Joy Mayer, 2010-2011 FellowRead Write Web yesterday published the results of a fascinating analysis of news outlets' social media efforts. Adam Sherk used an API from an analytics company called PostRank to take a look at how news organizations' traffic compares to their engagement. He came up with an "engagement per unique visitor" ranking. The results are interesting (at the top of the list, by a wide margin, is The Guardian, followed by Slate and The New York Times). But what's more applicable to the work I'm doing this year is the measurement tool itself.
PostRank defines engagement this way:
"Engagement refers to the attention other people pay to your published content, like blog posts, news & articles. They see and read a post, and then because it’s interesting, inspiring, or controversial, they get “hooked” and decide to take further action."
The measurement of engagement starts with individual "engagement events," like a tweet, "like," comment, digg, RSS view, etc. See below:
Realizing, however, that more user effort and participation are required to comment on a post than to click on it an RSS reader, for example, the system goes beyond that and applies a ranking to each kind of event. They use what they call "engagement points," and each kind of action is awarded a certain number of points. (The site doesn't reveal what the numerical value is for each kind of action.)
The categories they use for their interaction metrics look an awful lot like the nonprofit world's ladder of engagement that I wrote about last week. PostRank uses "The 5 Cs of Engagement:" clicking, collecting, chatting, critiquing and creating. The engagement events each fit into one of those categories.
The value awarded to each kind of interaction and participation makes this analysis useful. The trick for journalists — and for my work — is to figure out how we can factor in both non-digital kinds of interactions and the quality of the interactions. In-person conversations matter. And a dozen meaty posts in a thread of comments have a different value than 100 lightweight ones.
How can we take those into account as we measure our community engagement?
Joy Mayer is a 2010-2011 RJI fellow working on a project called “Ditch the lecture. Join the conversation.” Read Joy's other blog posts here, and talk back at mayerj@missouri.edu and @mayerjoy on Twitter.
Comments
I looked at a number of
I looked at a number of engagement sites and I chose NOT to go with Postrank because how they weight things and actions is secret.
I just don't trust it. I'd rather pull the numbers myself and make my own judgements on how well we're engaging.
Interesting. Yep, I was
Interesting. Yep, I was definitely hoping as I nosed around on their site that I'd reach a page that had the magic formula!
What strategies have you come up with for measuring and evaluating your site's interactions?
It reminds me of a question
It reminds me of a question asked during a discussion about engagement from the old public journalism days: How do you measure hope?
Right! Some intangibles we'll
Right! Some intangibles we'll certainly never be able to ascribe a numerical value to. But if we want to try to rate things, are there other types of interaction we can start with? What if we rated comments based on their likelihood to generate further conversation, for example? What if we logged our daily activities as journalists, and figured out how much time was spent listening?
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