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My friends at Postrank unveiled yet another cool public tool this week. Postrank Labs now allows you to compare and contrast three separate websites based on their engagement scores. Consider it kind of a Compete.com view of a given blog or website’s engagement rather than traffic.

Something I noticed about Labs was that it also delineated out five subdomains within each website and scored their respective engagement score. This was the first I’d ever seen someone have the ability to determine differences between subdomains. Certainly, the information is there and accessible somehow (otherwise Postrank wouldn’t have it), but I’d not seen it yet.

I’m sure some techy is going to make fun of me for not tapping into publicly available API data and cross-grid hexing some morpheous node to flip on the sphincter, but I don’t know how to do that, so put a sock in it and get back to your World of Warcraft, dork.

The division and comparison of subdomains is interesting, even exciting, because it gives public relations professionals, marketers and anyone else trying to determine which blogs are more important, impactful or influential the ability to do so within Wordpress.com, Blogspot.com (Blogger.com) and Typepad.com blogs. If a blog is run from one of those services and is “hosted” or contained within the Wordpress.com servers, for example, it appears as blogname.wordpress.com. When you typically run traffic or engagement reports on the domain, you get results for everything on Wordpress.com which is essentially useless.

Being the general pain in the ass I can be, I asked Carol Leaman, Postrank’s lovely (and patient) CEO, if I might get my hands on the sub-domain data for the three services mentioned. She gave me that and then some. (So much so that I can’t possibly cover it in this post. Hint.)

Without further ado, here’s a listing of the top 10 blogs, based on cumulative Postrank engagement scores (look here to learn what that encompasses) for the last three months, of each of the three major blogging subdomains. To access more of the lists, you or your developer (provided they aren’t tied up with Lord of the Rings … heh) can apply for and access that data through Postrank’s API.

I found the lists interesting and have some thoughts that might bubble up, but I’m more interested in hearing your reactions. What do you think of the top blogs in each platform. Any surprises? Any anomalies? The comments are yours.

NOTE: Some of the blogs contain content that might be offensive or unsuitable for your tastes. Click through at your own risk.

As I’ve indicated before, content ranking and analytics service Postrank is a sponsor of Social Media Explorer. One of the benefits of that sponsorship is one post per month about them. But I’ve asked the folks at Postrank to give me a little lee-way with the post so that I can ensure that it adds value to you, rather than just serves as an advertisement for their services. It’s a bit of an experiment with online advertising — making it more engaging — and they were cool with the idea, so here’s a sponsored post I hope doesn’t seem quite as much of one.

Long before Postrank was a sponsor of SME, I asked them to do me a favor and help me rank the top education blogs. That post continues to be one of the most visited at Social Media Explorer because it serves a valuable purpose for people looking for blogs in that category. In order to both provide an additional service by ranking blogs in a category of interest and show off the evolving technology that runs Postrank, I asked the gang there to help me produce a ranking of the Top Environmental Blogs.

I pulled together an OPML file (which is a collection of RSS feeds) of each of the blogs listed in Postrank’s community curated lists of Environmental Blogs, Green Blogs and Sustainability Blogs and sent that master list to Postrank for analysis. I asked Jim Murphy, Postrank’s stat guru, to expand the filters from Postrank’s main tool, however, so we could give folks a nice resource to play with. Postrank’s consumer tool displays engagement scores based on the last week’s worth of information. I asked him to give us a bigger picture of these blogs and score the engagement over six months. The following are the Top 25 Environmental Blogs based on June through November 2009 engagement.

Before you get up in arms that your favorite environmental blog may not be here, keep in mind this list was procured from Postrank’s publicly curated lists. It may not be all-inclusive. Jim also ran some extended numbers on the top five on this list. I found this chart interesting. It shows how AutoblogGreen shot up in engagement with an active fall. Comparisons like these are useful for public relations and marketing professionals performing blogger outreach because it shows who’s hot now and who’s consistently engaging over time. This is why Postrank is a valuable service.

A six-month comparison of the top five Environmental Blogs based on engagement from Postrank. (Click for larger view)

Murphy did say that the information he provided me was really a look at what the technology can do, not what Postrank provides … yet. While new features are continually being worked on, the consumer tool for Postrank does give you a more real-time analysis rather than historical per view as we have here. Postrank’s Analytics tool for your blog (technically the service that sponsors SME) does a really nice job of giving you deep analysis of both what your blog does over time and how each post on your blog performs along various engagement parameters.

The reason I accepted Postrank’s Analytics tool as the first true sponsor of Social Media Explorer is because they are a service I think the majority of my readers would find useful. If you are a blogger outreach person (PR, marketing, social media), Postrank helps you determine which blogs matter most and right now. If you are a blogger, Postrank helps you analyze what pushes your audience’s buttons to help you get better. It can also help you quantify your blog’s success to monetize it more effectively.

And I also knew they’d be hip and help us produce some lists that folks would find useful. Enjoy the list of Top 25 Environmental Blogs. And if you work with green bloggers or are one, let us know how we did in the comments.

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• Finally! A Blog Post Scoreboard (socialmediatoday.com)
• PostRank Combines Google Analytics With Social Media Stats (mashable.com)

Disclosure: Postrank is a sponsor of Social Media Explorer which pays to advertise in the right hand side bar space. I have written extensively about them before they became a sponsor and will continue to do so because they offer a service relevant to you. Their advertising here does not effect my editorial comments or recommendations about them (I’m free to criticize), but it’s safe to say I dig Postrank. Fair?

If you’re in charge of reporting how successful your website is and you’re still relying solely on Google Analytics, WebTrends or some other such tool, you’re under-reporting your success. I’ve offered up some explanation of this before, explaining that the new metric for Internet marketers is not how many people see your website, but how many see your content.

We now operate in a world of really simple syndication or RSS. Your site may have RSS feeds but it doesn’t have to in order to be syndicated. Using services like FeedYes you can effectively scrape new content off any website and create an RSS feed. I could be reading your content in my feed reader without you ever knowing it.

Because content is king and must be made ultimately portable for today’s online audience to consume it (audiences will consume content where they are … not where you are) website analytics becomes less definitive of a metric. We must now practice content metrics to quantify and understand how many people we reach and how effectively.

Postrank has recently expanded their services to help us draw better insights from the content metrics around our blogs, websites and more. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company started by giving us a plug-in for Google Reader and other feed readers that gave posts a 1-10 score based on how engaging they were compared to others on that blog, in that particular folder in your reader, etc. We had a way to say one post was better received than another.

Click for a larger version.

Not too long ago, Postrank unveiled Postrank Analytics, a subscription service ($9 monthly, U.S.) which allows bloggers (or content producers of any sort, so long as your effort includes an RSS feed of your content) to judge how socially engaging their content is. The image here shows two recent Social Media Explorer posts with their 1-10 Postrank score in yellow. On the right side, you can see how many times the posts were Tweeted, discussed (comments), posted on FriendFeed, bookmarked on Delicious and more. While I’m not 100-percent sure how the engagement points are determined, it’s an algorithm that is consistent across everyone’s content. (You can learn more about their measure of “engagement” on the Postrank Blog.)

These numbers by themselves don’t mean much, but looking at them over time gives you trending information about how your content is doing. That is relevant in measuring and reporting the value of your efforts as a content producer, blogger, public relations professional or community manager. Postrank offers a Trends tab where you can view these numbers in convenient charts and graphs as well.

And to one-up themselves again, Postrank recently released Data Services which allows your developers to request Postrank API access. Your team can take the Postrank service and use it to develop your own custom reporting and dashboard platforms for your clients.

I’m dying to be able to afford a full-time developer to start wearing this API out, by the way.

The biggest reason to familiarize yourself with Postrank and its various services is they are the one service out there that is giving marketers, public relations folks and bloggers a deep, meaningful set of measures of online content. There are lots of blogs and websites that get hundreds of thousands of website visitors. You can go out and buy traffic if you want. There are dozens of blogs that get dozens of comments, but a lot of them are meaningless, “Great post!’ type entries. Postrank gives you a look at how impactful a given piece of content or website is, both within your site and across social channels. They also allow you to judge posts in comparison to one another on a given website or in comparison to other blogs in the same category.

Postrank is systematically organizing and prioritizing blogs and websites for us based on how engaging the content is. That’s pretty valuable.

Is Postrank the know-all and end-all to the measurement piece of social media? Heck no. But they’re offering a damn fine start. Please do check them out.

Have you used Postrank’s Feed Reader plugin to filter out the best posts? (Check it out here if you haven’t.) Are you an analytics subscriber? Jump in the comments and tell us how you’re using it or how it can get better.

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I recently wrote about PostRank and some of the cool features of the system for organizing content for easy reading. PostRank is now launching its own analytics application.

PostRank Analytics provides a bit of a different approach to analytics. Outside of simple visits or pageviews, PostRank enlists an engagement score that utilizes comments and social media mentions to provide you with a proprietary score that indicates the impact your content.

Here’s an overview that synchronizes blog posts and pageviews:

Here’s a daily engagement report you can have emailed to you that provides a quick snapshot of engagement.

I’m not sold yet on the value of the package and whether or not I’ll pay for it. Engagement is an interesting metric… I’m not a fan of calling a comment or a retweet engagement. It’s more of a reaction score than engagement score in my opinion.

Am I missing anything here? Let me know!

The folks at PostRank appear to be putting together some complex tools that solve big problems – so I am happy to see this addition to their service and look forward to seeing what will follow! If you check out the service, be sure to follow Douglas Karr and add our feed under the tag marketing.

Register Now! Indiana Business Rally October 1st

The Indiana Business Rally is back with a whole new format and reaching more Hoosiers for the same common goal of overcoming the wake of the economic turmoil of 2008-2009.

The breakfast rally will feature networking with executives and business leaders across all industriesand stimulate new contacts as you continue to grow your business and rally in our recovering economy. There will also be an opportunity to share the positive things that are happening in your business or industry!

If you've been a long time subscriber of The Marketing Technology blog... First: Thank-You! Second: If you're subscribing via RSS, could you be so kind as to update your RSS feed to http://marketingtechblog.com/rss? and any bookmarks to http://marketingtechblog.com?

With over 400 feeds that I try to follow, I spend a lot of time NOT reading posts on others’ feeds as I filter through to find the great content. PostRank is an application that breaks through the clutter and helps you follow as many blogs as you’d like – but filter the content down to the posts that are most popular. It’s a pretty impressive system, albeit a little difficult to setup and maneuver.

Per the PostRank site:

PostRank measures engagement by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience’s interaction with online content. An item’s PostRank score represents how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction engagement_metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

PostRank does this by monitoring a number of systems to see which links have generated some interest. To get started, first export your OPML file from your RSS Reader. If you’re utilizing Google Reader, this is pretty simple.

Here’s a short video on how to export your OPML from Google Reader:

PostRank then allows you to utilize their system to fine-tune the subjects that you wish to follow. There are a lot of other tools – including the new widget you see in the sidebar that provides the top posts on The Marketing Technology Blog.

You can also simply follow people on PostRank, like me, to read what I’m reading and see what I believe is important.

To make PostRank more effective and promote your blog, sign up and add your OPML file or the feeds you follow. Let me know when you join PostRank and comment with your user profile page. I’ll be sure to follow you as well!

If you don’t use an RSS Reader, you can add feeds to your favorite blogs manually as well:

1. Click Subscriptions from the menu.
2. Select the Import tab.
3. Select Direct Input from the dropdown instead of OPML.
4. Type in your RSS feed address, in my case http://marketingtechblog.com/rss.
5. Important: tag the feed with specific keywords. In my case – marketing, technology, social media, wordpress, twitter.
6. Click Import.

There’s much more to PostRank than I could write about in a single post. The bottom line is that you can promote your blog effectively with PostRank as well as follow other popular blogs and posts more efficiently. At minimum, be sure to sign up and add The Marketing Technology Blog and tag it marketing.

Masters of Business Online

Indianapolis, IN October 21st

Yes, you have a web site, but how customer-friendly is it? How easy is it for customers and prospects to find it when they do research? Are prospects connected in a way that convert their leads into sales? The web can be a powerful tool, but only if you know how to use it! That's what this intensive one-day conference is all about!

Our local experts will teach you how to create an effective blend of online marketing tactics to reach your customers and increase sales and productivity.

By attending this conference, you will be able to:

• Generate more (and better!) leads
  Help targeted prospects find you by making your web site "search-engine friendly"
  Establish more effective email campaigns and touch points. Check and improve your
  link popularity. Test the growing number of Web 2.0 tools to find one that works for you.
  
  
• Move prospects through the buying cycle
  Develop relevant value propositions. Engage customers with logical relationship
  management techniques. Establish "offers" that make sense and fit your business
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• Define relevant analytics
  Go beyond basic clicks and hits. Evaluate multi-touch best practices, and establish
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• Create a bridge to your business brand and goals
  Determine when products require different sales approaches or types of interaction.
  Align your web activities with business strategy. Build a 360° view. Break down silos
  between marketing, sales, and IT.

As a reader of The Marketing Technology Blog, you get in for $99. Register with discount dk109.

Jason Falls

Razorfish has published a pleasantly useful report on social media called, “The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report.” You can download the report on Razorfish’s website here. It’s well worth the read.

The company’s VP and Global Social Media Lead, Shiv Singh sent a number of marketing and social media bloggers advanced copies of it last weekend in hopes we would write about it. I normally have little time to read reports or books, but most things coming out of Razorfish are pretty good and Singh has a stellar reputation, so I gave it a look see.

The report does something a lot of social media bloggers, thinkers and talkers don’t do. It whittles the focus down to a specific: Influence marketing or leveraging social connections with online influencers to market your product or services. Their analysis includes a survey of social influence which touches on the role of social media in buying decisions, how social media is becoming a place for paid and unpaid marketing efforts and talk of Facebook Connect an the resulting movement of the social graph.

More interestingly to me, though, is that Razorfish reveals in this report a new influence metric call the SIM Score, or social influence marketing measure. The score has two attributes the report calls, “critical.” First is the total share of consumer conversations the brand in question has online. The other is the degree to which customers like or dislike your brand when they talk about it online, or a sentiment score.

According to the report, “The first attribute … is a measure of reach. The second a measure of likability. The SIM Score combines the two attributes to essentially measure favorable impact of your brand.”

Essentially, the SIM score takes the net sentiment score for the brand and divides it by the net sentiment score for the industry, giving us a number. Comparing it to competitors would be relevant. I’d be interested to see other ways they might recommending using it.

There are lots of great insights to be pulled from this report. The best way for you to grasp them is to go and download it for yourself. It can be found online at http://fluent.razorfish.com/publication/?m=6540&l=1.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, good or bad, in the comments. And a nice tip of the hat to Singh and the Razorfish crew for producing some relevant content to support their brand.

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