Managers regularly use tools such as the Boston Matrix to keep track of the relevant health of their product portfolio and their place in the product lifecycle.
How many community managers do likewise with their communities though?
If you want to measure the health of your communities, you might consider measuring and recording some of the following information.
- Brief description, including the purpose, of your community
- Target audience
- Did we create it or was it member driven?
- How long has it been running?
- Which organisational goal/objective does it support?
- Key dependencies
- Current investment
- Current success
- Additional investment requested
- Justification for this investment
To help you get started there is a template provided below for you to use.
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Community 1 |
Community 2 |
Community 3 |
Community 4 |
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Description |
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Purpose |
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Target audience |
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Who created it? |
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Age of community |
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Which organisational goal does it support? |
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Who are the key dependencies? |
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How much has been invested in it? |
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What success have you had? |
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What extra investment is required? |
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How are you justifying this? |
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What's amazing is that apparently the average business has 178 social media accounts!
http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/study-companies…
Quite right Nick, as Michael says in the article
"What’s even more disturbing is that many of the employees who manage these accounts do not have an accurate inventory of each channel."
If you don't have an inventory of each channel, the chances are you don't have a purpose for each channel, and if you don't have that it makes it much harder to do anything useful with it.
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