In a 30-minute live webinar on March 31st, 2011 we would like to help you learn about some of the insights you can gather from your blog posts and audience using our analytics service. Understanding what posts are engaging your audience by looking at social engagement events and scores is the first step. But finding what it is about those posts that’s catching people’s interest and identifying your own best practices is a key component to making every post a success.

PostRank Analytics is an intelligence service that presents off-site data and metrics about how your blog engages audiences on the social web. This data is presented to you within the context of the content of your unique RSS feed, benchmarking yourself against your own performance over time. What it can clarify for you are opportunities for self-improvement as a content creator because it’s all about you – the stories you tell and how those stories engage others.

There are many things to be considered when comparing posts that engage and those that don’t. Style, topics, the effect of networks and the influencers within them all play a role in generating engagement. Join us online for a brief guide to some of the ways you can begin to use analytics to optimize the performance of your posts, engage your audience and grow your influence through your blog and the content you create. Registration for this webinar is now open.

Over the last year and a half we’ve added new features, developed tips and tricks, and learned from our community. Especially how monitoring and tracking a post’s engagement on the social web says a lot about your influence as a blogger and the relevance of the topics you write about.

You can find several resources, including videos, on how to set up PostRank Analytics and its features, and now we want to give you more.

Since many of you strive to continuously improve your blogging and find meaningful ways to develop relationships with your readers, we’re taking it one step further with a live webinar on how to get the most out of PostRank Analytics. Whether you’re already an Analytics user, or looking to start tracking and engaging your audience on the social web, you’ll benefit from attending this session.

If you haven’t already — subscribe to this blog and/or follow us on Twitter — and stay tuned for registration details to attend the webinar on March 31st, 2011. In this 30-minute event we will pull together some of the collective wisdom PostRank Analytics users have shared with us. You’ll learn how to analyze the data and apply it to your posts in order to optimize their performance, find your audience, and grow your influence.

And who knows what other surprises we’ll have in store for you? We may be giving away more than information!

On Monday, April 5th, at 6:30pm, at Fionn MacCool’s, our intrepid CEO, Carol, will be presenting crib notes for her career — advice and stories from the trenches on how she identifies opportunities and helps companies, both new and those in need of a makeover, achieve their potential. She’ll also talk a bit about PostRank, what we do, and what’s on the horizon for us.

If you’re a girl, a geek, or just interesting in a great social evening of learning, join us for April’s Toronto Girl Geek Dinner.

Special guest Carol Leaman, CEO of PostRank, joins Byron White, founder of ideaLaunch, for the presentation, offering a review of killer tools to measure social engagement of your content and the value of content in the social media sphere. Learn how content marketing powers social media, inbound marketing and all marketing today.

Webinar attendees will also receive the 101 Content Marketing Tips e-book free!

Register now!

If you love PostRank as much as we do (or, y’know, want a break from whatever you’re doing for a few seconds), head over The Crunchies’ website, scroll down to Best International Startup, type in PostRank, and click nominate. That’s all there is to it! We really appreciate the support, and we’ll be sure to include you in our teary acceptance speech… (Voting is open until midnight PST on Friday, December 4th.)

Public exposure and recognition mean a lot to little startups like ours. And when you come to work in jeans and t-shirts most of the time, a chance to get all dolled up and hang out with fancy people is exciting stuff. Thank you for your votes, and thanks for being part of our community and helping us build great stuff.

Update: Since the voting started, a company called Postini has been added to the nominations as well. So be careful when you vote, because if you’re not careful, the field will resolve to “PostiniRank”.

Each year, 20 tech companies, innovating in the fields of clean technologies, information technology and digital media, are selected to showcase their product or service for the CIX community.

On December 2nd, at the Design Exchange in Toronto, each company will deliver a 7-minute presentation about what they’re doing, where they’re headed, and how it’s changing the world. A judging panel of industry experts will evaluate each company’s product and provide constructive feedback and guidance.

The community present at the event will then vote for the winner of the CIX 2009 Award for “Canadian Innovation Leader”. 
(Fingers crossed!)

The PostRank team submitted an application focusing on innovations in web analytics. When asked to describe why our innovation deserves to be one of the CIX Top 20, this is, in part, what we had to say:

Our algorithms are based on actual audience activity, so scoring is not subjective to opinion, and takes into account many more factors that contribute to how content and publishers become influential online.

PostRank’s real-time, content-focused functionality enables people to discover engagement with ALL their content, not just “magic” words. It also enables seeing how the audience is reacting as it happens, facilitating immediate interaction to answer questions, provide additional information, and build relationships.

PostRank is in some pretty illustrious company on the list, and we want to extend extra big congratulations to the other Kitchener-Waterloo companies representing: Aeryon Labs, IGLOO, and Metranome. And also to Overlay.TV, which, along with Metranome and PostRank, are Tech Capital portfolio companies.

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.

You can head on over to the Panel Picker and peruse more than 2200 submissions (which have to be winnowed down to a mere 300 or so…) Voting is open from August 17th to September 4th.

You can also go directly to Evolving Customer Service Online: We’re All In This Together and vote for it! (It just happens to be the submission by yours truly…)

See you in Austin!

The audio is now available.

(No video, but you can check out my awesome cowboy hat here.)

The KW area folks rocked the end of the evening, with Ignite presentations (20 slides, 15 seconds each) by Ilya and Ali at Well.ca

Thanks to the Techvibes folks, we have a video of it:

Toronto DemoCamp20, Video 4 / 4: Ilya Grigorik of AideRSS, followed by Ali Asaria of Well.ca

And their post: DemoCamp returns to Toronto

And yes, he did mention porn, in a statistical way. (Around 1:07 in the video.)