[Juan23 on Flickr: Hellooooo Nurse]
With all of the talk lately about the Ze Frank / Rocketboom numbers, I thought it would be helpful for us to jump in and talk about some of the stuff that we’ve been thinking about.
You see, we deal with this issue regularly. We work with more qualitative (ie. anecdotal) data than we do with quantitative (ie. raw data). When it comes to community measurements, you can’t always think in terms of volume (ie. numbers of signups or page views). Nor can you always think in terms of density (ie. numbers of downloads or, in the case of Devnets, mashups, etc.).
There are always oodles of factors that affect the size or the shape of a community. Some communities abhor size. Some need large volumes to operate. We’ve witnessed communities of 20 to 20 million that could all be deemed very healthy.
But other than to go on ‘gut feeling’, what do we have to measure the health of one community against another. Or…more importantly for us…the growing health of a community? We want to see that what kind of advice we are giving is working and learn from it - adjusting so that we can truly help our clients and our clients’ clients connect.
Jeneane makes a great point when she talks about likability. Robert’s point about engagement is very valid. Both of these factors, plus many others, start to inform us how we are doing when it comes to serving our communities. We figure a good mix of quantitative and qualitative data - weighted just right - will start to inform us. But we can’t forget ‘gut instincts’, either. I have studied stats since that horrifically boring university class, nearly 9 years ago. I remember looking at a textbook example of some trend and thinking, “But that doesn’t account for human emotions. We could change our minds in a second.” Sure enough, every day people baffle the economists and go in directions that could never be predicted. Look at MySpace. Bah, look at Cabbage Patch Kids so many years ago. Tickle Me Elmo? Try to explain the phenomena all you want with scientific theories, but I remember falling in love with Cabbage Patch Kids for absolutely irrational reasons, then falling in love with Tickle Me Elmo for entirely different irrational reasons.
And wild ’successes’ aren’t the only story, either. What about those phenomena that thrive on rarity and secretiveness… communities driven by their obscurity and closed doors? ‘Buzz’ and press would kill them. We advise almost all of our clients to open up, but there are a few we think will do better doing the exact opposite.
So, what works for one community, won’t work for another - not to mention the individual needs within that community. Everybody has a different motivation for being there. How can you tell if you are satisfying all of those needs? And how do you satisfy all of those needs without getting to the point that you lose your own identity? Or worse…lose everyone to a watered down message?
So, we started thinking about this in a music equalizer metaphor. Take a look at these default settings in iTunes for the various genres of music:
ELECTRONIC
POP
JAZZ
Every song within those categories has a different ideal point on that equalizer to sound just right as well. It isn’t one measurement or adjustment (inputs and outputs) that determines the perfect sound. Some speakers will handle the sound differently. Whether it is an MP3 or a CD or a Cassette Tape or a Record will also make a difference. Oh…and of course the space you are playing the music in. I used to have a stereo that you could pick a pre-set for the ‘room’ of a house you are in: dining room, bedroom, party room, kitchen, bathroom, etc.
And…no matter how ‘great’ you make it sound…the recipient’s enjoyment of the music itself also depends greatly on their ‘taste’. I heart old R&B, Funk and Old Skool and cannot understand for the life of me why Chris can’t get into it. He can’t understand why I can’t get into alternative rock.
So, seeing that music is a nearly perfect metaphor for the way we approach community - gives us some solid measurements while allowing for endless variations - we are in the process of developing adjustable equalizers on three distinct levels that interact (as discussed as well at BarCampBerlin):
- ENVIRONMENT - total inputs. You can’t adjust these. Things like: politics, trends, competitive environment, language, reputation, timing, etc. TimeCabbage Patch Kids today are just not as cool. Garbage Patch Kids, however…I like to use the example of one of the best marketing books ever published, Gonzo Marketing…launched days before 9/11. Think it got much airplay?
- PRODUCT - more inputs. Stuff like: features, user experience, design, platform, interoperability, language, sociality, documentation, complexity, etc. The product does not exist outside of its context, like the Environment and the Community.
- COMMUNITY - transparency, mood, communications, relationships, reputation (the part you can work on), trust, etc. The mix of the ‘gut’, the qualitative and the quantitative. This is the most complex system of measurement and the most delicate. We thought about calling this part ‘communications’ or ‘marketing’ or the like, because the overall goal is to measure the health of communities…but this is more the ‘little c’ community portion.
We’d love your feedback on the work we are doing and plan to start to publish more as we actually get moving on it (one of the issues has been time - between the new office, the client load and all of the events, we’ve been too swamped to work on this). When the office is set up, we plan to have evening get togethers (with wine) to discuss stuff like this.
6 Comments
I love this idea–I’ve always been a fan of the equalizer/mixer metaphor. Here’s a guy who made an interactive version of the sliders that you can label and adjust:
http://livingcode.blogspot.com/2005/12/sierra-sliders.html
Looking forward to see what comes next!
hey guys- anything that improves (or better still) creates real measurement for engagement beyond freakin banner ads is AOK in my book! nice.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. I can’t help thinking that measurement of community is at odds with the Pinko philosophy but until 2020 and the men in suits realise the power of community then anything we can do to help them rationalise people power the better!
Tara,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I frequent your feeds and enjoy the material you make available. The metaphor you used in this post gets us closer to “packaging the gut.”
When old guard meets new guard we have an interesting chasm to cross. There’s so much “tuning” to do.
Thanks again, and best wishes in the New Year!
Chris Ronan
Kids health should be a base direction of the program of development of social sphere WBR LeoP
Hello Tara, this is a fascinating post and actually, a few of the articles of yours I flicked through contain some great lines of thought.
This topic is particularly attractive to me as it is something I spend a bit of time thinking about also. How does one measure the health of a community? If Ben Okri is right, one can tell by the ‘health’ or ’sickness’ of its stories and cultural practices, whether a community (virtual or actual) is well or sick.
Of course when we speak of a community, we are essentially speaking of a social individual, something you recognize when you say, “what works for one community, won’t work for another”. Thus MySpace as a social individual is distinct from Facebook or Bebo. MySpacing feels different from Facebooking… but empirically, there are also radical differences in the affordances of each social individual - MySpace for instance is often perceived to offer space for greater creative expressions compared to Facebook. Thus there are things one does in one community that one may not in another. In the same way, there are things one does in one country that one may not in another (one might smoke a joint in Amsterdam and not in New York City for instance).
Measuring the health of any individual (whether at the level of a person or community) is not like measuring say temperature. It is more like measuring a prevailing mood or taking a snapshot of a dynamic stable state (a state of social ritual equilibrium if you like).
Torkild Thanem and Stephen Linstead (2006) note in their discussion of multiplicities,
“An object cannot be hot at the same time as it is cold – its capacity to withstand a multiplicity of temperatures can therefore only be demonstrated sequentially. This holds for the human sensation of temperature too – although parts of our body might be hot whilst others are cold, a singular part is not both hot and cold at the same time. Heat and cold are intensive properties – they don’t add to each other but average out across the system. But is human happiness equally capable of being viewed as an absence of sadness? We all have experiences which are tinged with, or even lie between both, moments when we do not know whether to laugh or cry. They are present together within us, not as external objects acting upon us with separate influences, and happy/sad cannot be collapsed like heat/cold into the simultaneity of the single metric of temperature, a terrain through which we move like mercury moving up and down the thermometer scale. They are therefore extensive – they can be and are split as different qualities. The virtual shifting and becoming of mood is relational and qualitative, irreducibly experienced and intuited rather than measured and calculated”.
The question of measuring a community’s health, or happiness or sadness is not a question of measuring degrees… we are dealing with an altogether different multiplicity that must be intuited.
What you do get at in your post with the image of equalizers is the knowledge that the intuition of a social individual involves a multiplicity of variables… we can call this the beginning of an engineering diagram of social individuals.
Just a whole bunch of lines of thought… I’m slowly working together into a blog post on qualitative and quantitative measurements and the mistakes made too often in psychological and social sciences in regards to other multiplicities at work.
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