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).

Danah Boyd is right on in this post from a few weeks ago:

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it’s not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don’t. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don’t call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

If you follow the comment trail from the post, you’ll see some Second Life backlash. I actually think Danah and those posters are actually agreeing on the important parts.

I messed around quite a bit with Second Life–(born 9/18/2005). I know, at that time, there had been much less hype on it. To me, if I had been 10 years younger, I would have been all over exploring and creating in it–just for the fact that it was a new playground. But, I think there is still plenty to do there. It is an environment that levels the playing field to many real world constraints… you have the freedom to design, test, build, code, and make things come alive. It is fascinating in so many ways.

However, what bothers me is how people see Second Life, reading the tea leaves and predicting the future. How do you interpret Second Life as a faint signal on the fringe? First — what is it really (what is it similar to now and in the past, how is it different)? Second — how big is its impact (scale–people and $ and time, growth–of those same variables)? And finally, what are the secondary and tertiary impacts of all the time, money, and people involved?

But I don’t want to answer those questions in this post. What I want to do is loop back to the quote from Danah. The future is not about being virtual, online or offline, digital, etc. All of those descriptions are less meaningful. The future will be richer analog deepened by digital. Life will be augmented by technology. We won’t define going online or offline. The Web won’t be something we connect to. Those distinctions fade away. I will “see” hyperlinks in the real world. My social networks will exist on my phone, in space and time, at my backyard barbecue.

I think the deeper trends that portend this are things like presence, persistence, identity, privacy, high-speed wireless connection, unlimited bandwidth, cheap recording and production tools, etc.

Second Life is what it is because it enables actions and experiences that are more difficult or impossible in our analog life. But the same can be said for my analog life–it will be very difficult for Second Life to replicate some of my analog experiences. So rather than getting caught up in the “virtual” part of Second Life as a signal for the future, perhaps you can read it this way:

The best virtual environment is an analog one that enables me to do what I can’t do in the analog.

It’s a paradox of course. A koan. But that little riddle is the future.

Until I have enough for a second post, I’ll keep adding comments and more on this topic in the single post page.

(more…)

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.

Maybe I’m way behind on this — but here’s an idea. Write very detailed blog posts about a topic or question you have. Something worth speculating on — but isn’t really out there in the blogosphere or media. Then just use a halfway decent traffic analysis tool and read the tea leaves.

I posted a clearly over the top post, “Apple Acquires Last.fm“, on 19 August of this year. It’s a provactive title that gets a little bit of search traffic my way. I didn’t write the post to get traffic. The web 2.0 acquisition market seemed so heady. I thought it’d be funny to package my iTunes wishlist as a critique of the silly enthusiatic part of the web2.0 lexicon (my GenreFolksonomies). I also have written another “wishlist” post to Apple — about wanting to switch to Mac. And in some weird sort of synchronicity, they addressed most of my needs by introducing the Mini.

But looping back to where I started this post. While my intention in writing the Apple/Last.fm post wasn’t to “bug the internet,” I’m learning that, in fact, I have. I don’t have that strong of a signal on this blog — I haven’t consistently written or made people aware that it exists. So any traffic bumps are caused by waves and ripples of the web. I just had a spike of searches like: “how many last.fm users, last.fm acquire, last.fm itunes.” Sure, it’s a lot of noise — but think of the potential for parsing the signal?

Yes, you say, of course that’s what Digg and Technorati and the hundreds, if not thousands, of sites have been trying to do with blogs. But I think those are more about parsing the signals through the existing “microphones” on the web. I’m talking about strategically placing the microphones — not for traffic — but to learn.