In the past 3 months, I've managed to get Vjournal's Alexa ranking from 3,237,678 to just above 620,000 with no advertising.  Some days the ranking breaks into the top 500,000 websites.  Roughly, this is an indication that based on people who have downloaded the Alexa tool bar, there are 619,999 sites that get more traffic on a monthly basis than Vjournal.   And my response is, so what? 

What I've learned is that these rankings mean little and are incredibly easy to manipulate.  Unless the traffic coming to your site is truly quality, it doesn't matter.  Yet so many companies have incorporated goals of improving their Alexa ranking or some other ranking barometer such as Google Analytics traffic count, while ignoring the most important metrics available.  If a company is focused on the wrong metrics, the strategies put in place can undercut their brand and their sales.

So I would ask everyone to take a deep breath and focus on quality traffic.  While it's great that Vjournal's traffic has improved dramatically in only 3 months, the numbers I'm most impressed by are that they spend 8.1 minutes a day, and my page views per user hovers around 8 - all while my rankings improved.  For a "news site", this is pretty good.  The New York Times is only getting readers to spend an average of 4.6 minutes on their site, with 3.13 pages per user.  Yes, they are in the top 100 sites on the internet - Vjournal may never break the top 100k, who knows?  But my readers are really engaged and there is a true community brewing.

However, in an effort to "drive traffic", what I see happening all over social networking sites is the exact opposite of building community.  What companies are doing is joining or creating groups, and then discussing  their company's products without adding real value to the conversation.  It's one thing if you've created a group specifically about your product, for your customers or prospects.  but it's an entirely other thing to try to divert the conversation happening in other groups and forums to your marketing message when it is only remotely related to the discussion.  Group members see this as a form of spamming and it results in a company losing credibility and trust with the public they meant to attract.  Now of course there are real spammers out there taking advantage of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites - I'm not talking about that.   I'm talking about legitimate companies that know they need a social networking strategy but wrongfully make it about their products rather than adding true value to the community.   

Most executives of a company don't know that their brand is being tarnished by a poor social networking strategy because they don't see what those they've made responsible for posting items in social networking forums are actually writing.   I recently showed 4 CEOs the output of their social networking activities and they were quite shocked, as they'd been looking at great reports showing increased traffic so they thought they were doing well. 

How will you know if your social networking strategy is faulty as discussed above?   Likely your conversion rates to sales from your social networking activities will likely be near-zero, and your referral rate will be nil as well (this is the viral marketing rate, where group members pass along content to others - the best marketing of all). Once these CEOs got a handle on other metrics like conversion rates, time on the site, and referral rates they realized they'd been pouring money down the drain AND tarnishing their image at the same time - ouch!

Because of the amount of abuse in social networking discussions, people are beginning to be more careful about who they bring in as members to their groups and are banning those that constantly "pitch" rather than foster a true community. This is GREAT news for my clients, who've grown true communities around their brands - what about for you?