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.

PostRank Data Services provide online content performance and engagement data for a host of applications:

• PR firms
• Communications agencies
• Corporate brands
• Competitive intelligence analysts
• Ad networks
• Content aggregators
• Media monitoring firms
• Developers

We capture over 20 million individual engagement activities with content on the social web every day, and have archived over 9 billion activities in the largest database of its kind. Imagine what you can do with that! Whether you’re looking for quality content filtered by engagement, or metrics associated with specific URLs, or social engagement data associated with an industry, we have everything you’re looking for.

To help us expose all the gold nuggets buried in this mountain of data, we’ve got a new addition to the PostRank Team. Andrey Aredakov brings more than an decade of experience in media analysis to his role as our first on-staff Data Analyst. Having worked in research and analysis with the likes of Cision and Medialogia, Andrey has been offering up fascinating industry and brand snapshots on our new blog: PostRank Insights. He has been expanding the archive of meaningful, in-depth, turnkey industry reports for organizations ranging from banks to breweries and everything in between on a daily basis.

So if you haven’t visited us lately, or would like to learn more about Data Services, there’s no better time to check us out!

The information presented in these reports comes from the millions of articles and engagement events PostRank collects on a daily basis. What you may not realize is that the information available in the reports is only a subset of the analysis we carry out.

As you can imagine, we’re sitting on a lot of data, and as a result we’ve decided to share some of our findings on a regular basis. For this reason we are launching a new blog called PostRank Insight.

PostRank Insight is the new home for trends and analysis on a variety of industries and topics. We’ll be starting off with regular updates of ranked lists, ratings, and snapshots from our standard Industry Reports, and we’ll continue to add new reports over time.

If you head over to reports.postrank.com, you’ll see that as of today we’ve already posted rankings and ratings for Thomson Reuters, Canadian Political Leaders, Canadian Newspapers, and a snapshot of the January 2011 Automotive Industry Report.

The intention of the PostRank Insight blog is to create a valuable resource for anyone interested in social media engagement with online content. If you have any feedback or suggestions for an industry or topic to cover, please let us know.

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.

Update (March, 2011): We launched ted.postrank.com – check it out!

As a result, we’re always running fun internal experiments to satisfy our own curiosity. And so it happens that, after watching the “Lies, damned lies and statistics” TED talk by Sebastian Wernicke (which, as data geeks here at PostRank, we totally loved), we decided to run a quick experiment to determine what the most engaging TED talk is. We also wanted to know if the talks are consistent, or if they vary among different social networks. (And with over 250 million views under their collective belt, TED has a lot of engagement data.)

You can see the results for yourself, as well as play with the data: Google spreadsheet with 766 ranked TED talks. (Or download the spreadsheet.) Top three talks overall by engagement?

1. Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.
2. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps.
3. Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology.

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UPDATE: We received an number of requests to update the talks, given that lots of new ones have been added. We’ve included the new spreadsheet link above. Interestingly, the top three talks from before are still the top three, but the talks in the #2 and #3 spots have changed places.

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Perhaps even more interestingly, for the top spots there definitely is some variation among each of the networks. Reddit readers seem to have a science bias, whereas Digg users love to digg visual presentations. So now you can add a few more rules to your TedPad — it helps to know your audience!

Finally, for the curious, and if you would like to experiment with your own data, all it took was 40 lines of Ruby to scrape the TED site, query the PostRank APIs, and create the spreadsheet:

So when our friends at Flowtown needed data to build a visual story of how the online social world has been changing, they knew exactly who to ask.

We think the resulting infographic for How Social Engagement is Changing looks great, and more importantly shows and tells a compelling story about the web’s changing patterns. Can’t wait to see what folks think, and what kinds of magic we can make with the Flowtown folks in the future.

In fact, the main finding of the study is that Social Computing is already mainstream! Not surprisingly, the trends they discover fall directly in line with data we see at PostRank (Measuring Engagement of Social Web): 30% year over year growth in user engagement for the past 3 years, and a shift towards user curation and strengthening of the weak ties.

Key trends observed by the JRC-IPTS researches:

• 41% of all EU Internet users, and 64% of those aged under 24, were engaged in Social Computing activities
• 38% of people aged 15-25 in Europe had profiles on Social Computing sites
• 32% of European Internet users had crated a Social Networking Site profile
• 30% of internet users make use of Social Computing content created by others, e.g. they read blogs or wiki sites, watch videos on YouTube or use social networking sites
• 10% (included in above 30%) provide feedback or comments
• 3% are content producers, e.g. they create blogs or Wikipedia articles, upload user-generated video onto YouTube or photos onto Flickr

Societal change and Social Computing

A good sign that Social Computing is mainstream is also the fact that older audiences (aged 55 and above – 25% of internet population in Europe) are joining in on the fun.

Collaborative learning models, alternative learning channels (social computing has been shown to have negative impact on TV viewing and reading of newspapers, by substituting online content instead), ability to connect learners to experts and researches to practitioners in field under study are all contributing to profound positive change on our society:

Overall, we expect that Social Computing will foster social change in the next 10-20 years. At the societal level, there could be more efficient, interconnected and transparent markets, more participatory processes of governance and new forms of economic and social innovation.

Read the full report here, and also take a look at the recent trends we identified at PostRank: Measuring Engagement of Social Web.

In absolute terms, when we sample over the top 1000 of the most engaging feeds for the past three years, we see approximately a 30% year over year growth in engagement –- a sign that more people are participating in the social web. The “share, and like this” phenomenon, which is sweeping through Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social hubs, are all facilitating this trend.

Not surprisingly, as the mind-share of these social hubs grows, the conversations and discussions about the content are increasingly happening off the publisher’s property. Between 2007 and 2009, the amount of on-site engagement has dropped by over 50%, while the off-site engagement has skyrocketed!

Larger audiences & highly engaged communities

Looking across the different types of activity (PostRank’s 5Cs of Engagement), it is clear that trackbacks, which were previously the primary means of engaging in conversations, are becoming dwarfed by the lighter modes of engagement. From 2007 to 2009, the contribution of trackbacks to total engagement has dropped from 19% to 3%! In the meantime, channels such as Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have gone up from less than 1% to over 29%. For publishers, this is great news: larger audiences, more conversations, and more engaged communities. That is, as long as you have the tools to track this long tail of distributed conversations across the social web (shameless plug: PostRank Analytics).

Content Discovery & Distribution within the Social Web

An interesting side effect of the widespread adoption of more pervasive communication tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is the increased lifespan of a typical story. Back in 2007, we observed that over 94% of all the engagement occurred within the first day of publishing the article. Even more interestingly, the 98% of the engagement on that first day occurred within the first hour. In other words, the half-life of a story was, and still is, less than an hour!

Fast forward to 2008 and 2009, and we’re seeing a steady increase in the lifespan of a story: down to 83% of total engagement for the first hour in 2008, and 64% in 2009. While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency, the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. What we’re observing are the effects of strengthening the weak ties.

Engaging with the Social Web

The social web is growing fast. With 30% year over year growth we can expect both the number of people and the amount of their participation to steadily increase, which will translate into more feedback loops for the publishers. At the same time, the “share this” phenomenon shows no signs of stopping, and the deployment of “one click participation” mechanisms such as Twitter’s new retweet functionality, or Facebook’s “like” button, means that each one of us is becoming (if not already) a content curator. In other words, the distribution of content is becoming truly distributed.

Anyone who worries about the monoculture effect of niche networks should breathe a sigh of relief — the data indicates the complete opposite. Even as we organize ourselves into micro-networks of interests, the weak ties that everyone brings are helping the content to travel further and over longer periods of time. Increased lifespan of a story from 2007 to 2009 is case in point.

The challenge: while the consumers are trying to wade their way through the abundance of content, very few publishers understand how to properly engage with the social web. After all, if over 50% of the engagement happens in the first hour, which is also definitely not driven by Google, then how do you optimize and better engage with your audience? Fire and forget is not a strategy, and as random as the behaviour of these social networks may seem, there is a method to the madness.

How do you do it?

Huzzah!

Here at PostRank the concept of audience engagement is second nature to us, and we’re excited by the fact that one of the world’s largest advertisers understands that the quality of community, not just the quantity, is something that should be measured and rewarded.

It’s no secret that advertising on the web is an inexact science at best, and that pageviews have been the key measure of where advertisers place their bets. It’s also no secret that figuring out how to measure the ROI of social media has become a scorching hot topic with no clear answer.

While we weren’t sure how it would all shake out, two years ago we anticipated the importance of tracking and measuring discrete social engagement activities with online content across the web. It enabled us to figure out which publishers had the most engaging content and actively engaged audiences. Two years later we’ve got the evidence to show that the rise of social hubs as places where strong communities live and grow means that pageviews are only part of the story.

Think about it this way: in the world of sales, pageviews are analagous to the number of people walking through the door. They come in, they have a look around, and if you dazzle them with fancy endcaps or appealing displays, they might spend more money than intended. What you don’t know though, is whether it was a drive-by experience, or one driven by loyalty. And since building loyalty with customers is one of the strongest channels to long-term revenue, why wouldn’t an advertiser want to go to those places where they know loyal communities exist? 

It’s about connecting with the right people who want to hear the message, driving down the cost of each sale and driving up the average dollar value of each transaction.

We think it’s high time that advertisers started to look at audience engagement with online content as a key driver of revenue. By understanding how deeply a publisher is connected with readers and measuring that loyalty through specific engagement activities wherever they happen on the web, advertisers will get more bang for their marketing buck.

Based on what we know so far, the engagement criteria P&G is using is a step in the right direction, and we applaud it. However, engagement involves a vast array of interactions that goes well beyond measuring video views, sign-ups for newsletters, and playing games directly on a publisher’s site.

At PostRank, we know that 80% of a publisher’s engaged audience is commenting, tweeting, bookmarking, recommending, and doing myriad other things with the publisher’s content somewhere else on the web (i.e. not on the publisher’s site). P&G and others like them need to extend their view of how to reach loyal audiences and we challenge them to widen the net to include the kind of engagement analytics that PostRank has built its business around collecting.

The combination of our interests and this data means that when the online echo chamber starts assuming a new trend is a truth universally acknowledged, we have the ability to crunch the numbers and see if that’s really the case. We think plenty more folks would be interested in this research, and so we’ve gotten ourselves into the publishing biz.

We’ve released our first whitepaper: Tracking Social Engagement with Content: Deriving Insight from Audience Interaction. Download, share, ask questions, challenge us! We hope this will be the start of lots more folks joining us in the types of cool conversations we have around the office. (You’re even welcome to come over and debate in person.)

We plan to make releasing our findings an ongoing thing. What forms that will take will depend on the topic, really. Could be a blog post, a whitepaper, a newsletter… If you’d like to keep abreast of the questions we’re asking and the trends we’re hunting, please join us. Sign up for our newsletter! (Unless you’re in the market for our new Data Services, you can ignore the API usage question.)

And, as always, we’d love to know what you think and what you want to know. Got specific questions about social engagement, measurement, or a related topic? Let us know and we can try to address it in a future newsletter or whitepaper.