I listened to a good webinar by Bill Johnston & Patty Seybold on Measuring the Success of Online Communities. They shared into community types: Services, Developer, Professional / Peer, Affinity / Loyalty, Lead Customer and Virtual world communities. There was also a good discussion around metrics for different types of communities.

Bill had an interesting comment regarding a question: “How many resources did it take you to moderate and report on your site (he was previously at Autodesk and managed their communities) for about 10,000 posts / month. His answer for 1 FTE plus some limited hours for the reporting and analytics.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/tamara.jpeg”> Since I spoke with Tamara Littleton of eModeration about the same, I thought I would ask her the follow up questions I got from customers on the management and moderation costs of communities.

Here are some critical metrics that determine the # and cost of resources:

1. Post or pre moderated? Meaning are you allowing people to post and remove unwanted posts after the fact or the more expensive route which is to moderate all content before posting.

2. Duration of moderation: Do you wish to have postings moderated 24 hours (more resources) or only during business hours.

3. Do you need User Generated Content (videos, images) to be reviewed as well? – more expensive

4. Do you want alignment of moderation and community requirements to your overall marketing campaign, so a customer prospect generated if not qualified, can still be courted and managed to a point when they are qualified.

From Tamara:
“eModeration charges you per hour of resource. So you pay the same for video moderation, images, messageboards, mobile
communities etc.”

Depending on requirements the cost can be anywhere from $2500 a month, to
$30,000 a month.