Community Management Matters

Online communities provide technical support for organisations on a range of products and services. These communities are managed by dedicated online community managers who nurture and help the community grow. While visual analytics are increasingly used to support a range of data-intensive management processes, similar techniques have not been adopted into the community management field. Although relevant tools exist, the majority is developed in the lab, without conducting a domain analysis or eliciting user requirements, or is designed to support more general analytic tasks. In this chapter, the authors describe a case study in which we design, develop, and evaluate a visual analytics application with the help of Symantec's online community management team. The authors suggest that the approach and the resulting application, called Petri, is an important step to promoting online community management as a strategic and data-driven process.