This post won’t do the topic justice, but Telligent just made another hire that caught my attention. As CEO Rob Howard writes, the company has just hired Marc Smith, another former Microsoftie, as Chief Social Scientist: “Marc will lead Telligent’s R&D efforts around analytics and business intelligence (tools to help you understand what people are doing in your communities), specifically Telligent Harvest.”

This, in my view, is a smart hire. Along with my colleague Jeremiah Owyang, I’ve been harping on the fact that it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between white label social networking vendors such as Awareness, Jive, Lithium, Telligent, and hordes of others. So how should these vendors — as well as the incumbent web content management vendors like Interwoven and Vignette — differentiate themselves from each other? In a word: analytics.

Many firms from CPG to finance are now investing in social networking and social media and most are (rightly) focused on how to grow their community. The big question today is “are we building a viable community.” Traffic stats, comments, posts, and UGC are the metrics most community managers live and die by today. This is not, however, sustainable long term. Pretty soon the conversation is going to shift from “do we have a viable community” to “what are we learning from our community,” “is our community happy,” “what are the major concerns they are expressing,” and “how do we change our product road map as a result?” Most communities have begun as marketing initiatives but increasingly market research and customer support are getting involved and will only do more so over time.

How companies can make use of the insight from customer communities is going to be where budget, sales, and market share are won and lost, and analytics are going to be a major asset in that fight. Don’t get me wrong, analytics alone will not result in successful community implementations — incorporating community insights into the product development process will be the bigger trick — but those vendors that can provide the best analytics tooling will have a substantial advantage as the market shakes out. Telligent is making big moves to get there first.

By the way, Jeremiah is about to publish a Forrester Wave on white label social networking vendors. I worked with him early in the process developing the criteria and am very pleased to say that analytics are well covered in the report. I haven’t seen the final draft yet, but I can tell you already it will be a must read.

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