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.

Depends on what you mean by web and success… and who you ask. I’ll start to collect links here (and via del.icio.us), and host a roundup on the topic when I get enough meat to add something new to the discussion. Godin offered up the two below. They both talk about metrics changing because of the underlying technology or construction of online information. And oddly enough, the discussion orients around ad-buying terminology of impressions, inventory, etc. I say oddly, because there is so much room to change the model. I know it will take more time for the industry to change, but there is a chance for those on the front of the bow to really break some ice on the whole business of digital advertising…

From Jeff Jarvis:

I say the change we’re facing is much bigger than just the obsolescence of the pageview, much more fundamental: Size doesn’t matter. Relevance, credibility, and attraction do.

Theoretically, I’m in total agreement. But pageview is easy to understand… and though becoming harder to measure, how would one measure relevance, credibility, and attraction? The closer you get to actually measuring value, the harder it becomes to define the elements of that value. In my day job this is what I do. It’s not easy… and most of the time you end up constructing new ways of parsing and processing the information because there is a chasm between the standard metrics and real value.

From Fred Wilson:

But there are changes afoot in the Internet measurement business. Everyone is recognizing that pageviews matter less now. Ajax and other more modern web technologies allow for new ads to be displayed without a page reload. Ad views can grow even as page views decline.

More to come on this theme. Everything is related here… advertising as a product or service means you need different metrics. When you change from exposure to value-creation, most of the old language, processes, research, and measurement tools are no longer relevant.

As a tactic, this seems perfectly reasonable, and even effective. But as a strategy? This same tactic, as described by BusinessWeek, seems like it could easily become as useful as all those chain letters and joke forwards you get via coworkers, family, and friends. Those are “peer-to-peer” as well. Yet again, so is a virus. Sometimes it’s useful to take a term literally (Viral Marketing).

Web2.0’s value comes from the user. The engine of value is constructed through an architecture of participation. User generated content, mashups, social networking – when done right, get better and create more USER value at an exponential rate. This is nothing new. We’ve been saying this for the many years. And companies are starting and being sold based on generating this kind of value. But what hasn’t changed? The business model.

Back at The Future of Web Apps earlier this year it became obvious that the dichotomy of the web as a business model hasn’t been solved. There still is a huge chasm between user value and business value. There’s plenty of innovation around what the web is delivering – but very little innovation on how money is made.

I know. You’re thinking I’m completely ignorant of all the innovation regarding contextual advertising, search advertising, etc. But take a critical view of these models. They are just more targeted ways of delivering billboards and coupons. It’s better than it has been, for sure. More relevant advertising is better for a company and for the consumer. But this is incremental change.

BusinessWeek walks through the online ad models of Google, Yahoo, and niche players. And as TechCrunch states, it’s true, more competition should generate better pricing and innovation. But it’s still about inventory, views, and clicks.

Most simply, advertising is NOT user-centered. At its best, it is about companies that want to achieve certain business goals, agencies that can help create campaigns to achieve those goals, and media agencies that can help place the campaign in the most efficient (and sometimes most effective) places. It isn’t about solving consumer needs, creating more consumer value, and generating incremental profit from that value.

There is potential for true innovation of the radical variety. Imagine a model that transforms the strengths of advertising into a user-focused model. Imagine we coupled the power of an ad agency, a media agency, a Google or Yahoo, and a network of niche web developers that actually generated profit for clients rather than expenses? The product of the coupling would be new communication tools, products, services, or social glue that solved customer needs in way that the customers themselves would pay for it.

More to come on this topic for sure. If you’re up for answering the call to create this with me drop me an email. Let the user-centered revolution begin.