Pam is a Marketing Communications and Social Media Manager at Intronis Cloud Backup + Recovery in Boston, MA. Pam recently graduated from Suffolk with an MBA. She’s a freelance blogger, social media geek, and avid Red Sox Fan. While working for Holland-Mark, Pam was able to use PostRank Analytics to listen, analyze and keep in touch with what was happening with client’s online content.

“Online content is important because without content you have no value to offer the target market online. You can use social media, but without the content, social media cannot do as much for your brand.” said Pam as we discussed the importance of online content for the clients she worked with. “Content shows what a company does, the people behind the brand and give consumers what they want (or what they will want). As many say ‘content is king’.”

Like many PostRanker’s using our tools in an agency environment, Pam found that PostRank Analytics does a great job of demonstrating to clients what content is relevant, valuable and shared among audiences on the social web. When using PostRank with clients, Pam found that “it assisted in seeing whether the client’s content was relevant, as well as the content of the competition, bloggers in the sphere and others. It was great for curating content, as well as keeping track of what was being said online and analytics.” Specifically she said that “PostRank is great for assisting clients in starting out with their content hub, especially those who had not used social media in the past and needed to start fresh.”

I want to personally give a big shout out to Pam and thank her for taking some time out of her busy schedule to talk to me about her experience. The thoughts and insights she shared have help us here at PostRank learn more about how our tools are being put to use.

Now, we’d have watch these sites’ engagement over time to see how they evolve over the year, but even at first glance there’s some interesting info to be gleaned from the list.

Among the types of blogs, we categorized the highest percentage (37.5%) as personal development — being a better you, living a better life, running a business you love — all that good stuff. The next most prevalent topic covered is entrepreneurship (25%). (Note: these are categorizations I applied after looking over each site and its content.) Some of the other topics are photography, the art of manliness, working through disabilities, and sustainability. Intrigued yet? There’s certainly something for everyone in the list.

This year’s crop of 40 bloggers is quite a different cohort from 2010′s 30 Bloggers to Watch, which were more blogging and business-centric. Those folks also tended to already be more established to begin with (Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse weren’t exactly freshman upstarts even a year ago). So, seeing what the 2011 group gets up to should prove really interesting.

Even better, 38 of this year’s 40 bloggers are also on Twitter, so they’re even more accessible to interact with (though only one blogger didn’t have a visible email address or contact form).

Now, not all these bloggers are at the same point in the evolution of their blogs (or businesses), and, as we’ve already seen, not all of them write on the same topics. So making engagement comparisons isn’t entirely scientific, and they’re not really in competition with each other. In fact, many of them collaborate, guest post, etc., which could prove to help increase audience and engagement even more than just the individual bloggers’ efforts will.

However, for now we can still see who’s getting the most engagement at the moment, based on a recent baseline measurement of engagement. For those new to our analysis, engagement refers to how the audience shows interest in online content on social sites. So when a blog post is published, people read it, and, if it interests them, they might comment, tweet the link, digg it, etc. All of these are engagement activities.

Now, not all engagement activities are created equal. Some represent more interest and effort than others. For example, leaving a thoughtful and interesting comment takes more effort (and indicates greater engagement) than just clicking a button to vote. So we weight each activity and give each a corresponding number of engagement points, which we tally up to give each blog post an engagement score.

Each day we also tally up the blog’s total engagement points, so the points for all engagement activities for all published posts, for a daily engagement score. (The numbers in parentheses in the list below are one day’s total engagement score for each blog.)

For more information in what engagement is and how it works, have a look here and here.)

So, with all that said, the Top 10 among the 40 right now are…

1. Nathalie Lussier: Nathalie Lussier Media (1180)
2. Brett McKay: The Art of Manliness (620)
3. Pat Flynn: Smart Passive Income (604)
4. Catherine Caine: Cash and Joy (568)
5. Daniel Scocco: Daily Blog Tips (502)
6. Tyler Tervooren: Advanced Riskology (319)
7. Srinivas Rao: The Skool of Life (230)
8. Willie Hewes: Mad Science (230)
9. Wil Wheaton: WWdN: In Exile (214)
10. Jess Van Den: Epheriell Designs (201)

I definitely think you need to take a look at all of the bloggers, however, since they have such wonderfully divergent voices, approaches, and ways they can potentially connect with you.

And who knows, maybe they can help you become a 2012 Blogger to Watch.

We also keep talking to bloggers, a great many of whom are very receptive to making connections with brands, but who don’t know where to start or who to talk to. And who, quite reasonably, expect that companies that want to do business with them should at least get the basics right.

We knew that thanks to billions of pieces of information stored in our system that we could help both sides, and with a lot more than just correct names.

We have a data archive spanning three years, full of information about bloggers, writing topics, social profiles, and audience engagement (i.e. what their audiences are really doing with the content). We knew we could help brands connect with bloggers the right way and help bloggers get recognized and grow their influence. And so PostRank Connect was born.

In the two and a half months since launching Connect, we’ve been thrilled at the response. Not only at the thousands of signups, but the amazing variety of bloggers the service is attracting. You live everywhere and write about everything!

One of the coolest moments when you work at a startup is the realization that people all over the world know about your company and use its services. (Hello from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.)

Of course, since we’re data geeks around here, we have to share some stats…

• Number of countries represented by the Connect community: 102.
• Top three countries whence community members hail: USA (41.2%), Canada (8.2%), Great Britain (7.6%).
• Connect members’ global coverage includes the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. (But neither polar region. Or Greenland… yet!)
• Alphabetically, we’ve got Connect members from Andorra (AD) to South Africa (ZA).
• Here at home we have pretty good provincial and territorial coverage, though apparently we have a bit of outreach to do yet in Manitoba, Newfoundland, and across the north.
• Among our American neighbours to the south, we’re only missing two states: North Dakota and Vermont. (C’mon, you guys — we’ve even got a bunch of folks in Alaska and Hawaii!)
• In terms of gender, the gents definitely make up the lion’s share of the community at 76%. Women make up 21%, and those who have not specified gender make up just shy of 3%.

That’s who’s taken an interest in Connect. But what is everybody writing about?

• So far we have over 1000 claimed topics in the system (what you folks have told us you write about).
• The most popular topics are: Social Media, Marketing, and Technology — just those three topics contain over 1000 blogs!
• But we also have dozens of bloggers per topic who write about everything from Cloud Computing to Christianity and from Social Media Analytics to Snowboarding. (And, of course, since this is the internet, cats are included, too…)

When you’re in a business like ours, you really get a mind-boggling sense of the scale of the blogosphere, and the people who make it their hobby, passion and/or livelihoods to create the content on those sites. Brands and agencies really do want to make connections with bloggers across the spectrum. We know because they keep asking us for an amazing variety of demographics.

It’s not just all about the A-list tech bloggers or the household name parenting bloggers. As Ilya recently noted, it’s about how engaged your audience is, not how big, and often the niches are where the really dedicated folks and passionate markets are to be found.

We couldn’t have hoped for a better reception for Connect in the blogosphere and among brands (thank you!), and after only two months, we’re starting to wonder if our plans for a year from now are even big enough. With your participation, I think we’ll do great things.

“In recent years many larger news organizations were still coming to terms with the need for a social presence and the nature of their participation. Now the focus is decidedly more tactical with sites looking to understand how to maximize the benefits of their efforts and better integrate them with other marketing initiatives… The New York Times leads the pack by a considerable margin. CNN, BBC News, Yahoo News, The Guardian and The Huffington Post form the next tier. The top 15 sites earned scored over 1 million; from that point the scores begin to drop considerably”.

Total Engagement vs. Visitor Engagement

Adam also notes that the reader should take into account the fact that the larger and more well-established brands will have greater audiences, hence greater opportunities for engagement. This is a key point, because based on our data mining at PostRank, we definitely know that pageviews/uniques are correlated to engagement. But the actual relationship (the ratio) can vary wildly from site to site. To illustrate this difference, let’s add some Compete data to Adam’s original table, and compute the engagement per visit and engagement per unique:

Total reach and engagement matters, but comparing engagement per visitor/unique clearly shows another pattern: some sites are much better at converting their audiences into active participants. In fact, if we re-rank the list once more by engagement per unique visitor (instead of total engagement), a very different view emerges:

If you’re curious, feel free to play with the data in the Google Docs spreadsheet, but one thing is clear: different news sites are seeing very different levels of engagement on a per visitor basis! The Guardian (5th by total engagement), is now in the first place with a commanding 2.5x lead on NY Times!

Traffic and audience size matters, but these variables alone don’t tell the whole story once you factor in the Social Web. To succeed today, publishers have to grow their reach and total audience size, but they also need to optimize for engagement and loyalty of their visitors. It’s no longer just about the pageviews and uniques.

When we began tracking social interactions with content in early 2007, the terms “social media” and “social engagement” were barely in the lexicon, let alone understood in the marketing world. Today, I think all of us can point to a handful of big brands that effectively leverage social networks to grow loyalty with customers.

But our intuition told us that most still aren’t taking advantage of this powerful way to capture the minds and hearts of potential customers. The case studies always seem to reference the same names. And so with the recent release of our Domain Activity API, we decided to run a little experiment and grade the performance of some household names in major consumer categories familiar to all of us.

First, a brief explanation of the Domain Activity API: it rolls up all of the engagement events that occur for an entire domain and its sub-domains. So if the URL of a domain is tweeted, bookmarked, shared, dugg, etc. on any of the 25 social hubs we track, we collect that data in real-time as a measure of how engaged the social sphere is with the brand website(s) overall.

To be clear, we’re not measuring brand mentions; we’re measuring the performance of the brand’s online properties overall. More information on how we define engagement can be found here. You can also see the Domain Activity API in action.

We decided to compare data from well known players in the following categories to measure who was taking advantage in the social world:

• airlines
• consumer electronics
• coffee
• newspapers
• sporting goods.

The data we compared for each domain included: PostRank social engagement, unique visitors, overall visits to the site. Here’s what we found…

Airlines – Virgin, American Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa



Who gets an A+ for their social media efforts? Virgin is running away with a disproportionate share of online engagement compared to the others, while having the lowest number of unique visitors and visits to the site. British Airways isn’t doing too bad either, considering it only grabbed 6% of the uniques and visits, but 23% of the engagement. By contrast, American Airlines dominates on-site uniques and overall visits, but only gets 25% of the attention on social networks. Lufthansa isn’t making a mark on either front. My bet is that if we ran our sentiment analysis on the content associated with each of these brands, we’d also find some large disparities. Can anyone guess who would win that contest?

Consumer Electronics – Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, LG

While engagement with the selected consumer electronics websites isn’t super high relative to other product categories, among them Samsung leads the pack. Sony has half the engagement of Samsung, but more unique visitors and visits. Samsung also got picked up on fifteen social networks, while Sony only got notice on eight. Panasonic and LG lag far behind, with LG’s entire social engagement in March and April consisting of four tweets.

Coffee – Starbucks, Peet’s, Seattle’s Best, Tim Hortons

The story in coffee isn’t entirely surprising; who doesn’t know that Starbucks is all over social media? Well, it’s working. They dominate online engagement, uniques and visits compared to the others by a country mile. What is surprising, at least to us, is that Seattle’s Best, a brand common across the US, has zero engagement in the social world. Zero. A quick look at their site reveals no social media presence at all, no blog and no RSS feed. While Peet’s and Tim’s have stuck their toes in the water, they’ve got a long way to go to get anywhere near the Starbucks stratosphere.

Newspapers – New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today

It’s no secret that traditional print news media has struggled to find its footing in the online world. However, the New York Times appears to be doing a very good job of that compared to the WSJ and USA Today. While unique visitors and overall visits among the three sites aren’t significantly different, the New York Times is blowing away the competition in terms of social engagement. They’ve done a stellar job of creating custom feeds oriented to topics of interest, and actively promoting blog content and interactive participation on their site. One form of engagement, Reader Comments, is particularly telling. In March and April the New York Times got 1.15 million comments on their content; the Wall Street Journal and USA Today got less than one-fifth of that.

Sporting Goods – Nike, Adidas, Reebok

Nike is the gorilla in terms of online engagement compared to Adidas and Reebok. Their site makes it easier to engage in the social world, while the other two sites are less obviously social. Nike also picks up engagement across 12 of 25 social networks we track, while Adidas and Reebok get activity in eight and five respectively. While Twitter was the largest source of engagement for Nike and Adidas, Reebok didn’t get a single tweet in either March or April. Nike has also done some innovative things like bridging online and offline activity with runners and building a highly engaged online community through it. The other two might watch and learn.

Update: Fast Company has posted a piece on Adidas and Nike re. the World Cup that totally confirms our findings re. Nike and social media.

Conclusion

Some brands, like Virgin, Starbucks and Nike, are well ahead of the competition in their product categories in leveraging social media to gain brand awareness. But why is measuring audience interaction with a brand in the social sphere so important?

Because at PostRank we know that social networks are where people increasingly spend their time, and links to content that are shared, voted for, and otherwise interacted with can drive a massive amount of traffic back to the originating website, not to mention to stores. Not only do social networks drive traffic back, that traffic tends to be more targeted and loyal, something all brands aim for. Some of them understand that, but others have a long way to go.

“Cody Simms, who heads up what is left of Yahoo’s Open Strategy, tells me that early data suggests social links spread through Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo’s own status updates “can drive an order of magnitude more sharing on Yahoo.” And those visitors are more engaged also. For instance, when people click through from a status update to Yahoo News, Sports, Finance or another Yahoo property, they end up spending at least twice as much time there than the average visitor. For Yahoo, tapping into social traffic is what it’s all about.”

It’s great to work with such a well-known publisher and see PostRank engagement data used to bolster offline traditional media analysis in such an important way. We think it’s a great example of how traditional media is looking forward and seeing how the social web can be valuable in performing research, expanding reach, and keeping relevant to their audiences.

From the case study, a bit more about Atlantic Wire’s goals and intentions with The Atlantic 50 project:

With the Atlantic 50, The Atlantic Wire intends to be the go-to op-ed page by aggregating the latest opinions from a defined set of opinion makers, found across the web. There is so much opinion out there, in blogs and on mainstream media sites like newspapers’ and magazines’ online properties. The Atlantic 50 is intended to appeal to an educated, media literate audience who read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and similar publications, but simply don’t have time for thorough reading, including the op-ed page, every day.

The Atlantic Wire team has framed current political commentary in two ways, as a result. Readers can browse by topic and see what’s currently “hot” among pundits and their audiences. These are stories on the topics currently getting the most engagement from online information consumers like themselves. From healthcare to the economy, it’s to find out what’s being talked about, and what different folks’ take on the issues are.

Additionally, the opinion makers of The Atlantic 50 are ranked by the amount of engagement their content is currently receiving. The list is updated regularly, so where they fall in the rankings in a result of how their audiences are reading, organizing, sharing, and responding to their commentary, rather than being based on editorial judgment or assessment of political leanings.

Keep your eye on The Atlantic Wire and, whether you lean left, right, or just love great online news and opinion coverage, let us know what you think of The Atlantic 50.