Flickr Photo: NCBrianChris Brogan is one of my social media heroes. I really respect his approach to the power of these tools and how we should use them.  (And you can learn more from him at our Ask the Expert session on May 5th [1] -- free for NTEN Members!)

Chris has a great post today about Online Community Management [2] in which he shares how he would measure a community manager's performance:

• Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
• Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
• Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
• Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
• Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
• Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
• Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.

I love measurement. I track everything all the time -- graph it, chart it, measure it against all the other data I can find. That's because I'm a goal-oriented person.

The tough part is that success isn't always measured in numbers. You can be commenting more, posting more, and getting more comments, but still not actually be heading toward your goal. Here's a classic example from the nonprofit sector:

You can hand out more eyeglasses each year, but are you really helping people see better?

In terms of measurement, I think it's important to make sure that what you measure isn't geared just toward productivity, but also success. They aren't always the same thing.