What metrics should a community manager measure?
The motto of valuable metrics: High uncertainty with high cost of being wrong.
We can represent uncertainty as a set of possible outcomes of an event where each outcome has its own probability of happening and a value, positive or negative. Always, especially when you are just starting adding metrics to your community, look for areas where there is high uncertainty and high cost of being wrong. Those situations make metrics being of high value.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.