The following are the strategies and tactics that managers in organizations have reported using for improving community metrics:

• Engagement by Hosts: Being an active participant in your own community.
  Contribute to conversations, praise exceptional users and content. Be “present” in the
  community.
• Marketing Externally: Reach out to blogs in your space, make sure your site is
  optimized for search, mention your community via your other marketing channels.

• Marketing Internally: Educate new users on community feature set. Place prominent

calls to action to participate. Create email vehicles to send “best of the best” content
and encourage members to visit the community. Make it easy for members to refer
other members.

• Leaders: Find and/or cultivate community members that can act as your evangelists,
  community greeters, and second-tier moderators.
• Site Experience: Ensure that the site experience is a quality one. Conduct ongoing
  satisfaction surveys and usability test. Ensure site performance is optimal.

Source: Online Forum Communications

The following is a list of key metrics that organizations choose from to track the effectiveness of their communities:

Unique Visitors
New Member Registrations
Page Views
Retention / Attrition
Member Loyalty
Member Satisfaction
Most Active Members
Top Searches
Message Posts
Conversion
Advertising Performance
Influencer / Evangelist
Identification
Member Lifecycle
First Time Contributors
Content Rating
Ratio: Unregistered to Registered Visitors
Ratio: Page Views Per Post
Reputation Changes
Ratio: Posts Per Thread
Content Tagging
Comments per Blog Post
Ratio: Searches Per Post
Podcasts & Video (linked to / Uploaded)
Member Blog Posts
Size of Networks / Buddy lists
Quality of content and exchange
Tracking the brand through the “Community ecosystem
Impact of the community on revenue
Mobile interactions with the community

Source: Forum One Communication

The role of the community architect and the moderator is instrumental. A community architect is responsible and would communicate the following with the community members on a regular basis:

• Clarify the intent of the community
• Support contributions from community members
• Define and clarify the rules of engagment
• Define and clarify key processes
• Define and clarify the role of the moderator / facilitator
• Define and clarify the role of the community members

The community architect would also:

• Work with content experts and community to identify key learning needs and strategies
• Work with community members to identify contributors
• Evanagelize and support community participation
• Seed community content, support aggregation of content for various topics
• Engages and collaborate with learning experts outside of the advisory team
• Collaborates with IT group to develop the next generation virtual community models, and web-based experiences for display and structure of the user-centric content

Virtual Distance is defined as the perceived distance between two or more individuals, groups, or organizations that is brought on by the use of electronic versus face-to-face communications. The greater the Virtual Distance among the members of a team, the more problems team members will experience. Among them: miscommunication, lack of clearly defined roles, and even personal and cultural conflicts. It does not matter whether team members are widely distributed or collocated; every team is potentially subject to the risks of Virtual Distance.

Organizations that have managed virtual distances well report:

• Innovation behavior increase by 93%
• Trust improves by 83%
• Job satisfaction is better by 80%
• Role and goal clarity rise by 62%
• On-time, on-budget performance is better by 50%
• Helping behaviors go up by almost 50%

Source: Uniting the Virtual Workforce

The following are examples of some of the practices and processes for launching online communities:

• Access to reference materials and best practices
• Make it easy to contribute and share content
• Discussing and having dialog with peers and other experts 
• Reviewing presentations by peers and other experts
• Leadership led dialogues and discussions
• Exposure to other departments and roles
• Subscribing to and reading work related posts –  inexpensive way of communication
• Creating “lessons learned”  after projects or other work is complete and reviewing learned experience of others
• Using social networking tools to find and connect  with people to communicate with and learn from
• Access to frequently asked questions and answers of others
• Coaching and mentoring by more experienced workers
• Ask colleagues to help with problem solving
• Working with and observing more experienced colleagues

Source:  SRI Report

Online communities provide an environment for facilitating creation, access, reuse, and sharing of knowledge. In addition they offer the following benefits:

• Users learn of others who are doing similar things and can share their experience to help one another
• Users learn of “experts” who can help them in their endeavors
• Users can share/collaborate to bring embryonic ideas to realization
• Users can share “stories’ that help others learn from their experience (especially considering the Boomer defection over the next five years)
• Those who are new are connected with those who are in the know and can coach and support new learning

Source: Learning Lab and Innovation