In some ways it seems like a full year has passed since we started the Community Portal.  In other ways it seems like only a couple months.  Either way, the calendar says six. So I thought this would be a good time to review the CP and see where we are.

STATS

Here are some stats.  Some are fantastic, and others we hope to improve on.

Over 75% of our customers have registered. We are very pleased with this.  For ANY company to have signed up 75% of their customer base is incredible.  I saw some research (sorry, I can't find it now to link to it) that showed that most companies with a social media offering have less than 100 registrants.  We have blown that out of the water.

"Sure," you may say, "that is only because of NAGS."  Actually, the need for customers to download NAGS definitely helps but it isn't only NAGS.  I just went and looked and we had 24 customers sign in to the CP yesterday alone.  This tells me that customers are using it.  For almost all content, customers don't need to sign in so there is a lot more usage than just those 24. Also, last September (during the last NAGS update) we had 1683 unique visitors to the Community Portal.  In January, the next NAGS month, we had 2530 unique visitors.  That is a 67% increase over the last NAGS month.  Wow!

So we know that it is being used for more than just NAGS.  But what are our customers using it for? The two most popular informational sites (which means not the home page or community home pages and excluding the NAGS page) are the Not authorized to view the specified document 2408 and the Not authorized to view the specified document 2614.  Close behind that is a document that Kay created: "Not authorized to view the specified document 2250" document.  The most popular community page (besides the home page) is the Training Community with the Glass Software Community close behind.  So, are customers learning from the Community Portal?  Given the number of those going to these pages and how long they are staying on the page we conclude that they are. This is EXACTLY what we were hoping for!  The more we can educate our customers the better success they will have and the happier they will be!

Discussions are not being utilized as we had hoped, but still we knew it would be slow at the beginning.  Customers are starting between 9 & 20 discussions a month.  Not too bad.  We would like to see this increase, however.  When Discussions are used all customers get the benefit of learning what one person learns.  Instead of a phone conversation, it is opened up to everyone to comment, add their own unique perspectives and learn from each other.

In Review

The Community Portal is  working and working well!  Has everything been perfect?  No.  We knew we would need to continually tweak it and learn as we go.  That is to be expected with a new system (technologically and logistically) and the fact that the whole social media industry is in its infancy - there are not a lot of best practices out there.  This is new to everyone.  But we are having successes and seeing the results we would like to see and are pleased with the progress.