According to blog SocialMediaToday.com, some of the top trends reported by the study’s participants and presented in the report included:

• A majority (38% of 95 respondents) stated that within their companies the of online community staff and associated responsibilities actually fell under the Marketing department.

• Most (27%) of the participants said that 11-20% of their community members logged into the online community each month. The overall average member login rate is 34% and the Median is 25%.

• 27 participants gave detailed feedback about how they successfully attracted new members to their communities using Newsletter and Emails, Events, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, and other techniques.

What I specifically found interesting was the success of growing community through surveys, sponsored blogs and allowing members to recommend to a friend.  Within a community environment, I would expect to find peer-to-peer recruitment (social influence from recommendations/word of mouth) as one of the strongest community building activities.  I also wasn’t surprised to find search engine optimization high on the list since online communities by their very nature generate excellent long-tail search opprtunties.

At the core of the report, an excellent presentation was given in response to the question, “how do you define Communtiy Member Engagement?”  The responses varied but the main points involved (1) amount of activity, (2) amount of content created and (3) amount of time spent on the site.  The type of community further defined the specific measures.

If you own, operate or intend to strat an online community, I highly recommend getting a copy of the report.  It will help set benchmarks for your metrics and provide some creative insight for new ways to grow your online communities and gain higher engagement.

But which content source is truly the best for SEO purposes?  The truth is that they both are!  Both user-generated and editorial content serve unique purposes as I will explain in greater detail below.

Editorial Content – Targeting the “Short Tail”

Editorial content is usually written by the content writer (copywriter) on staff.  This type of content explains in detail your website’s products and services.  In essence, it is the true “meat” of your web site.

Within the editorial content pages, you are more than likely to target the specific ranking for short-tailed keywords – ones that are the most competitive for your market niche.  These pages are generally higher up in your navigational structure because of their importance.  In addition, they are sometimes the category pages of your web site.  In either case, it is clear based on my experience that editorial content ranks well for targeted keywords. However, SEO is not a perfect science; therefore, having a two-prong approach to content development is required to help a web site grow adequately for both short tailed and long tailed keywords.

User-Generated Content – Seeding for the “Long Tail”

User-generated content usually falls under areas of your website like forums and blogs.  It is truly impossible to target (and to know for that matter) every keyword that a user might type into a search engine to find your website.  Although a bit dated now, Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, stated in June 2007 that, “20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before.”

Sure you can do your best to target the most popular long tail keywords with editorial type content, but user-generated content works for you without your concentrated effort.  Based on Udi Manber’s statement, don’t bother attempting to optimize for all possible keyword variations. Instead, implement a user-generated content strategy to help seed the search engines for relevant yet hard-to-target keywords and keyword phrases.

Visitors to your website probably know what they are looking for long before you ever will.  This is why much of forum traffic is the long tailed variety.  With that being said, there is no doubt that user-generated is also capable of attracting short tailed keywords because of the power of social networks.  If a user finds a blog post or a forum thread to be very useful the thread can be picked up and blogged about on hundreds of other blogs which could lead to hundreds of back links.  The end result may lead to higher rankings for all types of keywords, not even just long-tail.

Conclusion: Editorial or User-generated Content?

As stated above, SEO is never a perfect science.  Knowing this fact, we can’t accurately predict which page will rank for which keyword all of the time.  You may see your main editorial pages rank for short tailed keywords just as much as long tailed keywords and there is nothing abnormal or wrong about it.  You will also see some of your forum threads rank for some of the most competitive keywords in your industry.

So what have we learned here?  The best approach to content development is two-fold.  (1) You will want an area of your web site where you fully control and create the content to focus on the short tailed keywords.  You may find over time that it is a good idea to create a community or social component to your web site to naturally (on its own) attract the long tailed keywords.  The primary guideline to follow is to keep either type of content relevant to your market audience in order to acquire traffic and rankings across the full spectrum of keywords you have targeted from the very beginning.

Post written in collaboration with Jaan Kanellis, SEO Consultant

David Berkowitz wrote a perfect article targeting my pain on Search Insider about “how to monitor Twitter.” One option he mentioned was FriendFeed. I have heard about FriendFeed and they just received some great press from BusinessWeek but I haven’t tried it out. Its model fits a significant marketplace need for aggregating social networks into a single dashboard. As David explained,

“FriendFeed, an identity aggregator that lets you publish updates from a range of social media sites including Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, digg, StumbleUpon, your blog, and dozens of other sources.”

Keeping up with the stream of content though reminds me of a podcast I listened to from Provident Partners who interviewed Gina Bianchini of Ning (a social networking site) and Robert Scoble. The podcast was titled, “Is social networking right for corporate marketing? Two tests will help you decide.” But it was Robert Scoble who mentioned the need for attention management (versus time management) to handle the deluge of user-content generated from social media.

Trying to figure out what’s important to read and how frequent is a main concern both in terms of productivity but also relative to focus. So now someone needs to develop a “need to know” versus “nice to know” filter to weed through the aggregated noise and expose the golden nuggets of required knowledge.