The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a series of case studies looking at social media marketing. Specifically I’ve been interviewing small to medium-sized tech firms about how they have made the transition from a static, traditional website to one that is more interactive and community oriented. We went with smaller firms because, while Dell and Google have highly engaging Web presences, we wanted to find out how firms with limited budgets are making the transition.

I wrapped up interviewing this week and found some great case examples to work with (thanks to everyone who participated!) though so far no one has felt like they really nailed the strategy, as we expected. All told I got to speak with 10 firms, all in different stages of deployment and with different strategies. There was great diversity, except for one little thing. When I asked how the traffic on the community parts of their websites compared to the corporate site overall we got a relatively tight range:  15%-30% of the corporate traffic is now coming from the site’s community features.

Now, longtime readers of this blog know that I pride myself on my stats chops, so there should be no mistake that this is not a statistically significant finding. But I do find it curious that such a tight range would emerge from just 10 interview, and I have a sneaking suspicion that further research would reveal a finding that is not far off from what we have seen so far. For those readers that have the numbers to weigh in, what have you seen on your own sites?

Not surprisingly the firms with strong discussion forums were up in the 30% range, while those with young blogging efforts were down in the 15% range, though across the board the interviewees reported growing traffic. In addition much of that traffic has been coming from organic search, bringing new visitors to the site, associating the firm’s content with valuable keywords  like “steel pricing”, and generally raising the SEO of the site at large. In fact, the one value of social media marketing that nearly everyone pointed too was search-engine optimization. So, if you’re trying to get a social media project off the ground I highly recommend keeping that nugget in your back pocket. Client engagement may still be a bit soft, but SEO is something most CMOs and even CEOs are willing to get behind.

A 10% boost in traffic (there has to be some overlap) and dramatically improved SEO sounds like a win to me.

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Now that hockey and basketball have officially closed up shop I’m starting to tune back into baseball and have been pleased to find my Tigers in first place — in the worst division in baseball, but hey, I’ll take it. Its been quite a few years since I have lived in Detroit, so when the Tigers are in town I try to get to as many games as I can. When they aren’t I spend my time going to Giants and A’s games mostly when the weather is nice, a couple of top shelf pitchers are going, or I just need a baseball fix.

Tonight I’m going to see Randy Johnson. I’ve never had the opportunity to see The Big Unit in person and I am looking forward to catching one of the games best pitchers before he retires — even if he’s not quite as intimidating as he used to be. So, as per usual I went over to StubHub to find tickets. Now, in my view, StubHub is the best place to find tickets for the simple fact that it has an interactive map of what tickets are available (why Ticketmaster can’t seem to figure out this technology is beyond me). So, in just a few minutes I found tickets and was ready to roll.

So I clicked “purchase” and logged in. What did I find next in my purchase process, why the screen shot below (you may need to click in to see exactly what has gone wrong).

Now, I am a big fan of site analytics. Anything you can do to get a better understanding of how your website is working or how satisfied your users are is worth the effort. But I have to question placing the popup one-third of the way through my purchase! Now I know, the ForeSee popup is random, but come on guys, how hard is it to hold the survey until after I’ve completed what I actually came to the site to do. My guess is if you can hold on just a few more clicks you’ll get a considerably more response.

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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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