Communities are wonderful living entities of social interactions, and the digital world has given us a great opportunity to use metrics and numbers to keep improving user experiences.

This means we have a great opportunity to follow the numbers and keep improving the experience community members.

But it also means that things can get really complex, very quickly.

The good news is that TCM is here to help.

Meet Dows, our resident numbers guy.

We’re starting a new series called Ask Dows About Data and we’re giving Community Managers all over the world the opportunity to ask specific questions about their metrics, measurement tools and just about anything else you can think of related to using data to measure the health of your community.

Now you can get tailored questions to any data question or problem you might have. Your question will be sent to our very own numbers person, Chris Dowsett.

Chris will publish regularly on TCM about topics like…

• setting up key performance indicators for social and communities, and which KPI’s are worth tracking
• how to set up a simple tracking spreadsheet or tool to measure your community data
• how to match data and measurement to a social media/community plan
• how to read data and how to make sense of data specific to the community
• how to make sense out of the millions of data points you could track and how to turn a couple of those into actions
• how to get actions and improvements from the data
• how to know when to use a complex formula vs a simple percentage, related to specific examples from a community
• questions and thoughts about measuring attribution or reach

We’re introducing the Ask Dows About Data series to help community managers turn real data into actions that will help improve communities.

So ask away, community managers…and get the most from your data.

Submit Your Data Question

*This post co-written by Cali and Dows. Because not only is he good with data… he’s good with words, too.

Image cred: Antonia Hayes via Compfight

Cali Harris

Cali Harris (better known as Caligater) lives and salsa dances in Boulder, Colorado. She’s Managing Editor for The Community Manager and works at TechStars. She still clings to the Oxford comma.