Over the weekend I visited a handful of Corporate sponsored "community" websites - okay, so not all are community websites, but brand affinity sites that have elements of community building and peer interaction - and almost all have been supported with big advertising campaigns. The basic idea was to assess how successful these sites were at building the community.

Many of these sites have hundreds of thousands of reistered users who have created thousands of groups, blogs etc. The problem, however, is when the groups are 1 to 2 members strong, when blog after blog is a couple of enteries deep and when post after post goes uncommented.

There are standard and good metrics for website performance, nothing wrong with them. But they don't measure how deep your relationship with your member is, or how strong your community is. The metrics for such a situation would involve:

1. Actives: Number of active members with a minimum threshold of tenure (how many active members who have been around for over 2 months)
2. Churn rate. The number of members who have stopped visiting the site altogether (measured by last login)
3. Lurk rate: The number of members who visit but do not contribute to the community (measure this as a ratio of lurkers to the total active base)
4. Thread builder ratio: The ratio of replies to posts in a forum to the new threads created. If your members are just creating new posts and not replying to existing ones, you aren't building stickiness.
5. Friend Counter: The average number of "friends" each member has on your site
6. Message metric: The number of personal messages being sent by your users to each other
7. Downloads: The number of views/ listens/ downloads your site generates
8. User upgrades: The number of members that get upgraded from one ranking to the next
9. Answer rate: The time taken before a query posted on your bulletin board gets responded to by the community
10. Bad apples: The number of members locked by the moderators
11. Bad apples (2): The number of threads locked by the mods
12. Time per user: Average time spent on the site per login by users
13. Posts per login: Posts made by users per login

These are just a few thoughts to be further developed into concrete metrics for marketers wishing to build communities online.