The Online Community Research Network has released their latest research project: “The Online Community Marketing, Growth and Engagement Report”. Join up with the OCRN to get the full report (email me if you want the intro), or check out the d skinny here:
The research study was initiated in May of 2008. The study was created in order to investigate the relationship between marketing, community growth and member engagement. Our goal was to gain insight into how people are measuring engagement in their online communities and to understand how many organizations were using an elite / influencer program, and how those programs were structured.
Participants included large software companies, large community destination sites, niche community sites, platform providers and interactive marketing and advertising firms.
There is a tremendous amount of useful write-in data from our research. We have organized the report with an eye towards summaries. We have also included all of the write-in data for your review.
Trends reported by participants include:
- Work in either Online Community / Social Media organizations (17%) or Software Companies (17%) and teams reside in Marketing (38%).
- Most (27%) of the participants said that 11-20% of their community members login each month. The overall average member login rate is 34% and the Median is 25%.
- Most (30%) of the respondents said that member response rate of email is 21-30%.
- 27 participants gave detailed feedback about how they successfully attracted new members to their communities using Newsletter and Emails, Events, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, and other techniques
- Definition of Community Member Engagement.
- Most effective ways to foster or improve member engagement.
- Additional programs, methods and opportunities used to link online and offline activities of the community members.
- Description of methodology for identifying and engaging influencers or elites in communities.
