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.

Today it’s impossible to have a conversation about social media for business – regardless of one’s level of experience – where the topic of monitoring and measurement does not come up or become a focus of discussion. The business world is built on numbers: everything is measured. The energy and resources that a company devotes to utilizing social media is no exception to this rule. To be used successfully, it must be crafted, monitored, measured and analyzed.

As the need for social media analytics tools has become increasingly important, the industry has responded with a variety of solutions. Early developments included social media listening platforms that used searches to locate and track keyword mentions around the Web. These platforms have become the gold standard, and providers of these solutions count the world’s most recognizable brands among their customers.

But has something been overlooked in the race for a solution to the problem of social media monitoring? Where does content figure into the process? Businesses are spending more time and money than ever creating compelling content and marketing it online.

Monitoring the performance of that content across social networks and hubs is key to understanding that often elusive concept: return on investment. Do the messages your online content contains resonate with audiences on the social web? Where, when and who is interacting with the content your company has painstakingly crafted?

In our newest white paper – Listening Beyond Keywords – we hope to spark conversations with companies and organizations already actively using social media monitoring techniques, as well as those who have more recently begun to dip their toes in the waters of the social web.

View and Download

PostRank Data Services offers a variety of solutions for brands, agencies and organizations of any size who are interested in discovering, monitoring and analyzing online content about them and their competitors. Using our advanced URL-based techniques and complementary keyword-based strategies, we can help you better understand your content’s performance across social networks, discover your audience, and facilitate relationships with your influencers. Check out data.postrank.com or contact our Data Services expert to learn more about raw data and customized reports.

PostRank’s suite of tools for monitoring, measuring and analyzing social engagement with online content have been proven useful for companies and organizations of different sizes and areas of expertise. Unsurprisingly, many of our customers and avid users are entrepreneurs, just like our founder, Ilya Grigorik, and indeed, by extension, everyone here on the PostRank team.

About a month ago, I had the pleasure of being introduced to a brilliant entrepreneur by the name of Natalie Sisson. Natalie is a Suitcase Entrepreneur and adventurer who travels the world running her business from anywhere while literally living out of a suitcase. As a former co-founder of a technology startup herself, Natalie loves demystifying tools and cutting through the technical jargon to show others how to find and use the right tools to streamline their business and save time and money.

I was incredibly excited to learn that Natalie would be including PostRank in an exciting and timely e-book called: The Ultimate Toolkit for Evolutionary Entrepreneurs. The Customer Development team here was so thrilled about this opportunity that we decided to sponsor the digital publication.

The e-book is a simple yet powerful guide, designed not to overwhelm but to help entrepreneurs immensely. Every tool outlined has been made easy to understand and organized by function, price and ideal business use. This clear and concise digital publication can help:

• Create professional marketing campaigns for less
• Optimize your website to attract more of the right customers
• Better understand your customers’ needs
• Do more of the important stuff in less time
• Master cost-effective self-promotion
• Create multiple streams of income on your website
• Track and monitor your social media return on investment
• And much much more!

While reading through the e-book myself I discovered some amazingly useful tools I only ever dreamed existed. Natalie has done a fantastic job at discovering and providing succinct overviews of some of the many free and paid tools for website building and optimization, personal productivity and time management, marketing design and public relations, social media management, and other facets of running a small business that matter to entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial. The Ultimate Toolkit for Evolutionary Entrepreneurs is a great resource: check it out.

The explosive use of social media in conjunction with this year’s Canadian federal election campaign and coverage is unlike any before it. Since the election kicked off, we’ve been monitoring and measuring how people on the social web interact with content about the major political parties. Using precise URL-based monitoring techniques, PostRank is revealing, through a series of weekly blog posts on our Insights Blog, the ability of the parties’ messages to elicit tweets, comments, social bookmarks and other events by the social electorate.

“We’re all about social data at PostRank. When the election was announced, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a closer look at how the social web was responding to online content produced by and about political parties, their platforms and their leaders,” said Carol Leaman, CEO of PostRank, “We’ve discovered fascinating information that tells an interesting story about this election that you won’t hear from the pollsters.”

Recent data from comScore revealed that Canadians spend more time online that any other nation. Clearly, what is happening online during this election is of major interest to the political parties as well as the media covering the election. These groups and the electorate want to know how the use of social media is changing election campaigns and whether or not its influence is real. Using precise monitoring and analysis techniques, we can begin to get unbiased answers to some of those questions.

Focusing on online content – the articles and stories containing party messages about their platforms and leaders – we’ve pulled together a host of data. These metrics include the number of articles referencing party platform messages, the performance of these articles on the social web in terms of their ability to generate interaction and engagement, viral lift, and the reach of all this content across the social web. Each blog post we publish over the course of the election campaign will highlight these and other unique facets of data. Here’s a quick overview of the politically themed posts we’ve published so far – including a couple pre-election posts:

• Canada’s Tories Outnumber Opponents in Traditional Media Mentions
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the Conservatives’ Platform
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the NDP Platform
• Top 15 Shared Articles: The Reach of the Liberals’ Platform
• 4 Weeks to Canada’s Vote: The Party’s Reach with the Social Electorate
• Liberals are the Best at Reaching Canada’s Social Electorate
• Canada’s Election: Tories Lead in SM Numbers, Liberals Attract more SM Attention
• Canada Votes in 5 Weeks: The Parties Pitch for the Social Electorate
• Socially Famous Canadian Ministers: Lawrence Cannon, Stephen Harper, Tony Clement
• Liberal Party of Canada: The Most Social Canadian Political Party

Social media will continue to figure prominently in this, the 41st Canadian federal election. PostRank data speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the parties’ messages at engaging people on social networks and hubs.

Promotional support for this blog post has been provided by CNW.

CNW connects organizations to relevant news audiences through integrated, intelligent communications and disclosure services. CNW offers newswire distribution, social media releases, webcast, video, photography, translation, regulatory filing services and MediaVantage, a web-based media monitoring application, communications and workflow solutions. CNW has been an industry leader since 1960. www.newswire.ca.

Earlier today Google announced their next step in integration of social and search. Moving forward, content shared by your social circle will be highlighted within the results – this is big news!

However, it is also important to recognize that social signals, regardless of whether they come from your circle of friends or not, can serve as an important indicator towards determining the quality and relevance of the underlying content. After all, what is a link but an old-fashioned “thumbs up” hardcoded into an HTML page? Retweets, votes on Reddit, web bookmarks, comments, and other forms of online engagement all serve the same purpose. (Sign up to our upcoming webinar to learn more.)

So, given the example search preview above, you have to wonder: did anyone else besides Matt share a link to his article? PostRank can answer that:

Engagement, Social, and Wisdom of Crowds

Same search hit, but this time we can see that hundreds of people have retweeted his article, left comments, shared it on Google Buzz, and so forth. All of those metrics combined make his article stand out head and shoulders above the rest on that search page, even though his article is not the first search result that Google currently serves — but perhaps it should be?

Integrating Social, PostRank, and Google

The intersection of social and search is a vast and largely untapped market. The personalization aspect that Google is introducing is certainly a welcome addition, but let’s not forget the wisdom of the crowd as well! In the long run, it is clear that both the personalized and the cumulative data will have to play together.

In the mean time, you can enhance your browsing experience without waiting for Google to catch up. Install our PostRank extension in your browser and enable (in the settings) our beta integration with Google search and several other sites to see it in action yourself — the preview above is from a live search session.

But, you’re wondering, what exactly is PostRank? Well, as part of our 2010 retrospective, we put together a PostRank in Numbers infographic! Let’s take a look…

PostRank Under the Hood

Tens of gigabytes of new data to process and index each day, an internal processing pipeline which crunches through thousands of jobs each second, and a sustained rate of over 500 API requests every second to power our partners applications and our own! All of that, with a team of 14 people (8 engineers), and of course, a lot of coffee – fun times.

Curious to learn more about our technology stack or capabilities? Check out our Data Services, Analytics, Connect, Labs & open source projects, or read up on our use of AMQP, Solr, Chronos (our job scheduling system), or Goliath (our evented Ruby API framework).

2011, here we come!

Ranking by Engagement

With the end of our year approaching, and measuring all that we’ve accomplished in 2010, it came as a very pleasant surprise to learn that we now have more than 18,000 active daily users of the extension! Not only that, but these are some dedicated Google Reader users as well: just yesterday they’ve generated over 700,000 API requests to our servers!

This is the most useful thing to ever come to Google Reader. i was always discouraged to reading feeds because there were too many. Now I know which articles to not waste my time on. - Chris Ha

This extension gives me the link popularity analysis unavailable anywhere else. - Badley

Love it! This helps to focus on things that are considered to be important. Prevents information-overflow. - Paul Bergmann

It warms our heart to know that the original PostRank insight – using social engagement as a way to find and filter what really matters to you – still has relevance in your day-to-day workflow. In fact, hearing that “It’s the most useful thing ever to come to Google Reader” made us smile.

Fighting with an overloaded RSS reader? Head on over to our Labs page for the extension and follow the instructions – consider it an early Christmas present!

RWW Co-Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick is an epic bit sifter and analyst, so he knows a few things about efficiency. To that end, to help more quickly learn about new blogs he discovers, he built the PostRank It bookmarklet, or “One-Click Blog Intelligence Community Button”.

From any site you’re on, click PostRank It from your toolbar, and you’ll be taken to that site’s page on postrank.com, automatically displaying the site’s recent posts, their PostRank scores, and a mouseover breakdown of each post’s social engagement events.

Using the Show drop-down, you can also filter the posts by engagement level, or type a keyword in the Search field to filter the posts by topic. Within seconds you’ll have a great overview of the new site, what they write about, and how it performs with its audience.

We love it when our community does cool stuff, especially when it involves even smarter ways to make their days better with PostRank. Thanks, Marshall!

For that reason, there is also a lot of skepticism around the subject — it’s all hype, it’s not measurable, it’s not defensible. And the truth is, many of the existing metrics and definitions around influence are all of the above. Having said that, the underlying theory and motivation behind identifying “the influencer” is not only sound, but is also a critical component of any successful PR or marketing campaign moving forward.

The value of a customer

Mass marketing is an effective way to deliver a brand message to a large number of people. Unfortunately, these campaigns are also expensive to execute and hard to measure. Direct marketing campaigns, on the other hand, make use of extensive data mining to help companies identify which potential customers they should target. The theory is: we can identify the profitable customers and market directly to them.

When executed well, direct marketing can show extremely high rates of return because it tries to estimate the “intrinsic value” of a customer: you know the cost of your widget, you can estimate the direct marketing cost to a customer in question, and you set the price. In other words, you know all the variables and it all comes down to refining and improving your predictive models: more comprehensive demographics data, capturing click streams, identifying content relevance, and so forth.

However, while direct marketing may seem like the holy grail of efficiency, it also has a major flaw: direct marketing assumes that each customer’s buying decision is made independently of all other customers. In reality, as we all know, that is simply not the case. Our buying decisions are strongly influenced by our friends, family, and other acquaintances. In fact, studies have always pinned word of mouth as one of the strongest influences on our buying decisions: an endorsement from a knowledgeable friend carries a much higher level of trust than any ad you will see on the street or the web.

In other words, the full value of a customer should include both the “intrinsic value” (amount they will spend on your product), and the “network value”, which is a measure of their effect on the purchasing decisions of your product within their network. If you only measure one of these variables, you will inevitably end up with sub-optimal marketing decisions.

Influence is the Network Value of your Customer

Anytime a company pitches a journalist or a blogger, they are intuitively betting on the high network value of that individual. After all, perhaps the writer will actually buy the product for themselves, but more likely you are counting that their product review or mention will compel many others to act on your message. In other words, the network value of that writer for your product is, in fact, a measure of their influence. That is worth repeating: the influence of a customer is their network value to your product.

Influence and the Social Web

So, why all the talk about influencers? Well, in the short span of the past few years, the Social Web has transformed everything around us; blogs have given every user a global and permanent voice, and Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others have recorded trillions of connections in the Social Graph. All of a sudden, our personal networks have grown by an order of magnitude and our messages are able to travel instantly to all corners of the world. Our individual network values have grown significantly, and thus their importance has increased to marketers, advertisers, and every other part of the brand organization.

Do you keep a blog on a subject with a few hundred readers, or perhaps have a Twitter following around a specific theme? Then, relatively speaking, you have a high network value for your area of expertise. Not long ago, this was an exclusive position held by a small number of journalists and thought leaders with a public soapbox. Today, each one of us can be in that position — the tools are there and no longer a barrier. You are an influencer.

Influencers matter and the importance of identifying the right influencers with high network value will only continue to grow. At PostRank we have invested a lot of time and effort into this area — hence our launch of PostRank Connect. Our belief is that detailed performance metrics, understanding the layout of the social graph, and measurement driven campaigns are the future. How do we define network value? More on that in the future.

Does anyone bookmark anymore? Why, yes! In fact, on Delicious alone, over 376,000 users have bookmarked at least one website over the course of the past three months. Of course, the actual number of bookmarks is much higher since many of these users save more than just one site. Not surprisingly, the actual bookmarking rate varies based on the time of day and day of the week, but as you can see in the graph above from one of our systems at PostRank, on average Delicious sees at least 1 new bookmark a second!

And let’s not forget the dozens of other bookmarking sites such as Diigo, Hatena, Mister Wong, and many other localized variants. Bookmarking is not only alive and well, but also continues to grow in adoption based on the absolute number of users using these services.