SoundCloud is an online platform that allows musicians, producers and labels to move music around quickly and easily, founded in 2007. This means that users can collaborate, promote and distribute their music openly – or in private, ahead of public release.

The lynchpin of its growth – from 30,000 users to over 600,000 in little over a year – has been a focus on community management, and the company states that its passion for this is one of the main reasons it’s been able to grow so quickly.

David Noël, SoundCloud’s community manager and evangelist told us exactly what this entails. “We do different things for each channel: Twitter mini-contests, featuring interesting case studies on our main blog, highlighting specific users and their tracks on Tumblr or Facebook, screening the SoundCloud forum for interesting stories – and supporting the 10-15 super users that help us help others in our support/help forums.”

The notion of engaging with your community is one that many brands have accepted as highly valuable of late – but the million dollar question is still how to measure it. In terms of positive and negative sentiment, Noël uses a mixture of channels to keep track of what’s being said online. This includes Twitter and blog search feeds for the keyword “SoundCloud”, as well as feedback from users via email (separated between free and premium users), customer service site GetSatisfaction’s help forums and the brand’s Facebook Fan Page. ”Conversation on each happens at different times, so I jump from one service to the other – or have the streams open in the background while I’m working.”

Instead of attempting to reverse-engineer traditional metrics to suit Noel’s work, it’s a whole different story in terms of gauging success. He admits that it’s hard, as the mediums he works with are very dynamic and the content SoundCloud provides is not always measurable. “It always depends on the content and how interesting one piece is to a specific user. One tweet about a blog post that covers a new album stream on the site from an indie band has a different impact (traffic-wise and comment-wise) than a Facebook status update about an announcement about new features or products on the site.”

He went on to say that although watching people re-tweet or blog about SoundCloud’s status updates is encouraging, it’s hard to say that they need to achieve a certain number of either. “The bigger picture for me currently works better. We’re active in all these different channels and actively interact with users thus providing human and valuable easy-to-digest information in real time.” The company is currently working with a web analyst to provide an overview of key metrics throughout the service, which will result in a understanding of user’s click paths. This data will then be channeled back into the product team for improvements on both a feature and a copy level.

So what about the future? There’s still cynicism from many brands about the longevity of community management as a promotional tool on its own. Many online successes have eventually turned to more traditional forms of advertising to bulk up public awareness. Will there be need for SoundCloud to do this in the future? “Since we’re pushing integration with all sorts of audio production services to enable exporting to SoundCloud after the production process, there will certainly be interesting additional touch points, marketing-wise. The community has grown much faster than we originally anticipated, particularly over the new year, which resulted in us pivoting a bit sooner in terms of scaling of the application. We’re now ramping up the application and infrastructure to meet the demand of the next months, which means up to 5m to 10m users.”

Based on monthly user discussions and open office hours every Thursday – during which people can phone in for feedback or to share stories – Noël has recently introduced official SoundCloud local meetups, which will bring together users in real life to exchange ideas, find new ways to use the platform and find people to collaborate with.