Our Architectural Overview of the PostRank Engagement System intends to define what we are doing and why.  While this paper will not go into specific technical details of how we build our stuff and scale it out across Amazon’s EC2 cloud, we are setting the context for our system, defining what we calculate and how. (We’ll geek out about some of the challenges and lessons of building and scaling our stuff a bit later, you can be sure.)  For those that are interested in how Social Engagement is calculated, this is the document for you.

Social Engagement is an evolving concept. We’ve been talking to advertising agencies and networks, marketers, researchers, public relations, news sites, media companies and analytics platforms. Across the board they all have highly variable and interesting points of view on what engagement is, how useful it is and what to do with it.

We’d love to get your take on our approach and especially hear what you would do with content and engagement data since the real-time content stream, social engagement monitoring, and two years of archival data are available as part of our Data Services products. We want to hear your ideas. Let’s Get Started.

The PostRank Real-Time Engagement APIs enable you to keep on top of when and where conversations about news and blog stories are taking place online. Over 50% of a story’s engagement happens within the first hour after it’s published, so keeping on top of where and how your audience is engaging with your content is critical. Answer questions, catch breaking news, and join conversations as they’re starting.

Over 80% of engagement with online content doesn’t take place on the publisher’s site. It’s scattered around the social hubs, like Twitter, FriendFeed, and digg. Keeping up with these activities manually can be extremely time- and resource-intensive. But PostRank tracks that activity on the most popular social sites and brings it all together, enabling stakeholders to see the full story around their content.

Each engagement notification includes metadata that helps identify velocity, the latest source of engagement activity (e.g. the network on which the content is popular), the feeds, and their respective engagement where the article appeared. Being notified when new interactions with your content take place is a powerful tool for people managing publishing, communications, community building, and marketing.

PostRank has also added Sentiment and Emotional Analysis to its Real-time Content stream APIs. We analyze each story with machine learning algorithms to provide general sentiment (positive, neutral or negative), an overall emotional score for the story, and a detailed emotional score for the story. (The detailed scores are based on Paul Ekman’s emotional classifications of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.)

Since we gather up what folks are saying about stories, adding Sentiment and Emotional Analysis to those conversations was the natural next step. Publishers can now learn not only when and where people are talking about their content, but what the tone of those conversations is. This is an invaluable tool for brand managers, assisting them in determining when and where their engagement is best invested. For example, a negative article that gets no engagement may not require a response, but a negative article accompanied by a vigorous ongoing debate very well might.

It’s no longer enough for publishers, corporate entities, marketing professionals, and agencies to be online, they need to know when and where people are engaging with their content and how those people (their customers and potential customers) are reacting. Intelligent and agile responsiveness is becoming a key skill, and PostRank’s Data Services — including our new Real-Time Engagement Data APIs and Sentiment Analysis — are a key competitive advantage.

For the formal types: the press release.

Audience engagement is no longer just about subscribers or trackbacks. You want to know what your audience is saying and doing with your content, and where. You want to be able to converse with them while their questions and comments are fresh. And you want to know who the real topic experts are in any niche — including you — not just who’s on the A-list this week.

You’ve asked us for solutions to issues of inconsistent data, unresponsive service, and simply being unable to find out about your audience. You want real-time stats that include social media engagement metrics. Community-driven influence measurement. And that’s just the beginning.

We want your input. Head over to our Feed Analytics Beta page, sign up for our beta, and let us know what you want to know. Sources to track, ways to present data, trending — we bet you have a million great ideas. And we want to incorporate the best ones into the products you’ve asked us to build.

Sure, we wish we had something to roll out right now, and we’re working on it, but the requests started flooding in sooner than we expected. It’ll take some time to get it right. But when we’re ready to show the world, you’ll get the first look and chance to test things out.

Share your input with us, sign up for our beta, and keep checking in over the next few months as we roll out the products you’ve asked for. (We recommend subscribing to the RSS feed.)

We can’t wait!

Thomas is no stranger to our ranks, as this is his second co-op term with the company. In fact, after we made him help us move, he got to enjoy the new office for one whole day last term before returning to school.

Josh, however, is brand spanking new (and full-time, not a co-op). To us, at least. Like Dan Sinclair, we imported him from Toronto, though he seems to be settling in to the area nicely. (We’ve explained where to get good coffee.)

You can read a bit more about our n00bs on our About page.

Please join us in welcoming Josh and Thomas to AideRSS. We’re looking forward to having them around, and expect great and geeky things to come!

The coolest improvement is that Google Reader with the PostRank extension installed should be way faster now. (In the past it would get progressively slower on big lists.)

Additionally, we’ve fixed the issue where folks with the extensions installed weren’t receiving notifications that there were updates available. Once you update the extension, you should receive notifications the same as for other extensions and plugins.

There was also a weird little bug where on rare occasions the “PostRank fetch failed” message pop-up would get stuck and basically lock up the Firefox browser. We’re pretty sure we’ve licked that one, but it’s so rare we’re having trouble reproducing it. (So if it happens to you still after you’ve upgraded the extension, please let us know.)

And so the voting is now open for the gents: Vote: Who Is Canada’s Most Influential Man In Social Media?

We’re proud to note that Ilya is included among the illustrious nominees.

So I wasn’t sure if I’d come back to vast heaps of feedback and bugs, or to tumbleweeds tumbling and crickets chirping. (Did you know I saw actual tumbleweeds at an abandoned ranch homestead in the south Okanagan? Awesome.)

Both of those possible scenarios bring challenges, though, really, given the choice I’d take the embarrassment of data riches. And you have provided them to me!

Ilya has gotten me up to speed on issues and suggestions submitted to date, and it’s fabulous stuff. The collective community really is deliciously smart. He also did a pretty decent Melle impersonation keeping invitations going out, bug fixes processing, and feature requests recorded.

Fortunately for my job security, he seemed pretty eager to get back to his real day job.

We’ve made a few other decisions recently that I think will make our site, and our company presence in general online, even better. It is a bit more work for our designer and developers. Fortunately, we make them prove they have superhero abilities before we hire them.

In any case, keep the bug reports, suggestions, and questions coming. The result will be a site that hopefully fulfills your wildest information management dreams. Or, y’know, just helps you kick ass better at your day job. Which is pretty important, too.

And we are still welcoming those who’d like to be beta testers. Just drop me an email at melanie@aiderss.com. As always, there’s a snazzy t-shirt in it for you…

We don’t have stringent qualifying criteria; in fact, the broader the tester demographics, the better — RSS wizards, web apps newbies, super-fans, staunch detractors — ideally they’d all be represented. The more user needs and use cases we hear about, the better we can make our site and our technology work for our community.

All testers are welcome to a snazzy AideRSS t-shirt, a note from me, and, of course, our eternal gratitude. If you’re interested in being a beta tester for us, feel free to leave a comment here, email me, or ping me on the Twitter @aiderss account.

Once I get the go-ahead from the developers, I’ll be sending out the beta invitation information.

Thanks!

It was during a discussion about content, and what companies should post online and how. I asserted that using Twitter ONLY to announce your latest blog post was lame. Same goes for using any social media only for broadcasting purposes.

Sure, marketers can get plenty of value using social media sites and apps as standalone tools these days. Inform the world what you’re up to; monitor what’s being said about you. But I think solely using that approach is evidence that, as the lolcats say, “ur doin it wrong”.

Endless digital ink has been spilled on the value that social media can bring to companies, from marketing to customer service to product development to sales to you name it. I also know that for those steeped in traditional marketing (and corporate practices in general) lowering the drawbridge and engaging with the public on their own turf can be scary.

But there’s another side to it.

We owe them.

It’s become something of a joke that these days big chunks of the internet are in eternal beta. For apps that are here today, gone tomorrow, that’s not surprising. Some well-established apps, on the other hand, seem destined to remain in beta forever. (Gmail, anyone?)

As I’ve always understood it, the point of a beta release is basically “it mostly works and we’ve tested it about as well as we can internally, so we’ll ask a few people to have a go and we’ll try to tidy up as many loose ends as we can before releasing it publicly”.

People who use beta products are doing the companies that release those products a favour. They’re giving you their time and feedback and potentially putting valuable things like their collections of RSS feeds at risk to use what you’ve built and tell you how to make it better. (Disclaimer: using AideRSS does not put your RSS feeds at risk.)

And there’s a good chance beta testers will be giving you free publicity and possibly even tech support/customer service when they tell their friends about your stuff. Cool, eh? Take a wild guess at how much it would cost your company in hiring or contracts to accomplish all that.

That’s why the internet is amazing, and why, as I said, we owe them. Folks online are used to betas by now. If your car only ran as often as Twitter was up, would you put up with it? No. Yet online we’ve come to expect things to possibly be somewhat broken, or just not working yet. Lots of very cool people don’t sit back and wait for something to get fixed. They use it anyway. Hell, sometimes they fix it themselves and then share it.

They tell you what they love and what they don’t and what features would be really cool to see. They will find what doesn’t work and test it out in other configurations and then send you explanations with screen shots and video. (Seriously, video.)

I was raised in a family where you don’t show up anywhere empty-handed or leave without saying thank you. So the idea that I should be able to ask people to voluntarily do all that work for me, and in return I’m going to hide behind the ramparts and shout down nothing but carefully crafted “messaging” seems pretty ludicrous. And worse, insulting. Oh, and by the way, don’t talk about me or my company unless I say it’s okay. Uh huh.

If user and community engagement is going to be a cornerstone on which we build our company, then the least we owe you is to engage one on one and listen to what you have to say. (As best we can given limits of geography and technology and such.) That said, we won’t be able to account for every edge case or implement every feature, but it’ll at least get equal air time.

So no, Twitter is not there just for blog post broadcasting purposes. And the various other social media sites and apps aren’t there just for monitoring. That’s why my name, my email address (melanie at aiderss dot com), and my Twitter accounts (@aiderss and @melle) are all over the place, and I follow new people every day.

That’s why we welcome blog comments and beta feedback. (The beta of our Firefox 3/Greasemonkey-compatible Google Reader extension is here.) And why we’re on Get Satisfaction, and Facebook, and Squidoo, and ProgrammableWeb, and elsewhere and why I check out every blog that mentions us. (Those profiles are works in progress, but they’re a start…)

I dunno, maybe I didn’t get enough years of traditional marketing under my belt. Or maybe I just find how people think (especially when they’re interacting with technology) really interesting. But while I’d love it if you read our blog posts, more importantly, I can’t wait to talk to you.

As part of this release, there are also a number of improvements with Greasemonkey compatibility and few other miscellaneous bug fixes. If you’re already a user of the extension, FireFox should prompt you to update it, and if you can’t wait, head to ‘Tools > Addons’ and click on ‘Find updates’.

What is the AideRSS Firefox extension? It’s a browser plugin which harnesses the power of PostRank^TM to score, filter and track performance of any RSS feed directly within GoogleReader. Now GoogleReader users can reclaim their time with a single mouse click to find the best content, boost their productivity and stay on top of the news. Sign up to join our beta!