Friday, April 25, 2008

Focus on Meaningful Website Traffic

I'm a regular reader of Seth Godin's blog and his "Silly Traffic" posting struck a chord with me.

Rather than get excited at and obsessed by silly website traffic numbers, Seth thinks "it’s more productive to worry about two other things instead.
  1. Engage your existing users far more deeply. Increase their participation, their devotion, their interconnection and their value.
  2. Turn those existing users into ambassadors, charged with the idea of bring you traffic that is focused, traffic with intent."

One way to engage users more deeply and groom ambassadors is to integrate social applications and social networking into your existing website.

My friends over at Ringside Networks recently launched an offering designed to "Bring the Power of Social Networking to Every Website".

What does this mean exactly? Well, let's look at Ringside's latest customer news:

  • Haddonfield Running Company enhances brand and builds customer ties online with Ringside Social Application Platform. They do not sell products on the web, they simply want to build and improve their brand. They are leveraging Voomaxer, a Facebook social application for runners, and providing application users the ability to interact via Facebook, Runningco.com, or both.
  • Fulcrum Gallery unites art lovers across Facebook and their own e-commerce website using Ringside Social Application Platform. In order to open up new revenue streams, they have created a custom social application called “What Is Art?”. This application highlights a selected piece of abstract art and allows users in both Facebook and the Fulcrum Gallery websites to comment. These comments are posted on users’ feeds to friends, inviting them to add comments and rate comments. Fulcrum Gallery is offering weekly incentives for the most popular comments.

Both are great examples of opening up new and compelling ways to interact with prospective customers and giving them a reason to increase their participation, devotion, interconnection and value.

So are you focusing on driving meaningful interactions with your website visitors?

Or are you just being silly?

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