PostRank began with a simple vision of helping people “find and read what matters“. To do so, we focused on what in 2006-2007 was still a relatively young phenomenon: the Social Web. Because many of the user-to-user interactions were done in public, we observed that we could harness this wisdom of the crowd to create an algorithm that would identify the top most engaging stories for any topic, theme, or time period. In practice, this worked out even better than we expected.
Today PostRank collects over 17 million user generated engagement events every day, which, combined with an accumulated archive of many billions of metrics, gives us an incredibly rich dataset to meet our original goal.
However, the more time we have spent working towards helping our users “find and read what matters“, the more we realized that oftentimes, it is not just the content, but the person behind it that many of us want to know more about. It turns out that finding engaging and relevant people, whatever your interests are, also goes a long way toward identifying engaging and relevant content.
Owning the Social Graph vs. Knowing the Person
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are locked in a battle for the Social Graph. Each is trying to maximize their share of the graph, offers a single sign-on solution, and in general would love to see you use them as your primary online identity.
However, just as in real life, most of us belong to many — often distinct — social networks, which span different contexts (personal, professional, hobby, etc.), and which, (as Google researchers found out) we often have no incentive to mix. In other words, just as in real life, to capture a good profile of a person and his or her interests online, one needs to look across all the different networks.
With that in mind, and because PostRank is already collecting tens of millions of user-generated events on a daily basis, we have been prototyping a number of social network analysis tools that go well beyond a site URL or a single network profile. We want to understand the person behind each interaction for a number of reasons:
When it comes to ranking based on audience engagement, influence matters. To measure influence reliably, we need to understand who the person is on a deeper level than number of followers on any one given network.
When it comes to discovery and helping our users find relevant content, understanding the people behind the content is where the next big breakthrough will happen.
When it comes to advertising in the Social Web, identifying individual experts and influencers, and providing a mechanism to effectively track their engagement is a critical piece of the overall puzzle.
Social Graph, Influence and PostRank
In fact, PostRank is already weighting some engagement events based on the cross-network profile (#1), or influence of the person. Before the end of the year we fully expect that all of our engagement events will be enriched with this data.
As for the discovery piece (#2), today we are launching a technical preview on one of our topics: click into any site within the Ruby topic (ex: yehudakatz.com, railscasts.com, igvita.com, or click on the screenshot above) and near the top, you will see a full, machine aggregated profile of the individual behind that URL – name, title, geo information where available, and all the social networks they are on.
Finally, today we are also announcing PostRank Connect to help – you guessed it – connect brands and PR agencies to the experts and influencers on the Social Web. This is a service we have run behind the scenes for a number of partners and we are excited to make it public.
Visit the Connect site to learn about all the details (and if you are an expert or influencer in your field, register to get your PostRank Analytics account for free!)
Needless to say, this is just the beginning, so stay tuned for more.