Notes to accompany this slide deck: http://www.slideshare.net/postrank/conestoga-college-pr-class-presentation

1. Presentation for: Conestoga College Public Relations Program
Title: Social Media for Fun, Profit, and PostRank
Presented By: Melanie Baker, Community Manager and Jason Santo, Marketing
Manager
Date: April 11th, 2011
Intro to PostRank and What We Do
PostRank has been in business for about four years. We started as an
information management service to help filter content from RSS feeds and
reduce “information overload”.
Since the beginning we’ve been collecting vast amounts of social engagement
data – millions of URLs from blogs and other websites – and all the engagement
activities online audiences perform with them, like bookmarking, tweeting, liking,
commenting, etc.
This data forms the backbone of all of our services. Our original free service still
exists at postrank.com – you can plug in a URL for a site such as your blog, and
see all the engagement for recent content. Basically: who’s reading my stuff,
what are they doing with it, and on what social networks?
PostRank Data and Services
Our main services now are Analytics, Connect, and Data Services.
Analytics is a service for individual publishers to monitor and measure how their
content is performing with their audiences, to find out what sites their audiences
are active on, to develop relationships with those people, and to learn what types
and topics of content resonate, which enables publishers improve their content’s
performance and grow their influence. (This influence makes them very attractive
to brands and agencies, but only if it can be demonstrated and measured.)
Connect is a service that enables brands and agencies to develop relationships
with online publishers and work with them on campaigns, contests, and other
initiatives. Currently the blogger side of Connect is live, and people who sign
up provide some demographic info, information about the sites they own and/
or write for, social profiles, and their pitch policy interests. They also get a free
Analytics account when they sign up.
The brands side of Connect will go live in a few weeks, and it will enable brands
and agencies to query the system to find publishers who fit specific criteria, like
age, location, blog topics, etc. and get a list of people they can approach to work
with on campaigns, contests, consulting, etc.

2. Data Services and Reporting are the services most closely based on our
raw data, and enable us to do a lot of research and analysis on just about any
industry or content. We can slice and dice the data by URL or keyword, and in
addition to finding all the social engagement data, can also apply geographic
filters, sentiment analysis, and other relevant metrics.
Recently we’ve been publishing daily results of how the Canadian federal
election campaigns are going for the political parties on the social web, since
this election is already more social than any before it. We also do research for
agencies and many industries, including automotive, online travel, credit card
companies, newspapers, and a host of others. Companies use these reports
both for improving their own marketing, and for competitive analysis purposes.
How PostRank Helps Businesses
Companies expend a lot of resources to create “destinations” – websites for their
portfolio companies, products, campaigns, etc., to which they want to drive web
traffic.
Except that what happens 80% of the time is that links we see, content we share,
etc., isn’t on the originating sites. We take it and share it, organize it, save it, etc.
on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious.
So for all the time, money, and resources companies spend on building great
websites, only 20% of our online interactions as audiences and consumers take
place there.
Even more “urgently”, when a new news story, article, blog post, etc. is
published, half (50%) of all of the attention and engagement activities (so those
tweets, likes, comments, etc.) that that story will get happen within the first
hour after it’s published. Internet time moves FAST, so publishers, companies,
agencies, etc. don’t have the luxury of 24 hours or more to respond to questions,
complaints, or feedback.
Even for individual bloggers, timely responses are one of the best ways to begin
building relationships with your audience. And even those who are complaining
are surprisingly easily mollified if they just know you’re listening to them and will
help if you can.
Companies, of course, want to know what people are saying about them and
their products, but the Internet is a really big place, and the social web is a really
big part of that. Sure there are a lot of tools out there, but it has traditionally been
a very manual, resource-intensive process to find conversations, analyze the
content, and determine how (or if) to respond.

3. Many agencies and companies have not been effective at blogger relations,
either trying a “bulk” approach that treats everyone generically and the same, or
not doing their homework and often insulting bloggers by getting their names or
information about them wrong. (E.g. contacting a woman who recently blogged
about dealing with miscarriage and asking her to join a campaign for diapers…)
PostRank Analytics, as one example, aggregates all the social engagement
events that content is getting in real-time, so you know exactly who is saying
what, where, and when, and can make fast, smart decisions accordingly.
Our Data Services APIs enable even deeper analysis into online audiences
and consumers. Companies can specify search for specific topics (i.e. keyword
search), including their own lines of business or those of competitors. They can
see the reach of specific content (i.e. URL search), as well as what social hubs
people are engaging on, what geographical regions the engagement is taking
place in, what the sentiment of the activities is, and more.
Overview of Five Popular Social Networks
PostRank tracks over two dozen engagement sources. The ones shown
(Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and Reddit) are some of the post popular,
particularly for North Americans. For most of our sources we gather new
activities on those sites as they’re happening.
Facebook:
Founded: 2004
Population: >500 million (3rd largest country in the world by “population”)
Average User Age: 38
Largest Demographic Age Group: 18-34 (42%)
Gender Distribution: 57% women, 43% men
Twitter:
Founded: 2006
Population: ~150 million
Average User Age: 38
Largest Demographic Age Group: 18-34 (45%)
Gender Distribution: 53% women, 47% men
Delicious:
Founded: 2003
Population: ~5.4 million
Average User Age: 41
Largest Demographic Age Group: 35-49 (42%)
Gender Distribution: 52% women, 48% men

4. Digg:
Founded: 2004
Population ~12 million
Average User Age: 36
Largest Demographic Age Group: 18-34 (39%)
Gender Distribution: 36% women, 64% men
Reddit:
Founded: ~2004 (unconfirmed)
Population: ~5.2 million
Average User Age: 37
Largest Demographic Age Group: 18-34
Gender Distribution: 24% women, 76% men
PR/Marketing and Social Networks
Most obviously, there are a LOT of people online. Canada leads the world in time
spent online, and about 80% of us are included in that. If you want to get our
attention, the Internet is the place to do it.
People in younger age groups especially don’t trust (or often even use) traditional
sources of information and authority – news, brands, etc. Their friends and those
they look up to are much more influential, they get their info from “new” media,
and all these people interact and spread branding online.
The Internet, especially the social web, is designed for spreading information
quickly and easily. If you can create something great that people want to share,
they can send it to hundreds of people with the click of a button. Try that with
direct mail.
Tools are getting more sophisticated, so it’s easier to quickly find out how
your marketing efforts are performing and tweak them to improve. What are
people saying and how do they feel? If people love the messages, you’ll see the
spikes. If people hate them, you’ll see the dips – and you’ll be able to respond
immediately to try and solve things before they snowball.
The Internet is really flexible, so companies have a lot of creative options in how
they want to get attention. Text, photos, and video are just the beginning, and
online and offline marketing can be combined to create immersive experiences,
incorporate game mechanics, involve the consumer in content creation as well as
distribution, and other attention-grabbing functions.
Campaigns that worked: Old Spice, It Gets Better Project, Ford,
Volkswagen’s “fun theory”, Best Job in the World.

5. Reputation Management consists of listening to conversations online to
understand brand perceptions. Companies can identify opportunities to intervene
in conversations (often negative or incorrect) and re-orientate perceptions.
Typicslly this is done using social media monitoring technology, both keyword-
and URL-based.
Integrating “Old School” and “New School”
Marketing
People do combine online and offline media consumption. One report from
LiveHive Systems notes 59% of survey respondents saying they are online while
watching TV. That number may skew high given their audience, but it’s true that
more and more people are combining their media consumption.
And there’s the basic fact that more and more of us are consuming
our “traditional” media via non-traditional means. Ditching cable and downloading
tv shows and movies and flipping through newspapers and magazines via iPad
apps are just two examples.
People will look up products, services, companies, destinations, etc. that they
see on TV and in magazines online. People will do online comparison shopping
and then go buy the products in a store.
Augmented reality is supposed to be one of the next big things, combining real-
world locations and businesses with digital data accessible by mobile devices.
QR codes enable people to do a quick scan with a smartphone and then access
a wealth of online content about a site, event, person, or other topic of interest.
Location-based services and group-buying services continue to grow, so you can
check in on Foursquare on your phone, then get 15% off your dinner because of
it. Or sign up for a discount on car detailing from an offer that got emailed to you,
then drop your car off at a real shop to get a wash.
The Mont Blanc direct mail “spam” re. Nigerian email scam is a clever example
of using technology in an unexpected way (or in reverse) to surprise and delight
people (which you really need to work hard at when your product is very non-
digital).
It also works in reverse, where we’ll see a great deal somewhere on food or
clothes or what have you, and then post it on Facebook or email or tweet it to our
friends and followers to let them know.

6. Social Marketing ROI
Start by seeing how much engagement an effort received, whether it’s a blog
post or contest or online deal. Look at how many people accessed it versus
actually signed up. Or how many people got an email versus opened it and
clicked links.
See how many people friend or follow or like your company, and over time how
many of them remain engaged – still following you, or commenting on your
Facebook wall, etc.
Compare the response rates and average sale amounts of a socially-driven
campaign versus a prior “real-world-only” one marketed to a similar audience.
Facebook offers Insights, its own integrated analytics services for pages.
With this tool you can see page likes, average views, active users, user
demographics, user activity, counts of specific interactions ( e.g. discusson board
posts and media consumption).
Other keyword-based monitoring services: Radian6, Sysomos
Web Analytics: Google Analytics is free and very powerful
URL Shorteners: Bit.ly offers a lot of data when you use their shortened links for
your content.