success in getting supporting institutions to pay for their employees' access.”

Create a Strong Community:
• “I do not believe you should be doing community to generate revenue. Our objective is to provide customers/users a way to Learn, Share, and Explore Technology.”
• “The communities don't generate revenue. They provide us a ‘lock-in’ to using our service by showing the value of the "network effect" on our platform. They provide a richer user experience for clients' members and therefore providing greater support during contract renewal negotiations.”
• “Create a strong community, then monetize the activity, versus monetizing the capabilities early on.”
• “Our focus is not on generating revenue directly. We focus on enabling community participants to develop solutions, find answers, and gain knowledge.”



Question: What advice would you have for a colleague that needs to introduce revenue generating activities to their online community?

Summary:
Recommendations varied from the respondents, but several themes emerged from the content:
• Understand Your Community: Know what your community values, and what they expect from you. Let your community guide you on what they value, what they will pay for, and what types of advertising they will tolerate.
• Add More Features/Value: Don’t put roadblocks in front of features that are necessary for a healthy community. Think of value-added services that compliment the core community feature set.
• Be Careful: Your community is a delicate ecosystem. Make sure you don’t abuse it.
• Combine Revenue Sources: which techniques like “Target Advertising” and “Premium Upselling”
• Quality over Quality: Focus on a few effective revenue streams rather than several moderately effective ones. 1 well placed ad vs. 7 throughout the interface.

Again, if you would like to see the full report, I would encourage you to download it here.

The Online Community Research Network is kicking off our next research project to study online community marketing, member engagement and growth strategies.

The goal of the study is to get direct feedback from community managers and strategists about:
- most effective ways to market their communities
- the definition of community member engagement
- best practices for fostering member engagement
- fostering community health and and driving growth

We have found that the best source of information about community best practice and strategy comes from the collective experience of real-world practitioners.

If you would like to participate in the study, please send me an email (bjohnston@forumone.com) with your contact info, your organization, and a link to, or description of the communities you manage or guide.

Research about online community building and growth is central to the mission of Forum One Networks. The Online Community Research Network studies and publishes 6 times a year on topics that matter to those responsible for guiding online community and social media activities in their organization.

The Online Community ROI Models and Reporting research study was initiated in February of 2008. The study was created in order to investigate further into the ROI research that we conducted in the last half of 2007, and to gain insight into specifically how organizations were valuing and reporting on their online communities activities. Further, we wanted to gain insight into who the stakeholders were for ROI metrics, and how the reports were being received.

I will be blogging highlights of the report over the next few weeks. To obtain a full copy, as well as access to all of our other research, and the professional network of online community pros, please consider joining the Online Community Research Network.

We received approximately 150 completed surveys. Participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.


Q16: Which of the following quantitative and qualitative metrics are critical for communication ROI at your organization? (question 16 from the study)
The top-ranking metrics are: Traffic patterns & statistics; Community member engagement; Unique number of visitors; New Member Registrations; Member Satisfaction; and Product Feedback / R&D ideation.

The middle-ranking metrics are: Number of referrals to the community by members; WOM generated by community; transition of lurkers into active community members; impact of the community on revenue; organization or brand-mentions on other sites; and ratio of comments per post.

When looking at the data segmented by type of respondent organization, Traffic patterns, member engagement and unique community visitors scored consistently high.


Top-ranking Metrics



Middle-ranking Metrics



Lower-ranking Metrics





Q23: What were the 1-2 compelling sources of value from your community or social media efforts that you constantly communicate?

This question was intended to solicit the “elevator pitch” stats or metrics that community managers and strategists use internally to their organization to evangelize community and social media efforts. Answers ranged from the unique ability of online communities to create value to cost reduction of existing communication channels and corporate functions.

These were all write in answers. The main themes are as follows, with selected quotes inline below. (full report contains all write in data).

1. Community helps problem solve faster and more efficiently than Customer Support, saving our company time and money:
   
   
   
   • "Customers are able to get faster response and answers to their problem utilizing the community over contacting Customer Support."
     
   • “Knowledge share, and hence problem solving, is more efficient due to the community model.”
     
   • “Using WebBoard is more efficient then email, telephones or fax. It saves us time and money and increases our ability to service the consumers in our sector.”
     
   • “The ROI on employee time devoted to the forums far exceeds the returns on the usual support methods.” [Thus saving our organization time and money.]
     
   
   
   
2. Availability of information and content for specific areas of interest:
   
   
   
   • “Expanded resources & knowledge for specific areas of interest and centralized resources.”
     
   • “Niche communities, focused on specific areas of interest. Market leaders on-line and in print with high cross over traffic.”
     
   • “You won't find this content anywhere else - written by our members to raise best practice within vendors.”
     
   
   
   
3. Increases site traffic / more engaged relationship with us:
   
   
   
   • “The more we invest into community, the more organic traffic we get.”
     
   • “Our members consume 49% more average page views per session every month than non-members.”
     
   • “Our community sites get more than 3 times the engagement for solutions, capabilities and use case content than our traditional sites.”
     
   • “Our forum generates more page views than the site itself.”
     
   • “Our community traffic by far exceeds traffic to all traditional product areas.”
     
   • “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”
     
   • “Our programs on average engage participants for 45 minutes each time they visit.”
     
   • “Time spent on the site is higher on forums pages than anywhere else on the site, indicating that community members are more engaged.”
     
   • “Views of photo albums remain the most popular area of the community. Members may not wish to participate in discussions, but they do want to see photos of their events.”
     
   • “An online discussion moderated by subject matter experts that followed an in-person event with the same moderators achieved the most participation of any attempts to engage our users.”
     
   • “Our social media content generates more content and discussions off site, increasing our reach.”
     
   • “The ability of our blogs to drive customer engagement and PR activity.”
     
   
   
   
4. Idea Creation / What we learn from members of the community:
   
   
   
   • “Ideas for our books.”
     
   • “It's all about what we learn from the developers through our community interactions.”
     
   • “We will have the opportunity to get first hand feedback on products and ideas for improvements and enhancements.”
     
   • “We discovered some problem areas in usage and service adoption that caused us to change our materials and strategy.”
     
   • “We have been able to gather more than a thousand best practices/lessons learned in two years use.”
     
   
   
   
5. Lead Generation / Conversion:
   
   
   
   • “Converting contacts, acquaintances, and other informal relationships into donor relationships.”
     
   • “Converting contacts into activists and issue leaders.”
     
   • “When we enlist our community members to represent us physically or virtually, our reach and conversion metrics dramatically increase.”
     
   
   
   
6. People are saving time / building skills by using our site:
   
   
   
   • “In our Sourcing Professional Forum, procurement professionals are constantly sharing templates and best practices across organizations, bootstrapping their RFP effort, saving time and increasing value."
     
   • “People creating and building productive relationships with people that help them improve their practice or do their work better.”
     
   • “The National Board of Certified Teachers can share best teaching practices with ease never before possible.”
     
   • "In our premium areas, customers are using online training and certification to manage global implementations, knocking down traditional barriers to skill building in an online, social learning setting."
     
   • “Our users have access to every single college coach in the country. This is something no other site offers. Our site is always free to the users and they will never be charged. All of our competitors charge users to use their recruiting website.”
     
   • “Our community members credit participation in our community with their increased skills in using our products.”
     
   
   
   
7. Build customer loyalty:
   
   
   
   • “Anecdotal stories of knowledge sharing, connections made for business purposes and special access created through connecting members.”
     
   • “Community members are more likely to volunteer their time, services, advice, and financial support than non-members.”
     
   • “Employees who belong to the community almost never 'turn over'. They are consistently the best performers out in the stores.”
     
   • “Offering a community to your clients where they can speak to you and each other significantly increases customer loyalty.”
     
   • “More connected members spread the word and come back frequently.”
     
   • "If you want to understand your stakeholders and develop the relationships, you have to think in communities."
     
   • “Online dialogue creates a more open environment that deepens trust and team work throughout the organization.”
     
   • “Our community has one of the highest net promoter scores for our brand of any corporate offering.”
     
   • “Our members say that they like the site and related services - direct comprehension of value, esp. during account meetings.”
     
   • “Research shows that customers in a community can have a sense of involvement with the company as long as we make sure they are heard and that involvement can lead to great loyalty.”
     
   • “Our community members are actively engaged with the brand and don't hesitate to tell us what they like, and don't like. They feel a real sense of ownership of the brand.”
     
   • “Our ability to personally communicate with future users of our product substantially influences their perception of our company.”
     
   • “Increasing site traffic proves that there is an interest and demand from our customers to have a more open and engaged in relationship with us.”
     
   
   
   
8. Online community is growing our membership base:
   
   
   
   • “In a climate where professional associations, and especially manufacturer associations, have struggled to maintain members, we have consistently and significantly increased in membership year-over-year for the past 5 years. This growth directly coincides with our implementation of online community services. Over 85% of our members find our member-only e-mail discussion groups alone to be worth the price of annual membership.”
     
   • “95% of our members would recommend membership in our online community to other parents raising children with food allergies.”
     
   • “Our blog has increased community participation by 80% over the past year.”
     
   • “We boast membership in 125+ countries.”
     
   • “We have 8000 registered members across 95% of local authorities.”
     
   • “We have doubled the size of our community membership in the last 6 months. 2 years ago, only 34% of our Company's upsells and renewals were also members of the Community. In 2007, 75% of our upsells and renewals were Community members.”
     
   • “We have the largest active user community in the marketplace.”
     
   
   

Again, to get access to the full report, as well as other research and the professional online community network, please check out the OCRN site.

Our Online Community Research Network (http://www.onlinecommunityresearch.com) initiated the The Marketing & Online Community research study in June of 2007. The study explored the current state of marketing to online communities, from the perspective of both the online community host, as well as from the perspective of the marketer.

The research participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.

We discovered early on in the research process that while community hosts and practitioners were willing to share their experiences, most marketers were not. At the beginning of the research I conducted several in-person interviews, it became clear that most marketing and advertising agencies have not met with great success in their community marketing efforts, and are unwilling to talk about their experiences. What limited success marketers have had is generally viewed as proprietary knowledge within the agency, and is closely guarded.

I've included excerpts from the report below. To download the full report, please go here (short registration required).


What are the biggest challenges you face working with third-party marketers?
It is clear from the survey responses that most online community hosts are still negotiating the relationship with third-party marketers, their messages, and their methodologies.

The main challenges in working with third-party marketers included:

• Third-party marketers want to control content/context in which their ad will be shown.
• Difficulty matching ads with content
• Overhead associated with helping marketer understand community culture
• The lack of a pre-screened third-party ad network
• Marketers seem to have no affinity with community / company brand
• Advertiser push invasive or unusual advertising to get results
• Difficult to determine fair rate and cost basis

What general advice would you give a colleague that was considering incorporating marketing and advertising into their community?

Respondents shared valuable advice about incorporating marketing and advertising activities into communities, from their direct experiences.

Recommendations included:

• When introducing marketing messages into your community, be very cautious and attentive to your member reactions, and open to their feedback
• Understand your audiences needs and sensitivities to advertising messages
• Establishing a good relationship with the agency account manager is key
• Establish creative and messaging guidelines for marketing to ensure appropriateness
• Make sure ads are appropriate and add value to community
• Be clear about policies and ensure that policies are available to and understood by community
• Involve the audience. Surveying members to determine which brands / types of messages they would
• Ensuring the right mix of content to ads
• Test and refine based on marketing effectiveness and feedback

Again, to download the full report, please go here (short registration required).

Earlier this week, I published the "Identity, Reputation and Ranking" research study to members of our Online Community Research Network. The study was designed to discover best practices for content rating and ranking, and to establish a baseline of current practice for supporting member identity and reputation.

I inititated the study in early November, and sent approximately 250 survey invitations to online community professionals in our network of executives and practitioners.

Over the course of the research, we 54 completed surveys. Participants (who respond on the condition the results remain anonymous) included community managers, strategists and executives from large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, consulting organizations and platform providers.

We asked 21 questions that explored member identity in the community, member reputation, reputation systems, content ranking, and moderation. We also explored current attitudes about member profile portability and universal login / ID.

In particular, I thought the data we got back on member profile fields was interesting. The graph below shows profile fields broken out by % of communities that require the field, ask for the field an don't require it, or simply don't ask for the field.

The research results uncovered several other interesting findings, including:

• New members typically don’t fill out non-required profile fields (> 25%)
• Slightly less than 1/3 of the respondents (32%) have, or plan on making member’s profiles portable in the next 6 months;
• Slightly less than 1/3 of the respondents (32%) have, or plan on implementing a universal ID solution in the next 6 months;
• The majority of respondents have, or are developing a reputation system for their communities.

We plan on releasing the full report to the public in April of 2008. For the list of currently available research reports, please check out the Online Community Research Network home page.

We publicly released the Online Community ROI report last week. The research project was conducted as part of the Online Community Research Network agenda, and was initially released to OCRN members in May. The study had many interesting findings, including:

• Only 22% of respondents could clearly articulate ROI on community efforts
• The majority of respondents gave a high priority to establishing an ROI model in the near term
• 49% were reporting some dimensions of value back to management on a monthly basis
• "Value" of online community efforts are contextual to an organizations goals and objectives

Download the full report here, free of charge.

We conducted the Online Community ROI research study in May of 2007, as a function of the Online Community Research Network. The study explored how organizations determined ROI, what dimensions of value were being reported to management, and the attitudes in the organization around the concept of community value.

We had over 50 completed surveys, and participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, community platform providers and consultants. Most respondents were senior staff that managed most / all online community budgets for their organizations.

Organizational Attitudes Towards Online Community Investment

Overall, the survey results indicated a fairly high tolerance for investing in online community activities without clear “hard numbers” ROI. Other date in the survey results shows that dimensions of value other than fiduciary are being accepted as “return” on community investment and involvement. However, the majority of respondents did say they were expected to communicate clear return in the future. Creating a clear ROI model for most organizations is clearly a priority, even those not under immediate pressure to communicate value.

Attitude Towards Communication of Value

A small number of respondents reported that they had the ability to tie community initiatives back to their corporate goals, and to clearly communicate ROI. The majority of research participants felt their initiatives are adding value, but can’t provide a complete ROI model. A small percentage of respondents feel their initiatives are disconnected from corporate goals, and they currently don’t report on value. This speaks to the need for most organizations to create an ROI model, and one that includes more dimensions of value than direct financial value.

Online Community Budgets

One last data point from the survey. When we asked about online community budgets. 75% of those that answered indicated a spend of at least $50k, and there were a significant number of that indicated spends of over $100k and over $500k annually, not including headcount. Obviously one would need to understand an organization’s spend in other areas to determine the proportion of overall annual budget, but these budget numbers do indicate significant investment in community by the participating organizations.

I initiated the Marketing & Online Community research study in June of 2007, as a function of the Online Community Research Network. The study was conceived as an investigation into the current state of marketing to online communities, from the perspective of both the online community host, as well as from the perspective of a marketer.

We had over 60 completed surveys, and participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.

One of the most interesting findings from the study actually surfaced early in the process. We discovered that while community hosts and practitioners were willing to share their experiences, most marketers were not. After several in-person interviews, it became clear that most marketing and advertising agencies have not met with great success in their community marketing efforts, and are generally unwilling to talk about their experiences to date.The responses from the marketer’s perspective are proportionally less than those from the community host's, but the insights provided are still of high value.

From the community host's perspective, one of the most surprising takeaways was that community hosts were still largely relying on banner and text ads as their main marketing and advertising vehicles.

I've included 2 of the most relevant question summaries from the report below:

Q: What types of marketing and advertising activity do you support on your community sites?
Summary: Banner and text ads were the most common forms of marketing activity, followed by RSS, branded content and surveys. There was activity indicated on most categories of community marketing, which seems to indicate willingness on the part of online community hosts and practitioners to experiment with new forms of marketing to their communities. Virtual world storefronts and sponsored podcasts scored surprisingly low, given the media attention in the last 6-9 months.















Q: Is advertising targeting available on your site? If so, please select all options that apply.
Summary: Run of site and contextual targeting were available on the majority of respondent’s sites. More sophisticated technologies, like behavioral and demographic targeting were only available on a few of the respondents communities. Given that there is generally a large amount of demographic data available in a community members profile, it would seem that there is a large opportunity to engage in more sophisticated ad targeting on sites currently just offering run of site or contextual targeting.















The Marketing & Online Communities report is published by the Online Community Research Network, a collaborative research series for online community professionals. If you would like to learn more about the Marketing & Online Communities research report, or more about the Online Community Research Network, please visit the OC Research Network home page.

The Online Community Metrics 2007 research report has been posted on the Online Community Research Network. You can download the report from the OCRN home page.

Some of the most significant findings published in this study include:

• Metrics options: a wide-ranging list of new and different metrics which respondents found valuable apart from the norm of page visits and unique visitors.

• Desired metrics: a valuable wish list that has been complied by online community professionals for online community professionals.

• Tools for collecting metrics: a highlighted graph on data collected to see what the best services, tools and techniques are for collecting and analyzing online community data.

• Demonstrating ROI: Quantifying the value of community efforts for management.

• Advice: Top tips accumulated for community managers concerning best practice metrics.

Our research is predicated on the belief that the best source for information regarding online communities continues to be other online community professionals. A quote from the report:

“Numbers tell a story, but numbers only tell part of the story. Metrics are important – page views, new threads & posts, etc all tell you hard growth facts. But part of community is organic -- how the culture is developing, how many people are forming deeper relationships with each other -- these are important things for community growth that can’t be measured.”

Again, the full report can be downloaded from the Online Community Research Network home page: http://www.onlinecommunityresearch.com

This research study is conducted as part of the recently launched Online Community Research Network (OCRN).

The OCRN is a collaborative research effort of online community professionals to better understand the challenges of building and managing online communities. You can find more information on the OCRN home page, if you are interested.

Enjoy the report!