It can be quite challenging to apply performance measurements against social media and it’s something that I think marketers and others will struggle with for sometime. Personally, I think there will be a lot of different approaches to measurement depending on your company’s business objectives. Also, these parameters and points that you’ll measure will change over time.

David’s list has some great starting points. The best way to look at this is to decide what your business objectives are and begin testing and analyzing the metrics. I’d recommend going back to these over time and making sure that you’re adapting based on what you learn. Ideally, the measurement will inject insight into your strategies and tactics.

Meanwhile, check out David’s blog, it’s always a good read.

Take a look at these numbers:

• Visitors to the 10 Web sites doubled from 6 million in Nov. 2008 to 12 million in Oct. 2009.
• Page views are up 296 percent from 29 million to 113 million

From the Media Week article:

NBC Local Media attributes the growth of sites such as nbcchicago.com (WMAQ-TV) and nbcphiladelphia.com (WCAU-TV) to the inclusion of more social-media tools, allowing visitors to interact with one another and the content on the site. For example on average, visitors cast 10,000 votes to indicate their “mood rating,” as “thrilled,” “furious,” “intrigued” or “sad.”

Launched a year ago, the 10 Web sites moved away from the style and approach of the traditional TV station Web site, evolving into a local portal offering more local services, news and information, along with user-generated content. The sites are also available via an iPhone application introduced a month ago.

I’ve always thought that the Mood Ratings feature on the NBC websites is one of the coolest ways to get an audience engaged with an otherwise static piece of content. Using our Polling API, we were able to customize how audiences rate an article. It certainly beats the 1 to 5 stars rating system that seems to be conventional on most website doesn’t it?

I personally think all the hot air about the death of the mainstream media (MSM) is just that, hot air, and some gloating from the cynics. That said, the MSM HAS to evolve in some pretty big ways to make it through the tough times they’re facing and NBC Local Media is a terrific example of this. If you bring together content and some interesting ways to interact with it and other audience members, you’ll get people to engage on your website.

It takes vision, courage and an ability to execute. 296 percent. That’s a very real number. Congratulations, NBC Local Media!

NBC Local Media websites in your city: New York, Los Angeles, Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Philadelphia, San Diego, Washington DC, Connecticut and Miami.

Innovation and continued advancement of what Social Software offers our increasingly broad range of customers is at the very heart of everything we do. So, we’re very excited about this morning’s release and want to make sure that we shared it with everyone.

Here are some of the highlights of what went out this morning:

• Media Privacy. This gives your website members even more control of their experience and is an optional feature that you can enable in the Affiliate Center. If you enable this feature, when members upload media into your community they will be able to specify that it can only be seen by their friends in the community.
• Full Member Export. Your members are yours. The relationships that you have with your audience, fans, customers and employees are central to your social media strategy. This has been our guiding principle from day one and this feature is a big part of that. You can now export your member data to an Excel spreadsheet with a single click.
• SPAM Defenses. There are few things on the web that I hate more than Spammers (it was VERY nice to read about the ruling on Facebook’s case in California). We’ve released an ever growing series of measures that address this issue. Yes, we have something called ‘Global Nuke!’
• Preview of the new App Studio. We’ve released a Beta version of the new App Studio that includes the first ever integration of Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework for building video players.

There’s much more, so be sure to check out KickDeveloper for all the details.

Our solutions for the online video publishing are based on the following:

1. Video publishing that is integrated with social functionality and a social platform.

2. Complete customization of the video experience with flexibility and extensibility of features and functionality.

3. Advanced management features for both editorial/premium and user generated content.

Today, the KickApps App Studio is already the industry’s most advanced way of creating customizable online video players. Customizing the look and feel of a player using the App Studio takes just a few clicks of the mouse. More importantly, we’ve integrated several plug-in applications that enable you to add features like advertising (Google Video AdSense, 24/7, ScanScout to name a few) and analytics (Omniture) with a few clicks. No more costly coding and no more lengthly development cycles.

The plug-in piece is where things will start to get really interesting in the next few months. As I wrote about last week, we’re the first platform to bring Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) to life. The goals of OSMF are to create an open standard and eco-system that will further the development of Flash video players.

What does this mean to KickApps customers?

While we’ve already been creating our own plug-in architecture for creating applications in the App Studio (everything from advertising to Meebo Chat), our support of OSMF will accelerate this for video players. Through OSMF we’ll be able to offer an virtually unlimited set of features to video publishers. For developers, we offer a distribution channel for reaching the largest video publishers around the world.

We’re going to be issuing an open invitation to developers to submit their OSMF plug-in to be integrated into the App Studio soon, in the meantime, if you’re interested in being part of the program, drop us an email at OSMF@kickapps.com. Here’s more information on KickDeveloper.

For more information about this, have a look at Derek Wishusen’s presentation at Adobe MAX last week:

The KickApps App Studio is a graphical user interface which allows anyone with a web browser to quickly and easily assemble highly customized, interactive, trackable and monetizable video players based on the Open Source Media Framework and the ecosystem of plug-ins that have been built on the framework. No technical experience is required to drag and drop the various video player components and publish an unlimited number of video players based on the OSMF. We have a short screencast of how it will work in the App Studio here.

Apply to join the program by emailing your contact information and a brief description of your OSMF plug-in to: OSMF@kickapps.com.

To use the App Studio, simply sign up for a KickApps account by clicking on the big red button at the top of this page.

Will you be at Adobe MAX 2009?

The KickApps team will be presenting at the FITC Unconference on Wednesday, October 7, 4PM.

This session is for developers of OSMF plug-ins, and anyone interested in leveraging the KickApps App Studio to distribute your online video technology to the thousands of publishers currently using the KickApps platform. In this session you will get an overview of the KickApps App Studio, and learn how to build your OSMF plug-ins for integration with it. We will review the OSMF architecture and drill down into specifics about plug-in implementation.

Come by booth #335 at Adobe MAX for more information.

Using KickApps you’re able to build an infinite number of Flash video players like the one below that are completely custom and programmable to feature whatever content you want. Building a player like this can literally take minutes and can be built by people with no technical expertise using the drag-and-drop App Studio.

Someone told me recently that it cost them over $200k to develop a single custom Flash player for their website. I think the sound of my jaw hitting the ground was heard all the way in Alaska. Sorry, but that’s just silly.

Let us know how we can help you avoid that.

Ovation TV is a remarkable success story. In a very short period of time, they’ve cultivated an extremely active and vibrant online community that has resulted in some very impressive metrics. For more on the story, check out the presentation that Allison Kingsley, director of digital media, and Megan Smith, community manager, made at our seminar in Los Angeles on the 16th (we’ll have video of the presentation soon).

Here’s a short video of the acceptance speech (apologies that it’s a bit dark) by Chad Gutstein of Ovation TV and our very own Jeff Zaretsky:

We’re extremely proud to work with the team from Ovation and as Jeff says in the video, we’re only as good as our clients make us. In this case, I think you’ll agree that they’ve made us great! Congratulations to everyone at Ovation TV especially their digital media team: Allison, Megan and Jennifer Colley, Ovation TV’s digital media team’s Creative Manager who is really stretching the way the KickApps Apps Studio is used–check out this very creative ‘Community Tree‘ widget. Jennifer layered an image of a tree over an RSS feed of art that has been uploaded by the community. We’ve come to realize that the possibilities of the App Studio are endless in the hands of creative people like Jennifer. Very inspiring.

Update: Here’s the press release.

Also, I just had a conversation with Ovation TV’s Community Manager, Megan Smith, about the award and her job and wanted to share a few really interesting points that she raised.

Reflecting on what it takes to be successful: “Managing a community is really gratifying experience but it takes a lot of regular care and attention. It can be a slow burning process but it’ll forever change they way you view your customers and audience. It shapes how you plan for and build the future of your company.”

On goals: “It’s not all about numbers. The goal of any community should be to motivate your members to act well on your behalf without your guidance or prompting. You want to turn them into evangelists.”

“On Wednesday, September 9th, we’re asking everyone in the state to grab their camera! We’re looking for great shots of one day in your life: taking the baby to the park, the kids getting ready for school, a beautiful sunrise, your friends and neighbors hard at work, etc.

The only rule is that you take the picture(s) on 9/9/09 between midnight and 11:59pm.”

Check out the photos here and the video from the news broadcast with some great stories below.

WMUR is part of Hearst-Argyle Television. KickApps powers the ‘u local’ section of the website, a place where local residents can share photos, video and stories about their ‘local’ experience. The “A Day in the Life” campaign is a great example of the way local TV stations are combining their on-air/traditional and their web programming.

Q. How do I get people to participate?
Q. It looks and works great, but why aren’t people active in it?
Q. What do I do with trolls?

Creating and cultivating an online community of passionate fans and customers can deliver tremendous benefits for  any brand–greater affinity and loyalty, direct marketing channel to your most passionate customers and deep insight into your customers’ likes and dislikes, to name a few. However, growing an online community is no easy task and it takes time, and more often than not, dedicated resources to make it successful.

Here are some useful resources and tips as you think about your community strategy:

1. “9 Steps to creating a successful online community,” a white paper by KickApps. You can request a copy by sending an email to info@kickapps.com.

2. Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester, compiled a list on his blog about “How to Kick Start a Community.” Here’s his list of things to consider:

a. Create compelling content on a recurring basis. (Content is a key to engagement, together with activities and having a way for people to interact with each other. Whether that’s content you create or your members, make it relevant, interesting and compelling.)
b. Reward users who fill out their profile. (This is about human nature. People are motivated by a handful of different things and we all like a pat on the back or to get something out of a relationship–material or otherwise.)
c. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first. (Leaders will emerge, by bringing some into your community you’ll get people to follow.)
d. Encourage interaction through conversations. (If conversations don’t start on their own, it’s on you to get it started.)
e. Reward top contributors. (Again, rewarding people for their participation is a great way to tap into that very human need for reward. People will look to this and you’ll tap into another very human need–aspiration.)
f. Centralize your community around your real world events. (This is a great way of extending that experience between the offline and online world. The Phoenix Suns and U2–currently on tour–are great examples of taking advantage of this opportunity.)
g. Virtual events integrate community. (This is the activity piece of the Engagement equation I outlined earlier. Ovation TV held their 3rd Happy Hour online chat last night and got a great showing with members talking about art, photography and music.)
h. Integrate with your website and other customer touchpoints. (Ask yourself how you extend this experience through places like Facebook or Twitter. How do you extend those conversations?)
i. Encourage employees to get active. (Your employees can be your most important community members and advocates to kick start the participation. Let them be open and authentic. If that frightens you, give them guidelines to follow–here’s a great example from the CEO of Zappos about how their employees should use Twitter, note that he doesn’t talk about rules, rather he puts it into the context of their brand values, thus great authenticity from employees.)

As with most blog posts worth reading there’s as much value in the comments. My contribution was around the role of the community manager or as I prefer to call it, the Community Leader. As the host of the ‘party’ the Leader’s role in getting things started is very important. He or she needs to make people feel welcome, introduce new members to each other, lead conversations, encourage people, be a guide.

3. The Community Roundtable is another great resource. It’s an organization created by Rachel Happe and Jim Storer for community managers and social media practitioners. Roundtable members have access to a ton of great information and resources about best practices and new ideas. I think what’s most helpful about this is that everyone learns and teaches in this group. You might work for a B2B technology company like SAP but also find really interesting tips from someone at TripAdvisor, for example.

Also, the Community Maturity Model that they’ve developed is very useful when thinking about your community strategy (http://community-roundtable.com/2009/06/the-community-maturity-model/).

4. Rachel Happe’s blog, www.thesocialorganization.com, has too many excellent posts to talk about here. I really recommend that you take some time to read some of her thoughts (and of course the conversations in the comments that people leave). Here’s a good one to start with: Growing a Community is Like Making Risotto (http://www.thesocialorganization.com/2009/08/growing-a-community-is-like-making-risotto.html).

Also, check out Rachel’s webinar (hosted by KickApps) on 8 Competencies for Socializing Your Organization.

5. Bill Johnston, chief community officer at Forum One Networks, runs the Online Community Unconference and blogs here. Unconferences are a great place to spend a day with peers to discuss any thing you want about online communities. Literally. Attendees to the event develop the agenda in the morning and volunteer to lead or participate in sessions that interest them the most. Highly recommended.

6. eModeration, a KickApps partner, is the most well known provider of community management services. They work with some of the largest brands in the world and help them manage their online community efforts. If you need to outsource your community management, they’re a good place to start.

I hope this information is helpful. Feel free to share any other tips in the comments section.