Joel Greenberg is progressing towards something worth looking at. At first, I balked at the idea of looking at site traffic as a metric to define success of a marketing site versus a community site. I still do. I think the size of a community is a very small piece of its overall success. I also am still not convinced about the relability and validity of Alexa and other traffic measures (but that’s for another post). Finally, I think it’s an apple and oranges comparison between online communties and online marketing promotions.

Too many times marketers claim building a community is the goal of their marketing… especially recently in the online space. It’s a valid desire — to have a self-sustaining or growing community of brand advocates that constantly revitalize the sense of value of the products / services. Community is a lot like the hot button word “relationship” in marketing though. What the marketer wants out of the community and relationship is usually disconnected, or even at odds, with what the customer wants. I’m being shaped by Minksy’s aversion to “suitcase” words, and community and relationship are just that, especially in the marketing sense. Everyone says they want it… but no one is really sure what that means. And if you don’t know what it means, you can’t measure it (what it do you measure?) and you can’t design for it.

However, there are some interesting pieces here and no matter the limitations in the data used to derive the theories, they are interesting topics to think about. Greenberg basically compares site traffic over time to marketing sites and community sites and looks at the patterns. It started with a post about Second Life (and my chart reading is much more negative regarding it than his — not sure it’s just the holidays) that didn’t convice me. Then in his follow up post he starts to lay out more interesting examples. On one level, this isn’t much different then television exposure and wearout analysis. But it’s interesting when applied to the web.

Let’s assume these traffic patterns are correct. Now lets try to take the leap to ascribing value to them. Assume each “hit” is worth some dollar value to the marketer and are equal across the sites — a wild assumption, but bear with me. In the case of Subservient Chicken, there is a huge initial pulse of value (according to our assumptions) and then it fades away. In MySpace, it just keeps on building value — increasing returns.

There are many implications to this type of thinking. I’ll start with this one. Even with the assumptions above, you can’t compare Subservient Chicken to MySpace. Why? What is the unit of analysis? If we are at the community level, then Subservient Chicken is too discrete. You have to go higher up. What is a proxy for the community level of Burger King? Bk.com doesn’t cut if for me. I think this is the issue for marketers. Where are their communities? Is it a corporate web site? Do they create a community? Do they co-opt a space in Second Life or MySpace? I say it depends. What are you in the business of? If Burger King and other restaurants have a sense of community, it lives in the store first. So the fair unit of analysis between MySpace and Subservient Chicken really should be MySpace user traffic versus Burger King store traffic…

Just some a stream of thoughts here. But this line of thinking is worth delving into more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 7:30 am and is filed under Web, Metrics, Advertising. It is further classified using the following tags advertising, community, Metrics, second life and Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.