The Online Publisher Association announced that it added Community as a category to its Internet Activity Index (IAI). So they will now measure how much time consumers spend online with Content, Communications, Commerce, Search and Community.

The OPA defines community as:

“Web sites and applications that combine user-generated content with communications in order to foster relationships between individual members and groups of members. Many Community sites are content driven, and they were previously accounted for in the Content category. However Community’s content is largely user-generated, and when merged with communication, creates a specific category of online activity.”

The IAI numbers for January show that consumers spent 42.7% of their online time interacting with content, 28.7% with communications, 16.1% with commerce, 7.5% with community and 5.0% with search.

AdAge picked up on the story, declaring “When It Comes to Time Spent Online, Content Trumps Community.”

But wait a minute here, adding community as a category at the same level as content, communications, search and commerce, is like comparing apples and oranges. Or better yet, comparing apples and oranges with air or water. Communities are combinations of content, commerce, communications and search. And communities affect the usage pattern of all the above categories and vice versa. So if I am spending time on Amazon.com, am I spending time with commerce, content, search or community? Obviously the end result is commerce if I buy something, but it could also be searching without buying or interacting with content (both user generated reviews and published content) without commerce. The fact that Amazon is a community which leverages my personal profile very well (another component of communities) is determining my interactions and time consumption on that site. The same can be said for many other sites that combine content with community. If I am spending time on the WSJ Health blog, I am spending time with content or community? If as a car buff I spend time on Carspace.com, I am spending time with commerce, content or community? Would I spend as much time conducting commerce, searching for stuff or interacting with the content on those sites if there were no community component to them?

Probably not…

Besides the fact something does not sit right with the categories, many conclusions drawn from the new numbers by AdAge and the IPA are equally flawed. Jim Nail at the Cymphony’s Influence 2.0 blog captures those flaws in detail in his post today (well worth the read). A couple of highlights include:

• The fact that page views per person in content dropped 225 pages suggests that a number of content sites were just moved to community.
• Content sites show 480 pages per month per user vs. 380 pages for community sites. So from an ad perspective, the reach may be just the same.
• Another factor not reflected in the new numbers is influence. If a third of people below 30 don’t make buying decisions before checking with their social networks, the impact of communities on the commerce is obviously not reflected in those numbers.

We should of course remember the agendas that both organizations are representing – those of advertisers and publishers.

According to the CMO Council’s latest annual Marketing Outlook survey (via Marketing Charts), CMOs are upbeat about spend levels, which are supposed to stay steady or trend higher, and frustrated and stymied by organizational culture, senior management mindsets, and insufficient budgets.

According to the survey, more dollars are going towards the analytics side of the business and the use of more tangible and targeted forms of personal interaction, contextual communication and online demand generation.

When asked how they measured success of their marketing spend (well they were asked for return on marketing spend – more on that later), 20% of respondents said they were not measuring marketing ROIs, and 32% said they were planning to introduce a formal ROI tracking system.

The leading area of marketing dollar allocation – strategy & branding! Following that are events and trade shows, operations, direct marketing, sales support, online marketing, advertising, and market research.

The main reasons why marketers switch agencies – which was very frequently, with 41% who switched ad agencies – are:

• Lack of innovation
• No value-added thinking
• Poor creative
• Quality of work
• Results and deliverables

Duh – maybe all the interrupt-based stuff that they use is just not working anymore

Unfortunately, the increased focus on ROI will likely not be the expected savior that will return credibility to the marketing department. First off, ROI-driven companies are often focusing their measurements on transaction-based buying activities. In the long run, however, it is not the efficacy with which you can get one person to buy something once that counts, but rather the customer lifecycle value and the ongoing amplification in the form of word of mouth that goes along with a long term customer relation. ROI is also a trailing indicator, and as all financial services companies will tell you – past performance is not an indicator of future results. Lastly, and by measuring ROI on discreet processes (i.e., a specific lead generation campaign), which most companies who measure ROI do, companies are reducing marketing to a collection of simple linear processes, when in reality it is a complex multi-variable and non-linear system. So by oversimplifying marketing to make it measurable, many companies will actually break marketing more so than it already is.

Nowhere in the survey was there any mention of consumer generated content – somewhat of a surprise considering that fewer and fewer buyers make their buying decisions based on information coming from the vendors.

A new survey from Bazaarvoice and the Keller Fay Group found that a vast majority of online reviewers are motivated by goodwill and positive sentiment (summary of the survey can be found at Marketing Charts).

Other findings of the survey include:

• Positive reviews outweigh negative ones 8 to 1
•  79% of online reviewers do it to give back to the review community
• Reviewers buy products online (85%), and engage in social networks (25%)
• 20% of reviewers post messages on other people’s blogs or chat rooms; 19% post on independent product-review sites such as ePinions or CNET; and significantly more post directly on a retailer’s own website.

This is great news, but it does not negate the fact that even though they are outweighed by positive reviews, negative online reviews remain “findable” for a very long time and can hurt a product or company way more than off-line negative reviews. So vendors should still do whatever they can to avoid negative online reviews.