Social Media metrics - identifying important core behaviors

There will always be bandits who try to derail an online social service.  And there will always be contributors whose participation may be distracting to the core mission.  So then how do you find the core contributors amongst the power users in a social media tool?  I’m curious how you measure this, though think there are probably 3 data points to watch:

1)      identify self-organizing groups of contributors
2)      measure individual behavior popularity
3)      isolate outliers

The self-organizing groups will form the nucleus of the service’s advisory council.  Then, the most popular individual behaviors will help determine which functions to develop more deeply.  Bell-curving the behaviors will identify what the contributors find annoying and what they find admirable…both are important.

When core user behavior is understood, it’s a lot easier to allocate development resources and prioritize functionality.  And it becomes more obvious how to convert new core users without disrupting the community.

Slashdot is a great example.  They have a karma system for awarding contributors whose participation shapes the direction of the site.  If you post a lot and those posts get published, you’ll get rights to moderate other people’s posts temporarily.  Your moderation skills are then rated by meta moderators.  The meta moderators then find themselves steering the editorial direction of the site.

The meta moderators are the nucleus of the system, the key to leading the other contributors.  They have to make decisions on which types of posts should be encouraged and which should be discouraged.  Outliers are eliminated organically as the collective moderation system selects the best posts for publishing.

If the moderation system slips, however, and bad posts get through, then the core users are going to get angry and leave the system.  Losing 10% of the core user base is going to hurt a lot more than losing 10% of the public passersby.

I’m also curious how change occurs in these systems.   Can the core user base become too rigid for what the wider public wants from the system?  What if the business wants to make a strategic change?

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