How much do they spend on communities?

They’re at it again: the fellows at Forum One’s research outfit has produced a nice report, summarised in this interesting post.

It gives definite answers and numbers on a few interesting issues, namely:

- How much are companies saying they spend on “community”? (You’ll be surprised: they say it’s high).

- Can they find the link between community and value (ROI)? (A good portion have no doubts, some have a serious approximation, few admit to not having a clue: that’s improvement from the formerly prevailing consensus out there that “you can’t really measure community-generated value”).

- Are they expected to find it? Only 59 % say they are expected to find it either now or in the near future; a full 18 % have it down as a pure “cost of business” item. That said, there’s a full 23 % of unspecified “other” answers, so the data is not really relevant.