As a team, we’re structured rather uniquely. In the past few posts, we’ve covered:

• The Radian6 community team’s goals and purpose
• Our community team roles and players
• A bit about our listening setup and strategy

Today, in the final post in the series, we’ll discuss something we’re often asked about: what we measure to determine our success.

First of all, it’s important to recognize a few things about measurement and reporting.

1. It’s always a bit of a moving target. We’re constantly tweaking and refining our reports to get a little different information, or something that helps us better understand the impact of our efforts.

2. Measurement itself is not the goal. The measurement is the diagnostic tool to tell us how we’re doing.

3. The most important thing you can do as a result of measuring is let it inform your strategy and execution. Do you need to keep doing what you’re doing? Change something? Stop altogether? If you don’t act on the data you collect, it’s a waste of time, really.

Okay. So now that that’s out of the way, let’s run down some of the key metrics we track as a team.

Weekly Post Volume

As an overall guide, the post volume shows us the overall chatter about our company and brand. We watch for significant spikes or dips, and investigate those to see what might have caused either, and whether they’re emerging issues, or something we were aware might happen (like a product announcement). We also watch for the variance in this number from week to week and month to month.

Overall Sentiment

As we’ve talked about before, sentiment metrics work best when they’re viewed in aggregate, as a trend line. So we look at larger sentiment trends by week and month, all the way up to a six month view. We look at the correlative events around positive or negative sentiment spikes to try and understand what might have caused them, and whether it was something we initiated, or an external event.

Engagement Statistics

Within the realm of our active online outreach, we look at a few things. We keep track of what percentage of the overall post volume we actually engage with and/or respond to, to see if it’s consistent from week to week and month to month. Significant changes are reason for further investigation.

We also look at what media types are carrying which proportion of conversation about us and the topics we’re tracking, to make sure we’re targeting our outreach activity and content stuff in the right places.

Of the discussion, we also look at the proportion of chatter that is generated by our own team vs. external sources as well as our partners around the globe. And we break down the external dialogue into categories – like product reviews, job postings, or content sharing – so we know how our community tends to talk about us, and it what context.

When it comes to content sharing, we also break it down a level further to see what content is being shared and discussed, whether it be our blog posts, ebooks, newsletters or otherwise. This is one we can’t wait to dig into more.

Support Requests

Again within the overall dialogue, we look at the profile of support requests within a given time frame. We can learn a bit about what types of support issues are cropping up, whether we’re dealing with isolated questions or recurring ones, and help inform our support team and work with them to always make our support even better.

Sales Leads

Lead generation is an important consideration around our online activity, so we track this carefully. Using both our dashboard and our integrated SalesForce stuff, we keep an eye on how many leads we’re tracking and capturing through social networks, how many of them make it into our sales database and pipeline, and eventually, how many of them move and convert to customers.

Industry Discussion

An important focus for our community team is to participate and engage in discussion over and above our brand, and into the broader markets and industries we serve. To help us understand where the hotbeds of discussions are, the topic trends, and where they’re happening, we drill down into those metrics so we can get a sense of how people talk about things like social media monitoring as a whole. That kind of dialogue absolutely informs everything from product development to content strategy.

The Competition

While it’s important not to obsess too much about what the other guys are doing, we do watch the trends around our competitive mentions. We keep track of our Share of Conversation, the overall buzz around the broader competitive landscape, and some of the topics and discussions that are driving their awareness. We look for predictable spikes in competitive mentions – like acquisition announcements – as well as how much of competitive buzz is being created by the community versus the competitors themselves (and how our ratios look against that).

What Are You Tracking?

This is a high level overview of some of the stuff on our dashboard, and we’re continually looking for metrics to add or refine that can give us more actionable insight around our brand and industry. And we’re always seeking to answer the question “okay, so what does this TELL us?” when we look at the data. Without that, we’re just looking at pretty charts and graphs.

We’d love to hear from you. What are you tracking, measuring, or struggling with? What do you think or notice is missing in here (like, say, Twitter followers)?

Let’s chat about how measurement can work in your favor.

image credit: Nick Sayers