Secondary metrics: click-outs; subscriptions

While the advertising side of your collaborative site is run like a media business, from a collaboration standpoint you care about users that are creating content, whether through uploads, writing, ranking, or editing. You also care whether this content is valuable—are others reading it?

A second factor is how much users are engaging with the site. Do they track comments on items they’ve created? Are they building social networks within the site and rating one another?

On many collaborative sites, a small population of users will generate the majority of content. This can actually be a liability for site operators: a big attraction for collaborative sites is that they harness the long tail of public opinion and provide more targeted content than the mainstream media. Sometimes, the focus on the long tail has casualties. On September 24, 2008, Digg announced that as part of its new financing it would be banning its biggest users, saying it could “not have the same 1 percent of users generating 32 percent of visits” to the company’s site (http://socializingdigg.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/diggs-new-biz-model-ban-top-users-and-hit-300m/).

Also, because much of the growth of collaborative sites comes from invites, you should treat invitations as a form of conversion. Facebook, for example, lets users share their content with friends who don’t have Facebook accounts. Those invited friends can see the shared content immediately, but must sign up when they try to browse elsewhere on the site.

Secondary metrics: referring URLs; inbound links from social tools; visitor motivation

As the operator of a collaboration site, you care less about where visitors are coming from than the operator of a transactional site might. But knowing about the social groups and referring sites helps you to tailor content to their interests. Similarly, visitor surveys can reveal why people are coming to the site and what other collaborative sites they frequent.

Primary metrics: content popularity; usability; community ranking and rewards

Secondary metrics: site effectiveness; findability and search effectiveness; trouble ticketing and escalation; user productivity

This is the most important set of metrics for a collaborative site. With so much riding on your visitors, your site has to be usable and it must be easy for visitors to find and rate popular content. You need to reward active contributors and make them feel a part of the community, showcasing their work. Also, find out what causes visitors to invite their friends, and make it easy for them to do so and for their friends to get immediate gratification from the invitation.

Your site won’t succeed if there are a large number of complaints and problems that make it hard for users to create. You also want the collaboration site to become a reference for users. After all, you’ll eventually make your money by turning the content your users provide into media to which you can attach advertising, so the site must be searchable and properly indexed.

If you’re using a wiki model, you need to track incipient links—essentially, links to pages that haven’t yet been created. If a page has too few incipient links on it, it’s an orphan. If it has too many, related material hasn’t yet been created. You should identify incipient links that are frequently clicked by visitors and flag them so that their destination pages are the next to be created.

Primary metric: reach

Secondary metrics: loyalty; enrollment

You need contributors to keep coming back. Informing them that others are interacting with their content—essentially giving your contributors their own analytics—is one way to accomplish this, as are updates and friend feeds. For all of these to work, you need permission to contact your visitors via email or RSS feeds, and you need them to follow the links you send them. As a result, you need to track reach, loyalty, and enrollment and encourage users to engage with the community to maximize collaboration.

Secondary metrics: availability and performance; capacity and flash traffic; seasonal usage patterns

Collaboration sites may experience sudden growth, particularly when viral marketing kicks in. Slideshow producer Animoto, for example, went from 25,000 to 250,000 users in three days.^[4] While availability and performance should always be monitored, your primary concern is that they do not interfere with collaboration and that you can quickly detect growth in traffic so your systems engineers know to add capacity.

Secondary metrics: site popularity and ranking; how people are finding my competitors; relative site performance

Competition isn’t as important with collaboration sites as attention is. Because the long-term goal is to make money on media contributed by others, however, you do need to track your site ranking to be sure that the content your users are creating is relevant to advertisers and is gaining the attention of search engines. How are Internet users finding out about topics you cover? Can you better mark your pages so they get the attention of search engines and you rise above competitors in organic search?

Primary metric: trolling and spamming

Secondary metrics: copyright and legal liability

The biggest risks for a collaboration site are bad content and the addition of illegal, inappropriate, or copyrighted material to the site. Trolls will deter visitors from returning, and spammy content will reduce the value of the site in the eyes of both users and search engines.

You also need to watch how quickly content is rejected, which can be a sign of abusive behavior or an attempt by spammers to downvote other users’ content in order to bring theirs to the forefront.

Depending on the type of collaboration site you’re running, you may need to monitor for illegal uploads. If users post content that could expose your site to litigation, you must be able to demonstrate effective tools for flagging the content, investigating it, and removing it quickly. Such actions need to be backed by terms of use and community management policies.

Primary metric: site reputation

Secondary metric: social network activity

Your site’s reputation in the eyes of both search engines and users is key. In the early stages of a collaborative application, you need to watch social networks to track buzz and manage complaints by addressing user concerns. Because your site is so dependent on the contributions of others, its ranking and the attention it receives from microblogs and news aggregators can make or break you.

If you’re focused on a specific segment of the Internet, you need to be sure you’re reaching that community directly. Imagine you have a website where people contribute plans for paper airplanes: are aeronautical engineers discussing you? How about paper companies? Science teachers? Where can you go to find them?

Primary metric: API access and usage

Secondary metric: mashups, stolen content, and illegal syndication

Your content, and that which your users create, is valuable. If it winds up on others’ sites without you being able to insert advertising, you’ll never make money from the community you’re nurturing. At the very least, content should be attributed to you so you’ll rise in search engine rankings and gain visibility. So you need to watch APIs and automated retrieval of content, particularly the embedding of rich media for acceptable use.

Many multimedia collaboration sites embed their advertising directly into the media as preroll messages, interstitial advertising, or overlaid logos that link users back to the site itself. This is one of the main attractions of Flash- or Silverlight-based encoding of video and audio. If you’re using this approach, you don’t mind that others embed your content in their sites as long as you tie your rich media content back to your analytics systems so you can see when it’s played elsewhere.