Last week we announced the 2nd topic in the #octribe discussion: Valuing Member Participation and Contribution in Online Communities.
From the “Call to Post” last week:
“Admittedly, this topic is a bit of a double edged sword: Assigning financial value to online community member participation and contribution.
On one hand, a community manager could can paint a compelling portrait of value for internal stakeholders by determining a financial value to member participation (assistant moderate, guiding discussions, welcoming new members, etc.) and assigning value to member contributions (support forum posts, tutorials, reviews, feedback and ideas).
On the other hand, if an organization were to make the valuations of member participation and contribution public, it would likely set off a firestorm of debate about member compensation, legal boundaries around “volunteer opportunities”, and ultimately, force the host organization to account for true cost and true value of the activities and content created in their online community.
It seems clear that it would be useful for organizations to have at least notional values for member contributions and participation. What is less clear is how (if at all) to talk about this value with the community, and how (if at all) social capital is exchanged for financial capital in online communities.”
Several folks participated in the discussion, and had perspectives on how, if and why to measure and quantify the value of member participation.
Here is what the #octribe community had to say:
“The value of participation in a community should be measured by its effect on brand perception, equity and aspirations. #oct”
“If cmty is displaying cpm Ads, financial value of member contributions would be each page view = Ad displayed = Revenue generated. #octribe”
Value and Community Behavior Metrics: “Behavior Stoppages?” – Connectible Dots
“His big question: “What is the arbitrage between social and financial capital?” I don’t have an answer, but I do have a further question. Even if all of the rewards are experiential, and nothing looks like compensation, could an organized community that knows about metrics and valuation of a business do a “behavior stoppage” of desired activities as protest against a company action? Valuing behavior like work could extend the work metaphor in directions beyond the company’s valuation. “Interesting” organized group dynamics are possible too.”
Create value metrics for both host and community - PHOOM!
“Some discussion of assigning value to members in a community tend toward how valuable a particular community member is to the host of the community (be they a brand, reseller, or even non-profit). This often raises concerns that community members are being taken advantage of. The AOL volunteer lawsuit gets thrown out as one of the third-rail types of stories — danger! do not touch! What is often lost is that AOL ran volunteer programs for a long time before the lawsuits with few issues. What changed? Part of the answer is that AOL was using free access as a perk for their volunteers. However, when AOL went from a rated service (access charged by the hour) to a flat-rate (unlimited access for a monthly fee), the value of that perk plummeted. It’s not the whole reason some volunteers stood up against AOL, but it certainly added to some of the resentment.”
…”but I challenge my fellow community managers and facilitator. What other kinds of positive feedback loops can we create that build value for different aspects of our communities such that even if the value were quantified as a number, people would still be willing to contribute?”
The value of volunteers – Confessions of a Community Junkie blog
“Here at Novell, volunteers answer forum questions, create and share technical documents, participate in beta testing, etc. etc. Everyone that reports a bug or makes a suggestion is a volunteer…it’s just all a matter of scale. The value of all volunteer contributions could be very, very, very roughly estimated by equating forum answers to technical support calls, technical doc contributions to documentation, etc. but then not every forum post would be a support call and every document submitted wouldn’t be written by the documentation department. What can you equate a bug report or beta participation to? Also, you should ask what is the value of a forum post or a blog entry when the interactions are not one-to-one but one-to-many or many-to-many where multiple parties benefit over an extended period of time?
The bottom line is that any attempt to put a dollar figure to volunteer contributions in a complex business environment would be spending a lot of time to come up with that rough estimate.
Like documentation, you know it’s critical, you know it has value, you know you would lose customers without it, but you can’t know the dollar figure in indirect revenue it brings to the company. You do it because you know it DOES have value as a cost of doing business.”
If you posted on the #octribe topic, and I missed your post, please let me know. Also, if this discussion spawns any reactions or further thinking, please let me know that as well. The intention is to keep the conversation going!
