Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

I've looked through the reports and I can't seem to find this stuff.  Here goes: We're looking to put together a newsletter of sorts to replace our monthly internal 'status updates' (which are pretty much newsletters) to the Director-level and above crowd.  One thing I'm always asked is 'what are the top topic areas?'.  Sure I can pull numbers on the categories and boards which havethe most amount of activity, but this just doesn't get the job done.  Folks want to know what is being talked about.  I'd like to be able to pull a quick report on what thread(s) received the most views or the most replies.

Is this possible or is this a candidate for the Ideas section?

P.S. I'd also like to see a break down of the most active users.  I can quasi do this using the User Reports, but its a bit clumsy.  I'd like to quickly pull the most active user (by post count, time online, solutions, things like that) and put that in my news letter as well.  I can see this newsletter idea translating out to the community as well.  I'm sure they'd like to know who's contributing the most to the community.

[#2]

No one?  Really?

[#3]

Potential,

First, I have to say I absolutely love your signature reference!  Priceless.

Second - I think you are absolutely on the right track here.  I share some of the same interests.

I structured our community in a way that board activity, when tracked and made into Power Point charts does show some interesting things about what areas of the product line draw the most discussion.   And if this were shown quarterly, there are some interesting spikes here and there which could be tied to specific discussions.   On a weekly basis, this doesn't do a whole lot and I'm now only doing it monthly so I can see long term trends.

A couple things that have been more interesting to me is to develop a threshold.  What get's your attention?   For example, our community discussion is fairly broad and flat - the average discussion is perhaps 4.5 - 5 posts long.   So, when a topic breaks into the low to mid double digits it is on my radar.   Triple digit post count conversations definitely make the charts, and one can then use that as a numerator against the denominator of the board it came from.   For example  26% of all the conversation about Widget X is about strange noises coming from the flux capacitor.   I arrive at this by dividing the post count on that thread by the total post count for the board and multiplying by 100.

But even that is pretty basic and while it conveys a sense of where things are, it doesn't necessarily tell the stakeholders where things are heading.   Looking ahead, it would be a great report to trend the view count, post count, and number of unique members involved in the thread.   Looking at these variables, especially the number of members involved and seeing if the views are a significant multiple may indicate the thread will become more important than it is today.  Developing some fact patterns around this might allow a community manager to identify threads earlier based on their trajectory and factors derived from prior discussions and provide additional guidance to internal stakeholders as to how these are likely to develop.

I'm glad others are working on this - I hope to hear more ideas for how various community managers are reporting activity in their communities.

Best regards,

Mark

[#4]

These are all great suggestions guys! I strongly recommend that we create an idea like 'Hot Topics" around this if one doesnt exist already. 

[#5]

Well, as long as it does not end up like "Top Boards", I think it is a good idea.

The thing is, a thread with a lot of replies does not always mean that it is a good thread.  So, programatically, that is not the solution.

My first thought is to turn to Most Kudoed posts for that week, but what if the community is not using Kudos?  Or worse yet, what if the most Kudoed thread for that week is the same thead that was the Most Kudoed last week?

I hate to say it, but the software is not always the solution in these situations (and this is coming from somebody who works for Lithium!).  A truly good Community Management team knows what the best threads are that week and what should be bubbled up to Upper Management.  They know their products and services and they know their customers.  The conversations happening are read, digested, and maybe even responded to by the Community Management team.  It should not be that hard to recognize the most pertinent ones if you're an engnaged Community Mangement team.

For big communties with lots of action, I like how Playstation does it.  If you go visit their communtiy, in the upper righthand corner there is a widget that has "Community Highlights" for the week.  They know to accentuate the positive rather than the negative in this section, but they also know that this content should be seen by Sony too.  I'm sure that in the extended reports that they send to Management every week they probably include some of the negative stuff that happens in the community too, but this info is culled and harvested by a Community Management team that is going beyond just the numbers.

What I'm trying to say is that the strongest Community Management teams are providing both qualitative and quantative data in their weekly reports.  A "Hot Threads" feature may be a good idea, but until you get into advanced sentiment analysis there is room for a huge margin of error.

[#6]

This may not help a ton right now, but the way I do it is that my Lithium mod partner guy culls some posts that he digs over the week, and then sends them to me and I parse them to see if I like them.

And the main thing I wanted to say is that I've started sending those hot topics to the social media guy in my company, who tweets them.  And he reports that those tweets onto forum threads get the highest level of clicks and such than any other tweet he does.  So maybe this would be helpful a little later on.