Currently, a lot of noise is being made about measuring the ROI of online communities and social media initiatives - something that quite frankly, that we as communication professionals are far from getting to grips with.
Now, all of these question pertaining to measuring ROI are relevant and are worth the time and energy to investigate and improve on further – however, I do want to emphasize that we still need to remind ourselves that the ‘Return’ is 100% dependant on the ‘Investment’… it can’t be the other way around.
Simply put…
- Invest in the time to properly understand, plan and execute online community initiatives
- Invest in acquiring the best intellect to assist you in formulating your online community strategy
- Invest in putting the appropriate resources (financial, human, marketing) behind your community initiatives; then lastly…
- Invest your energy in putting the correct deliverables in place to measure the return on your investment.
Read more posts by LouisJvR
Related posts:
Measuring social media and in particular online communities is crucial to how they work and are perceived. It’s really important to emphasise how challenging it is and equally important to keep trying to define it and work it out. I work at a social media agency, FreshNetworks, where we build and manage online communities, and ROI is crucial to us to prove to our clients how we have enhanced their brand. We debate ROI all the time; if you are interested we have written about it in the following articles: ‘So how do you measure ROI of online communities?’ – http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/08/so-how-do-you-measure-roi-of-online-communities/ and ‘KPIs and metrics: more on online community measurement’ – http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2008/08/kpis-and-metrics-more-on-online-community-measurement/
@Rhian thank you for your comments.
You are absolutely correct. Measuring ROI is very, very crucial. My point in this particular article is that although the measurement side of communities are important – that this will still always be dependent on the resources that you invest in planning and executing your communit initiatives.
And thanks for the refered links – I’m actually a keen follower of http://www.freshnetworks.com and frequently read your blog posts. Very good writing.
L.