I totally agree.  I believe "influentials" will be very important going forward.  Unfortunately, the tools to capture this aren't there quite yet.

You wrote: 

I also suspect the resulting impact of ‘influentials’ will prompt a demand for some kind of value metric. That value metric will help web marketers measure beyond volume (perhaps even beyond engagement to evaluate quality.

Could you write a little bit more about what you mean by "quality."   This is something that seems to me is very difficult to do. 

Todd, you bring up some really interesting points.  My comments inline beneath your q’s:

I am curious to know how you feel Web 2.0 features will impact web analytics. Will they prompt a shift in how people measure effectiveness online?

BB: This is a big question, but the short answer is, ‘yes’, the new tools are changing the way people behave online.  As a natural result of this, those of us behind the scenes in web communities are trying to figure out how best to measure ‘impact’ and ‘effectiveness’ within this new context.  As we’ve seen w/ the explosion of youtube, the way we value click-throughs changes dramatically when supporters can make and spread videos on behalf of your cause/org.     

Are you gearing up to reconcile linkages against syndication?
BB: Do you mean are we identifying sites that are driving the most traffic to net2 via their own sites?  If so, yes. In fact, we actively work at cultivating relationships with the people who drive the most traffic to our sites.  Unsurprisingly, these are people we either know (friends, customers, partners), or people who love what we’re doing.  Often, they too are in the business of working towards social change. 

I have a couple of theories I’m curious to investigate: 1.) I suspect that ‘influentials’ will become important to web evaluation...people, tools, and sites that act as marketing ambassadors through their reach. 

BB: Yep, I absolutely agree with you here, though I don’t know if I’d leave this to the number-crunchers alone.  Web analysts inevitably are going to value some ducks more than other ducks online. In fact, the WOMMA is trying to ‘do the math’ to make this very case that ‘influentials’ are essentially more valuable than passive users, which makes good sense. What I think is important here is that someone on the community side of the team works closely with the analyst-type to continually inform the way activity and value is measured within the community.  Considering I’m not really interested in trying to find the universal unit measure for people’s activities online, I can only share a couple of core principles that will hopefully keep us on course in the coming year.  

Go with the flow.  Align your activities and the tools that accompany these activities with the interests and goals of the people.  By this I mean, identifying existing user behavior within similar networks online, and encouraging this within your own community.  The team at http://www.netsquared.org, we saw how nonprofits are using tagging to raise awareness about issues on Flickr, and naturally encouraged users to tag relevant sites net2 on flickr and delicious and furl to help spur link-love here.

Value and appropriate behavior over time deepen relationships, on and offline.  At the end of the day, we have to give people something they actually want in an appropriate way.  On the web, this is about connecting the right people with the right tools based on their level of commitment/interest.  For instance, if you’re interested in hosting a Net Tuesday, you will need different tools and support than someone who just wants to subscribe to our newsletter.  As community planners, we’re responsible to recognize the different needs between these two users and respond to their needs accordingly. 

So, how do we measure for impact now that these new tools are changing people’s behavior online? 

BB: I think this mostly depends on what the goals of your site (and organization) are.

We look at the tools as just high-tech hammers that we make available for our various constituencies to use.

Once we identify goals, we can move forward by asking ourselves what do we want people to do on our site? 

For us, considering this is a first-of-it’s kind project, we didn’t know what to expect, or what people were willing to do online.  The only thing we were confident of last year at this time was that the tools used by Dean and Wikipedia and Moveon.org and others have created an opportunity for nonprofits and social change organizations to harness and leverage the energy of their supporters in unprecedented ways across the globe, and we encouraged net2 members to participate http://www.netsquared.org/participate respectively. 

Speaking only for myself, I learned that we'd be better off by limiting the number of ways we encouraged people to engage with us online so we could get a better handle on making it easy for people to do those 1, 2 or 3 things they want to do, which inevitably would  yield exponential increases in activity and conversion within the community (See Seth Godin’s http://www.apennyfor.com/fixing-micahs-site.pdf for great write up about this).  Of course, there are costs to this approach as well.  Inevitably, we’d lose a sub-set of people who didn’t find a level of engagement that was appropriate for them.  Costs and benefits....dont' go away.

As far as metrics on the site goes, we looked at a few things:

·        overall net2 registration

·        Net Tuesday activity

·        Net2 badge distribution

·        net2 tags (Gina, Britt, Marnie, am I missing anything here?)

but because of the fast-moving nature of this project and the ambitious number of features we tried launching, we weren’t able to spend a lot of time crunching data and refining the user experience (Hence the current wide-eyed user experience on the site.  Our apologiesJ).

We plan to align our activities online with the topics and activities that had the most traction in year 1 during the second annual net2 event.  We’ll trim the fat from the site by killing off the dead or dying features.  We encourage you to weigh-in about the (3) things/features you think should stay on the site.  Send a note to: gina@techsoup.org.

My last thought: Building a community online is very much like building a community in the real world. 

There's got to be value.  There's got to be appropriateness and there's got to be trust.  Some people will ignore your plea.  Some will sign your petition, and some, will enlist in your cause to sign others up on your behalf.  The key is to recognize what different supporters want to do on your behalf, while continually adding value to the community by optimizing the experience for them.  Hope this helps.

For other resources about this stuff, check out:

The Pew Internet and American Life project does a great job of studying trends and behaviors online.    Check out: http://www.pewinternet.org.  Also, Ben and Jackie here http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/ do a great job of articulating the dynamics at play here.

Btw, I think the theories you're noodling on are fascinating.  Feel free to reach me anytime to discuss: billy@compumentor.org or 415.633.9369.