Thanks again to everyone who joined us for our first webcast in our Engagement series. As noted, due to the technical issues with the sound, we’ve done a re-record. To view a larger version, just click on the link below the video.
PostRank Exploring Engagement Webcast from PostRank Inc. on Vimeo.
We’ve brought all the questions together in one place as well, and they are listed below with answers. As always, we love to hear from you, so if you have additional questions, feedback, or requests for future webcast topics please let us know.
Q: Do you think enagagement is a consequence of influence or vice versa?
A: It’s a bit of a chicken and egg idea, but I guess engagement would have to come first — you need something to engage with before you can be affected by it, form thoughts or opinions about it, i.e. influenced by it. Certainly, though, once initial contact and connection has been established, they become mutually perpetuating.
Q: Is there an interface where we can easily add sites for you to monitor?
Certainly. Right here you can check on metrics for sites in our system, or add new ones to track. Just type or paste a URL or RSS feed into the search field. If it’s not in the system already, we’ll start gathering the content and metrics right away.
Adding sites to monitor in Analytics is a bit different, however, and you need to sign up for an account before you can add specific sites there.
Q: I understand you have a limited set of content you scan per day (though large, it’s far from comprehensive). When customers ask for engagement on a specific piece of content and you haven’t seen it yet, you don’t have statistics for it. Will you change this in coming months and add new content customers send you to provide a more comprehensive view?
A: Well, the data in our system is pretty comprehensive. For example, we’ve indexed over 4.7 million new stories just in the last 24 hours, with over 23.7 million accompanying engagement events. So chances are good that the sites people want to know about are already in our system. However, if they’re not yet, we add them.
Typically sites are added to our system by anyone and everyone — just type or paste a URL into the search field — but all sites are added by people, which helps keep out spam and other useless data. As soon as a site is added we start gathering its content and metrics, so we have the information about it shortly.
How much of a site’s archive we can access depends on the site’s and RSS feed’s settings. If customers come to us with specific lists of content they want scored and ranked, it’s an easy exercise for us to make sure everything’s in the system before we start performing analysis.
Q: Is there a way we can get tags and sentiment for content – so we can have it tagged/sentiment the same way as the content we get from your data services?
A: We use several ways of categorizing the sites in our system with topic-related tags, both automatically and user-generated. Topics on postrank.com are one way of seeing that at work, as is the search functionality on the upcoming brands-focused side of our Connect service. However, for the time being, we don’t have any plans to add sentiment analysis to our Analytics service. As you noted, though, that functionality is included in Data Services.
Q: How is http://www.readwriteweb.com/community_aggregator.php using PostRank for their community aggregator page?
A: They are an API customer using PostRank Data Services.
Limiting your choice of the channel by their existing perception (e.g. Facebook being casual), does this limit possibilities for future?
A: Not exactly sure what you mean here, so please feel free to follow up if I don’t address it in the manner you meant. Anyway, we add new engagement sources based on who’s using them. If a site is growing and has an active audience, we’re interested. Especially international sites, since we have customers in over 100 countries, and Twitter and Facebook aren’t necessarily the 800lb gorillas everywhere in the world.
So short answer, perception of social networks doesn’t affect our analysis, especially since things change so quickly. For example, a year or two ago Facebook didn’t have nearly the business presence it does now, and LinkedIn was far less community-oriented.
Q: Is there somewhere I can see the points value for all the sites, like Twitter and Digg?
A: There is no overall matrix available of which types of social engagement events are worth what number of points, no. It gets into how our algorithms work, and that’s all secret sauce. In Analytics, when posts have low engagement or are just starting to pick up engagement, you can get a pretty good idea of the points values for at least some of the sources, though. But as an overall guideline, the highest engagement activities get about 10x the points of the lowest engagement activities.
Q: What sites do you cover?
A: You can find a full list of PostRank’s engagement sources here.
Q: How is what you do different from other analytics companies?
A: The most obvious thing is that a lot of monitoring is keyword-based — company names, product names, etc. Whereas we focus on specific online content — unique URLs — and track the engagement with the content, rather than specific words in it. Content-focused analysis is very targeted. You know exactly what the engagement refers to. Whereas monitoring keywords produces massive piles of data that then need to be filtered for relevance.
Q: How is your analysis different from Google Analytics?
A: Google Analytics provide an excellent, comprehensive view of on-site metrics. What’s going on when people actually come to your site. Pageviews, uniques, time on site, bounce rates, etc. That’s really valuable info. However, as we noted in the webcast, 80% of engagement with online content now takes place off of the originating property. That’s a whole lot of activity that Google Analytics can’t track.
That’s where PostRank comes in. We monitor and analyze the off-site activity, and we provide Google Analytics integration with our Analytics service, so that publishers can get a full 360-degree, on- and off-site view of the performance of their online content, and the make-up and activities of their audience.
Q: What do you think of the use of “trust” in measuring influence?
I’ve only seen “trust” show up in the social web space within the last few months, and it makes me a bit twitchy. Certainly, so much of what we’re all doing is about building relationships, so real human thoughts and emotions are going to get into the mix. And humans are not neat and tidy like algorithms.
However, “trust” takes things to a really personal level. It’s not just “Will I be interested enough in the URL you just tweeted to go read that article?” anymore. Throwing trust into the mix makes it about “Do I believe you when you say you really like X, or that Y will help my business?”
I certainly think that key concepts like influence and engagement, the ways we measure them, and what is considered the Holy Grail to doing business online this week will continue to evolve and change. And I’m curious as to whether the concept of “trust” gets picked up, and, if so, how it and the detection, definition, and measurement of it evolves.
HackDays are gatherings that bring together the brightest geeks in technology across Canada. The concept is simple: one day, a co-working space, a collection of API’s from local startups and a bunch of bright minds creating a dozen different apps based on those API’s – with prizes, food, and a great time guaranteed.
Today, we mark another milestone in our journey with Connect by providing access to our first brand offer listings. Working with beta launch partners, we have listed offers from financial software, gaming, hospitality, and other companies for our thousands of registered Connect account holders. And we continue to reach out to new launch partner brands for offers every day.