This is cool! We used the word "love" a lot at DigitalOcean as one of the key/core values for how we thought about customers and community. Curious - how do you think of blogs and content marketing w.r.t this? Is that a "big marketing effort" or does it fit into community?
so first of all i love the work you folks are doing to map out this very difficult problem, i think the 4 level orbit model is bang on and i tell everyone about it every chance i get.<p>objection 1:<p>this NRG formula – i dont know. as you already note, its kinda indirect what is attributable to product centric upsells, and content marketing SEO. i understand that you can make the case that all this comes from community work, but it can feel like a landgrab to the other people who already do this job and dont exist in the "community org". (of course people shouldnt be that political, they're all on the same team, etc etc). it's less useful because Product, Marketing, Community all could feasibly lay claim to this same metric, and importantly, when its not doing well, they each can blame the other.<p>objection 2:<p>internal politics aside, i think my primary source of discomfort comes from 2 angles - A) punting the "what is the value of community" question to the "what % of our signups are organic" question (which as we know is often up for manipulation/debate), and B) ARR from services doesn't count?<p>anyway, its no worse than the nothing we currently have, so i think a worthwhile exercise, even if not objective.
Interesting but what if you already started sales? Would be very hard to distinguish "Organic Signups" as when you get a sales team you'll find adoption goes up. Following up on leads, helping them get going, etc (if the price point supports it, usually $200/mo+)