How do we understand community and collaboration value?

In trying to assess the impact of social and collaborative engagement it's easy to get lost in the minutae of analytics without stepping back and thinking about the context for value assessment.

Having that value context is important to be able to tune strategies to support community effectiveness and relevance.  A consistent framework is also vital to creating an understanding of collaboration impact among stakeholders (executive management, for instance).

There's an ecosystem of various tools that measure activity and performance along a spectrum of online experience - web traffic analytics, social media assessment, email marketing metrics --  but it's difficult to get a holistic sense of the value and outcomes of collaborative engagement.

Looking at the value of social media-one part of the whole

Last year the Altimeter Group published Social Marketing Analytics: A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media.   Written by Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter and John Lovett of Web Analytics Demystified, the report provides concrete, useful models for evaluating performance of social media against business objectives.

The model focuses on four key business objectives - fostering dialogue, promoting advocacy, facilitating support and spurring innovation.  Within each objective one can then evaluate specific key performance indicators.  

On fostering dialogue, for instance, one would look at share of voice, audience engagement and conversation reach.   The Altimeter model is adaptable and flexible - I've used it to assess performance of engagement for an online community for education leaders and innovators.  

 

Value creation and assessment - a holistic framework

Yet there's more to assessing community and collaboration value, and a new paper by noted social theorist and community of practice expert, Etienne Wenger offers new clarity in considering value within networks and communities.

Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework was co-written with Beverly Trayner and Maarten de Laat. 

This framework takes as its focus the value creation garnered through the "the learning enabled by community involvement and networking."   While Wenger et al. draws useful categorical distinctions between a community and network, each are viewed along a continuum of social structures in which learning takes place.

The framework outlines five cycles of value creation and articulates various forms of value:  

• immediate value  - from activities and interaction;
• potential value  - knowledge capital arising from personal assets (human capital), relationships and connections(social capital), resources (tangible capital), collective intangible assets (reputational capital), and transformed ability to learn (learning capital);
• applied value - changes in practice;
• realized value - performance improvement;
• reframing value - redefining success.

Wenger, Trayner and Maarten not only provide a foundational conceptual framework, the paper includes a set of useful tools for assessing each cycle of value creation.