Venture Beat recently looked at a popular question in social media - how can you measure and track the efforts of online social media. They came up with a few answers that were very unique and showed not just profit the online community can make, but what the online community can do to save you money.

- Market research - Online communities are a great group of targeted customers who you can use to do market research, saving the normal market research spend

- Advertising costs/revenue - You can find out if new marketing campaigns are going to work before buying any media space by testing them on your community group

- Customer revenue - You can measure the spending of your online community members versus non-online community members

- Customer Retention - Those members of the community tend to have a greater sense of loyalty and stay with your brand, buying your products longer