Recap notes from CMX 2023 Summit session. Grammatical errors and typos are my own 🙂

Abstract

In the Community world we’ve seen massive strides; from the rise of the Community Intelligence Platform (CIPs) to Community Operations as a Super-Department. One of the biggest drivers of this trend for more authority and attention has been one glaring pain-point: getting through the “”red tape.“” Measurement marketers, community builders, and data analysts have all suffered this same problem, but still struggle to unify the metrics story (not to mention the “”attribution”” problem). On one end Community tools have ignored the Marketing suite in favor of their own tools, because marketing’s processes are “”insufficient”” for measuring community. On the other end, Community metrics are too disparite, difficult to work with, and they needlessly complicate data flows for any brand’s tech stack. Now that Community is here to stay, we’ve gained enough sway to affect organizational change, and measurement has revolutionized its tools, so we can absolutely solve this issue. For this talk, I’m going to explore a new organizational infrastructure in the wake of measurement and community operations becoming departments. We’ll discuss the specialization of Community roles along that structure, and I’ll introduce an easier way to cement the value of community among your peers. – Samantha “Venia” Logan, Community Architect & Founder | Social Sciences, SociallyConstructed.Online

Notes

• What customers ask for is different than their behavior
• Industry KPIs were made from marketing KPIs – it’s not working
  • Need to be on the same page as the organizational processes and metric goals
• Community is often in many different groups – we are spread out, but are siloed into one
• ROI across the business
  • Despite hitting all of the business areas, we’re run into problems:
    • Issues of stakeholder discussion
    • isssues of data abstraction
    • Issues of department structure
    • Issues of community metrics

Stakeholder Discussion

• Need a better way to communicate
• Wicked problems mindset – how to talk about different problems, but it’s an endless cycle. Usually doing all of the below in a single meeting. Rather better to focus one meeting on each of the following.
  • Need – it matters, because..
  • Plan – here’s what we need to do
  • Practicality – here’s what we will do

Data Abstraction

• Meaning: When things happen, you count them. Based upon the numbers, we accomplished…
• Rather it’s about perspective shifting
  • Need to report metrics to the right audience

The Attribution Problem

• It’s experienced in every department. But each department is responsible for reporting its own metrics, but all organizations are fighting for the same metrics.
• Cannot solve it. Make the team self-report.

Better way

• Focus on building processes along the data that is actually happening. The data has already created a story for us – massaging.
• Need a facilitator to create the engagement, Architect to build it, data, reporting, and analytics its own reporting
• Align business to the data so data to be aligned across teams

How do to it? Start small – start with one team.

1. Modified target planner
2. WIFM Dashboards
3. Community Intelligence Platform

Start with marketing – why?

• They already have the tools to understand the data. Translate their data so that community infrastructure (its value, collecting sentiment data) will speak their language on how our tools can integrate with theirs.

Socially Constructed Metrics System

1. Collect
2. Standardize
3. Analyze
4. Compile
5. Report and Predict
6. Repeat

Look at WIFM training

Intelligence Platforms

• Orbit
• Chaoss
• Talkbase
• Threado
• Common Room

Next Steps

• Fix marketing <> Community Data streams by aligning processes and tech with data
• Use meetings to do work
• Systemize your data flow

Look up WIIFM Training