The network and the online community

It can be fun trying to keep a track of thinking around online communities and effective ways of using the web, and then trying to work out how that relates to the voluntary sector. For instance:

On Gerry McGovern’s blog, which emphasises focusing on the customer not the organisation, Thinking Web, not website “If your product or service is being discussed in the blogosphere, you must be there, listening and contributing. Is it more important to publish your content on your website or on the websites most of your customers frequent? If your organization has particular words for describing a service, and those are not the words your customers search with, you must change your words.

“On the Web, we need to think beyond the organization. What is success? Is it that having a website? Or is it getting people to act in a certain way? It is the results of what you organize that matters, not the organization you created or where you created it.”

So does that mean that trying to create your own online communities, and then measuring activity etc, isn’t important? My short answer, as often, would be “it depends” (long answer on application and a small fee). For another aspect, try Ed Mitchell’s blog entry, Community ROI Report, where he says “Many of us are wrestling with emergent community metrics and their meaning in this time of increasingly distributed community activity.”

How do you get statistics simple enough to collect and report reliably across sites which aren’t yours? But then Facebook’s new Pages facility has a built-in ‘Insight’ section, giving some feedback on views and visitors.