SocialMedian was barely a thought for people back in February, but it has gained a solid following in the 9 months of its existence. Many people would ask why this startup has gained any traction. It is yet another social news site with voting and commenting. Did we really need another? Given the amount of traffic that socialmedian is getting, it is obvious that they are onto something.

With this in mind, I figured it was time to chat with SocialMedian Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg and find out if things were actually as good as they sounded.

A look Back

During the summer, there was rapid growth as SocialMedian added Google Reader and other service integration, as well as replize. These features were added because of user feedback. Goldberg has stated several times, "Our model at SocialMedian has been: small, fast, and listen to users." You have probably noticed that you do not see any advertising or many press releases plastered all over the major news sites. Essentially, SocialMedian has been built through its user base. The only "press coverage" you tend to see are reviews from various blogs, including here on Mashable.

Almost a month ago, SocialMedian integrated with Facebook and users saw a large amount of traffic coming from the popular social network. Also, in the weeks leading up to the election, socialmedian announced partnerships with the Washington Post and The Guardian. Their election widget was gaining adoption, and Goldberg stated that the few days following the widget release had seen a 300% increase in traffic. Why? It is probably due to the partnerships created through the Election Talk widget.

A chat with SocialMedian

Rob: How big of a traffic boost did the Facebook integration give you?

Jason: We got a nice initial boost when we launched our Facebook integration as our existing members were suddenly easily able to find and follow their Facebook friends and to invite new friends to check out SocialMedian. Since then, Facebook has been a steady boost for us as our users have amplified their SocialMedian activities to their Facebook friends and new users have also taken to our Facebook features. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of overall impact to our growth and engagement, I'd say Facebook integration has been about a 7, but has the potential to be a 10 with some new developments we have planned to even better leverage the Facebook platform.

One thing the Facebook integration launch did though was it really went a long way towards starting to mainstream SocialMedian. I used to measure our growth entirely on new registrations. It taught me that awareness comes first then adoption. The Facebook integration made a whole bunch of new people suddenly aware of SocialMedian via their Facebook friends. After seeing SocialMedian postings on their friends' Facebook pages for the 5th, 10th, 50th time, you start to see adoption. The second thing it did was really up the engagement level on SocialMedian. Suddenly it was really easy to follow people via Facebook. That hit our currently active users with a slew of new follow messages, which ignited them.

Rob: Obviously, the Washington Post and Guardian partnerships are a big deal. Do you see SocialMedian making several partnerships like this?

Jason: YES! It took us two weeks to put together the micro-site election.socialmedian.com for the Washington Post and then 1 phone call to get The Guardian excited about taking the widget. Now we know how to do it fast and know better to get ahead on working with more partners to include them. We also built this in a way in which we can replicate it again and again and again with only 2 days to get a micro-site up and running for any topical SocialMedian news network.

We'll do our second one next week for the Monaco Media Forum event in Monaco November 12th, where the Prince of Monaco brings together 300 leaders in the transformation of media. It's a closed event but SocialMedian will enable people to follow every blog post, video, picture, and tweet from home. You heard that here first. The page for that will be http://mmf.socialmedian.com.

Rob: Do you see any scalability problems with the micro-site idea? Meaning how often can you do these without affecting how much staff you must maintain?

Jason: No. It basically builds right on top of our "news network" concept in which anyone can create a news network to gather and discuss news about a particular topic. For these microsites like election.socialmedian.com or mmf.socialmedian.com, all we really do now is apply a template created for the election site which adds some additional views like "rising fast" in addition to "popular" and "recent" and which enables anyone to grab and embed a widget for the news network. We can do hundreds of these without any negative resource impact.

Rob: At the beginning of November Quantcast showed SocialMedian at just over 160K page views, what is the real traffic? I saw the email regarding the 300% increase over 3 days. Does that give you over 475K pageviews?

Jason: Conservative estimates had socialmedian at 500K pageviews (rolling 30 days). October ended consistently above 20K per day. Overall, there were 225K pageviews in September, 280K in October, and 120K the first week of November with traffic rapidly increasing as we got closer to the election. Quantcast has significantly more conservative numbers.

Rob: So how do you measure user engagement?

Jason: Clips/day is our best measure of engagement. Clips aggregate all user activities: clipping, sharing, like/dislike, and 1st comment a user makes on a story. In the past 60 days we've gone from averaging 1500 clips/day to more than 3500. We have seen the same sort of increase in comments as well. We attribute our replize feature, where users reply to other users vs. just leaving comments, as the key to the rapid rise in comment levels. One thing worth noting is that Mixx has probably 4-5x our traffic, but we are far higher than them on clips/story vs. their votes, and comments/story. In other words, we have more quality traffic we think and more engaged users.

Rob: Have you seen a traffic boost due to the election partnerships?

Jason: We see that our user growth has been more about the tech community suddenly all talking about SocialMedian at once vs. being all about the election. Over the past 4 days we've added more new registered users than in the previous 4 weeks. We've seen our 3 biggest traffic days yesterday (on a Sunday!) and the two prior days. It happened because users started talking publicly about how they seem to be getting value from SocialMedian. Nothing beats positive word of mouth. And we've worked really hard to cultivate that, while spending $0 on outbound marketing.

It's all about satisfying users and getting them engaged in the service. Then, when they recommend the service to their friends or readers, it helps that newbies see a party going on when they get to SocialMedian (a vibrant community) that they can join in on vs. have to create. Notably, our strongest area is still tech news and we still have a very tech-oriented early user base, but at the same time our users have created more than 2000 news networks on all sorts of topics.

Rob: Will end of election season hurt traffic significantly, or are you seeing increased engagement from the new users?

Jason: So far we are holding up very nicely as new people introduced to SocialMedian because of the election and from Twit.tv seem to largely be staying around. This past Sunday was our biggest Sunday in history and Monday was better than the Monday before the election...so far so good. I think it's fair to say that the election helped draw people in but the discussion continues around the news of the day.

Rob: What is the biggest complaint from users and how are you addressing it?

Jason: The biggest feature request we have is for us to add topical news search. We have none right now. That's coming in just a couple of weeks. We're also working on better filters and cleaning up the UI, which have been big user requests/complaints.

Rob: What do you see as the biggest reason for success?

Jason: The biggest reason for success is simple. We listen to users. We have done very little to focus on growth and marketing and instead focused almost entirely on helping one users at a time find value and get more engaged with the service. Our theory is that one happy user will bring 10 over time. That's our focus.

Looking forward

Obviously, things look to be going very well for Jason and SocialMedian. It is still too early to determine whether the traffic will decrease now that the election is over, but the micro-sites give SocialMedian the ability to have focused coverage on any major event or conference. SocialMedian is maturing nicely, and I would definitely keep an eye on their future.