Recruitment and retention of community members is of course critical to the success of online customer communities. It is certainly not a case of “build it and they will come”!

How do you get a handle on a “healthy” level of engagement?

The answer to this needs to be strongly qualified by the objectives that you have for the community (refer last Post!). If your community is delivering strong insight or innovation results with minimal community numbers but adequate sample sizes, then driving additional engagement is less of a concern. If word of mouth marketing is the objective, then identifying as many advocates as possible becomes a priority. 

Regardless of objectives, measurement and numbers play an important part – “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. So where does one start...?

Measuring engagement is still at a rudimentary stage and generally limited to quantitative measures (traffic!) rather than qualitative measures. Numbers involved in broader online communities are a good starting point and the ratios quoted by Forrester are useful. As a rule of thumb we use 90:9:1 - where 90% of those invited do not get involved, 9% observe only and 1% contribute.

Our experience to date says that branded communities should do better than this – particularly when the conversation vehicles include surveys that are pushed to members. We have seen participation rates anywhere from 10% to 30% in these environments.

We do believe that the relative percentages of customer involvement varies quite dramatically as brand categories vary. Our 30% was a sporting club client, where passions run high.

The guys at Copernicus report "High Customer Involvement" rates that vary between 13% and 55% of customers as categories go from low involvement (toilet paper) through high involvement (retirement planning). We find that involvement with the brand (category) relates directly to active participation rates in a branded community.

How do you go about gauging engagement or participation?