Il monitoraggio di community online: il Community Performance Index (CPI)

This work provides a useful tool for community managers in their day-to-day job. The proposed tool must be easy to use and helpful to monitor an online community. The proposed model is specifically devoted to community manager working in no profit sector, in small organizations, scalable and not related to a specific technology or to a specific social network site. Following a literature review on the meaning of engagement in the social media environment, the work examines the opinion of eight Italian key informants in order to get new insights and ideas on the subject matter. They confirmed the existing literature and stressed in addition new perspectives on the role of lurkers in online communities: a reassessment of their role is undoubtedly necessary. The Community Performance Index is a monitoring tool composed by three main axes. The first one is called VPI (Vanity Performance Indicators) and is devoted to metrics (measurements) collection from social networks; the second one called KPI (Key Performance Indicators) is the performance measurement related to the purpose of the project; the last one called PMPI (Peripheral Members Performance Indicators) stresses the role of the lurkers in the community. The overall vision of this three axes answers the question: how the community is performing? The main novelty of the CPI is that it provides an overall community monitoring vision. The model was tested on TwLetteratura, an Italian social reading community. We analized the tweets produced by the community in order to fulfill the VPI axis and administered an online survey to investigate the KPI and PMPI. 
The results are presented here. Further researches are needed in order to validate the proposed model.